Slashdot Mirror
Phrack E-zine Comes To An End
Flammable writes "Since 1985 Phrack has been releasing ezines to public about Hacking, Cracking, Radio, Social Engineering, etc. All things come to an end, and Phrack is no different: the last issue, #63, is accepting articles from the community now."
I wrote Several articles for that mag when I was a wee youngster.. Mostly anarchy and drugs, and whatnot. Always liked the magazine. It was pretty funny when the Secret Service tried to prosecute the editor of Phrack.. They did a great job of demonstrating their ignorance of both computers and the law! The mag came a long way, then went a long way. To tell you the truth I wasnt aware it was still around..
Hackers should use their powers for good, not evil. They should stop spending energy trying to break, take over, invade, infect, and steal from others.
I completely understand the thrill that comes with probing a system for vulnerabilities. Hacking is a drug... it's a power trip to take control of another host. But that power comes with karma of the worst kind. Whether a hacker hurts an individual, a company, or corporation... their deeds are not any more acceptable. Even if they're smart enough to cover their tracks, they will be punished for their crimes.
Fuck hackers! Fuck the hackers that shut down my companies when worms or virus compromised security. Fuck the hackers with their clusters of zombie machines running PsyBNC. Fuck every single one of them that constantly pound my servers with brute force attacks. Fuck'em all. Their time for comeuppance will arrive.
If you want to hack: Go try to break a security protocol then publish a whitepaper on it. Track down a hacker and terminate their exploited host by contacting its admin. Go patch an open source project. Go make something of your own instead of just raping other peoples property. Don't destroy... create! Your life is a waste if what you do with it is evil.
To blog is sublime
As someone who has not only read but also studied every single issue of Phrack I propose that in the very last issue they also publish the All-time Top 10 Articles List as voted by readers and I hereby nominate Aleph One's legendary article Smashing The Stack For Fun And Profit (Volume 7, Issue 49, November 08, 1996).
So let's hear your nominations... Yes, I know phrack.org has been slashdotted (commiserations to John Kozubik of Johncompanies in San Diego), but that's the point - if you are a true diehard fan of Phrack you already have all the issues mirrored locally because you've studied them thoroughly.
In my early days I got papers out of HAL-PC BBS in houston, a chinese friend was the first real hacker I knew. Hacker in the truest sense, he understood every part of technology. Shortly after I found a reference to Phrack on one of the binary files he'd edited with a Hex dumping tool. That caught my attention but I had no access to Phrack. Years later as the web was born I remembered the name and got my issue of Phrack online, don't remember which one but was into the early 90's. Assembly language, phones, cool C "progz", Ascii art and UNIX when UNIX still had not a Linux offspring.
I will not deny that this news comes as a bit of a shock. All things must end, therefore in a saddened state I say goodbye to you old teacher and friend. You will be missed.
Broken Hearts are for Assholes. - Frank Zappa
I remember back in the day in 1996, one of the first things I did when I got my internet connection was downloaden phrack.
:-(
I am really sad to see it go. The articles were way better than those in 2600, and it was well written and funny too.
Seems that alle the good zines are gone or dying a similar death (Confidence remains high, B4B0, HUGI, Veracity and others). This seems to be the state of the hacker scene today as well. It's all become either commercial or totally lame.
This is a sad, sad day for me as it doens't look like anyone else is starting a zine of comparible quality. Please for the love of god start something not meant for lame ass high school newbies with "safe", cool hacking "tutorials". Telnetting to port 25 is NOT advanced. Phrack, you WILL be misses
Agreed 100%. Most of the stuff in 2600 is crap, especially the political articles. If I want to read left wing propaganda I'd pick up the NY Times (or check politics.slashdot.org).
The articles in Phrack are a step above the few technical articles in 2600 these days.
The current "anonymous" batch editors have outgrown the zine. They were a bad choice to begin with, but regardless, that's happened to phrack before. On a regular basis. Every generation or so passes on phrack to the next. It's tradition.
What's different about the current batch of editors was their intense arrogance and unusualy patronizing attitude towards the scene. Phrack hasn't been about the computer underground for years. The last ten years have turned Phrack into a prestigious journal for security research.
The anarchistic underground roots of phrack have been whitewashed away by the latest batch of editors. Go and read the issues from 1980s, early 90s.
The reason this happened was that when the scene moved to the Internet in the mid 90s the MIT hacker memes battled it out against "war games" hacker meme of the 80s. Hacker still has an 80s meaning for the general public, but the MIT hacker meme clearly won amongst the technically savy. The "cracker" and "script kiddy" memes were part of a process that turned Phrack's underground past into an embarrassment.
So Phrack gradually turned against it's own roots. It's not for the hacker community by the hacker community anymore. Far from it. The current incarnation of Phrack actually spreads hypocritical anti-hacker memes between it's covers. It's BY $150-an-hour-security-consultants FOR our-reputation-in-the-security-industry.
Phrack has been hijacked by sellouts.
Aside from their snobbish elitist attitude, what have the recent editors of Phrack contributed? The articles are written by others. Try reading the "linenoise" section written by the Phrack editors sometime. Degrading newbies never gets old for these guys. Ha ha! you're all so stupid! We're so uber elite!
So now what's happened is that these guys are so old school, so been-there-done-that, patronizing assholes that they've decided it's time for Phrack to die rather than evolve.
Here's an alternative to killing off a 20+ year tradition: run a competition amongst would-be editors who can publish the best next issue of phrack. Then allow the PUBLIC to vote amongst alternatives as to whom succeeds the current editors.
The team that manages to hack together the best edition of phrack 64 wins.
Phrack is dead. Long live phrack!
