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What Happened to Phrack?
A worried Anonymous Coward asks: "Remember phrack; the ever irrepressible hacker journal. Their site seems to be down. Does anyone know what happened to them? Phrack was a tradition. I remember the times I used to pour on the articles dissecting every bit of information. To see it go makes me sad." Pinging the primary domain name server for phrack.com also returned no results. Have they dropped off of the face of the 'net, never to be seen again?
As I write this the links to the issues are broken due to a MySQL error. However, the FTP archives work fine.
ftp://phrack.infonexus.com/pub/phrack/
> > I say summer of 1995. Basically USENET's commuliative quallity halved that summer.
>
> Windows 95. Dial-up networking. Bundled TCP/IP stack. Everybody and
> their dog could get on the internet with a few clicks.
Or as we old-farts like to call it: The September That Never Ended.
It's just that it took a couple of years for September to catch up with alt.2600.
more cannon fodder for the slashdot effect...
another mirror for the phrack archive is here
you can find up to issue 52
jungle is massive
IIRC, that was about the same time AOHell & Prodigy unleased their masses of lusers onto USENET. It's never recovered. I've pretty much given up actually trying to read usenet. About all it's good for anymore is trawling for pr0n. Almost all of the intelligent discussion has moved to web forums like /. or to mailing lists, where at least there is some attempt made to keep things on-topic.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
I thought the point of an Ask Slashdot was to put out a question with many possible answers, such as "Is there any way to set up a machine to do X, Y, and Z?".
...
Then people can respond with a variety of solutions to the problem. This can provide a wealth of information to the person asking the question, as well as other interested parties.
This question (and a few other recent ones) asks something that probably could have easily been answered with a quick web search. Not only that, but the answer isn't really something that requires a community response.
"Where's X?"
"It's over there"
"Oh."
It's not that I am bitter that this guy asked this question. I am bitter because we miss out other questions with potentially more interesting answers.
And of course, the classic: "The Acarchists Cookbook". Check it out at your local library or get it from Amazon.com.
I strongly recommend against trying any of the recipies in the _Anarchist's Cookbook_. They tend to have dangerous errors or omissions.
Example: The nitroglycerine recipie neglects aparatus and processing steps necessary to keep the reaction running cool enough that it doesn't blow up during manufacture. (I understand that the original inventor of nitro blew himself up, and the compound he was working on was reconstructed - much more carefully - from the surviving fragments of his lab notes.)
Considerably less likely to kill you are the recipies in the reprints of the US military manuals on improvised munitions (available at most gun shows).
Reminder: The BATF is in charge of seeing that anybody who actually TRIES the recipies in these books (without filling out forms, acquiring government approvals, and paying applicable taxes) is treated harshly. And "The Revenooers" are somewhat gung-ho about their job (as they demonstrated at Waco TX.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Of course it's down, it was linked to on the slashdot front page!
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The shareholder is always right.
I will regret doing this, because I know it will get slashdotted, but a mirror of all of the issues can be found here.
If you want to get a good glimpse at the earlier days of computer "hacking", this is a good place to start. I especially like the "hack" to open a Master combination lock. I hope this helps a little.
My guess is that something got screwed during the migration - consistently gives a MySQL error when you try to pull up an article.
And as to those of you conspiracy theorists who think that this is Operation Sundevil reincarnate, I remind you that the site changed hosts, there was no government conspiracy. Explore before you claim that the sky is falling. "I mean, that's the only reason it could have happened." Err, no, it was quite obviously not.
this is BS. unless you mean that the original editor's included articles on bomb making and stealing things , where as now it is more technical info, either way it is still a great zine, and accepted by a lot of people.
Big deal. Relax. Look, sometimes thingz happen that are beyond our control. And sometimes thingz happen because people are lazy. And sometimez thingz happen because lazy people can't control anything. Jeeze. Calm down. Things will be fixed. I'd hate to see what would happen to some of you if www.startrek.com went down. Phrack isn't dead.
In early 1990, the United States Secret Service carried out a nationwide crackdown on hackers which came to be known as Operation Sundevil. The sweep was highly publicized, in an effort to discourage many of the hackers whom it did not target. Naturally, this crackdown had an adverse effect on Phrack magazine. In late December of 1989, Issue 30 was released; a mere three weeks later, Phrack was shut down by the USSS during Operation Sundevil. Over the course of 1990, several attempts were made to re-establish Phrack, however, since they were not done with the consent of the original editors, they were unfocused and not generally accepted by the hacker community.
Rapid Nirvana
My absolute favorite article is the one where they do the email around the world, using UUCP style routing, and bouncing around geographically stepping servers. Indeed a good time.
Anyone else have a favorite article?
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I get nothing but Mysql errors from that site. Perhaps it's still under construction?
Werd.
Perhaps they had problems with the server, and are down for the time being... Is it really necessary to jump to the conclusion that the government took it down, or someone hacked it? Crashes do happen...
You're nothing; like me.
Warning: Can't connect to MySQL server on '63.145.226.10' (111) in /var/www/vhosts/phrack/htdocs/search.phtml on line 166
/var/www/vhosts/phrack/htdocs/search.phtml on line 167
Warning: 0 is not a MySQL link index in
hehe I love seing this kinda stuff!
Gosh, and I figured they just got slashdotted ;-)
All issues are there, in both compressed and uncompressed plaintext.
http://the.wiretapped.net/security /te xtfiles/ also contains a decent slab of other stuff that might be of interest...
Goddamn it! Anytime I forget to preview. Here's the actual HTML: Sure thing dude.
. html
http://images.kuro5hin.org/kuro5hin_Sig11_vs_Taco
If that doesn't turn your stomache, I don't know what would. As long as I'm posting more crap, here's an interesting conversation on Slashdot itself (set your threshold down to view it though).
Thread of doom!
Actually, I left in my settings so you can view it.
Bite my yammer.
John
John
some of the funniest flames I've ever read (back when flaming on usenet was an artform).
:(
Are there any Best Of... collections on the net anyplace still alive? The 'Hall of Flame' died years ago it seems, and I haven't found any replacements
Look at the bottom of the page. http://www.lastfoot.com/about_us/news_coverage/081 000-merger.php. It was a merger.
treke
Nice link. I was shocked to find something of mine in there. Glad I stopped using that alias a long, long, long time ago.
I never saw a phrack past issue 47, and that was five or six years ago.. I did see mention of them the other day, and some quote from issue 49, which means they must have gotten over whatever problems plagued them after 47. I never knew they had a website.. We used to get it off BBSs.. hehe..
Vote for freedom!
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Did you try asking Mike?
I just called him... he should be on in a moment to comment.
The site has moved to the new address http://phrack.infonexus.com and is definatly still alive and firing out awesome articles.
http://phrack.infonexus.com/ ...
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I wrote the play & still own the script
Was this the same SCAM! magazine that, in one issue, was selling a package of donuts with lye injected with them? Had its own little custom reader program?
http://www.eff.org/pub/Misc/Publications/CuD/Phrac k/
Includes up to issue 49.
Datalens seems to be down. Could be something as simple as a telephone guy stealing a pair from their uplink T-1. This can take days to fix, since the telco will say, " no, we havent done anything to YOUR circuit ". I have seen T-1 lines go away for 3 or 4 days from causes like this. How long has the site been down? Does anyone know how big of an ISP Datalens is ?
enough is too much
I dunno if it is still around, but ftp.eff.org under /CUD used to host the computer underground digest and a huge collection of hack / phrack netzines including Phrack, Lod tech manual, Cult Dead Cow, Informatic and others.