I haven't read either Phrack or 2600 in a couple of years, so I can only take your word for it when you say it's all political leftist content now. But maybe there's a kind of conceptual continuity there, you know? Computer hacking was significantly fueled by interest in complex systems that had enormous potential but were just out of reach in pre-PC days. Today everyone and his dog have a PC, RFCs are free for all to read and learn from, and there's enough open code to last a lifetime of study for those so inclined.
So what complex, intriguing and powerful system is left that keeps the "rich folks only" tag and could conceivably be put to, well, other uses? What system is obscure and guards its inner workings? What huge complex system is left to hack? There's only one that really counts.
Phrack published the infamous E911 paper and shit hit the fan big time for some people. This was important, because it got lots of cool people interested in civil rights in a new way. If an equivalent event were to happen these days, I don't think it will be about a technical manual.
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity." - Marshall McLuhan
Don't waste time debating cracker/hacker for
the 5 billionth time, the word 'hacker' was long
ago taken over by the crackers who were called
hackers by themselves and the media. 'Hacker' does not mean what it did in the earlier generations of computing anymore.
The term has evolved as all things do.
In any case, the difference between cracker/hacker is a purely pedantic issue at this point.
If you prefer to think of 'hackers' as different, then just imagine every instance of the word "Hacker" you see here and in other media replaced
with the word "Cracker"
This will be the intended interpretation of
the author 99% of the time. Only in elitist/nerdy
old-school "hacker" groups will you ever find
any wide acceptance for the the older interpretation of the word hacker.
The word hacker already has strong negative
connotations in the world, and there's no
chance of any recovery possible at this point.
If you call yourself a hacker, and are not a person who breaks into other people's computers,
writes viruses, etc, then GET A NEW CATCH PHRASE.
2600 has dumbed itself down over the years;
Right you are. I'm a life time subscriber, but with some of the content anymore - especially the letters - just pains me to read it. Once in a while there will be a good 'hacker'-worthy article. But most of the time it's "how do I get around right-click suppression using Internet Explorer?" Please.
Fyodor introduced nmap on Phrack. Aleph 0ne taught us about buffer overflows through Phrack. And route was the funniest damn editor ever. My only complaints about the zine was the lack of grammar police, but other than that, it has probably been the most prestigous underground publication in the last 20 years, IMHO anyway.
While I still believe in 2600, they really need to get back to their roots. Who cares if we alienate some newbies? If they are truely hackers as they claim to be (that title is so easy to come by these days), maybe it'll inspire them to do something other than read a how-to.
I'll miss you, Phrack.
btw, they've had 'last issues' before. I'd be surprised if they went away forever.
I, for one, hope you're right.
I'm more or less with you on your comments, parent poster - but I also think it's wise to be careful talking about hacking in black and white "good" vs. "evil" terms.
Like almost everything in life, there are complex shades of grey. It's fine to lecture people on how much better it would be for everyone involved if they broke security protocols on their own time and hardware, and then published "white papers" on what they found. But when you're a 15 year old kid, you probably wouldn't find any of that "interesting" at all. You aren't tinkering around with hacking/cracking because you wanted another "homework assignment" to take on. It's purely for the thrill and bragging rights to your like-minded buddies.
I'm not saying this gives them "carte blanche" to go out and destroy other people's systems... But I guess what I *am* saying is, magazines like Phrack and 2600 started out (and thrived because of) the rebellious spirit of bored teens. Sometimes, the only way you'll really get people to find flaws in a product's security is by putting it in place and seeing who ends up breaking it in order to do something you see as "evil".
Take those dial-type Master locks for example. Before kids were messing around with them, trying to figure out how they could "feel" the tumblers inside them click to find the combinations on them, most people assumed they were pretty secure locks. (Short of a bolt-cutters, you weren't likely to get by them.) After kids (obviously motivated by the "evil" desire to break into other kids' lockers in schools) leaked out the secrets to picking these things, and it got passed around the Internet, Master Lock, Inc. made improvements to the lock and started selling revised versions.
I think we'd *still* be using an older revision Master lock today if we waited around for someone to put on a "white hat" and hack their own Master lock purely to "do good" by writing up a white paper on it when they finished.
I think there's merit to the concept of a corporation as a "groupthink" with a life of its own. However, the fact remains that the employees of that corporation make many individual decisions and if these were always ethically sound, the corporation could NOT do evil. You reap what you sow. So the corporation could be an interesting example of sociopathy on a sociological level (if that makes any sense) but I think it just comes down to a few (or many) bad seeds who think that their wrong decisions mean less because they are shielded by the corporation. In the end, it's just the mob mentality that encourages people to steal and kill because "everyone's doing it," albeit in a less intense and more deliberate manner.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Yeah, it's almost as if they're betraying themselves. But I do see every issue as having at least one good article. The most recent one - as of this comment - has a great article about BitTorrent. Hacking stuff is all well and good, but I love the occaisional "road less traveled" style technology editorial from someone not famed in the journalism community. Someone who actually knows what they're talking about.
Your ad here.
As someone who's read 2600 on and off for going on 15 years, I like that they haven't felt the need so much to prove their l33t-ness by insulting newbies and making the material out of the reach of intermediate and even beginning hackers. What and when were 2600's "roots" to you? I don't recall a time when it was overly "stuffy," and it's always kept truer to the so-called "underground" - which if you don't recall was significantly populated by what we'd call "script kiddies" today.
Put another way, if everyone has that attitude, then there are no new hackers. Some proportion of script kiddies actually grow up to be good hackers. Now that doesn't mean that the material has to be of the "where can I find a perl script to do X" nature, but making concepts understandable isn't a bad thing.
Of course, 2600's increasingly political bent technologically irrelevant matters is another issue...
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat