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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 could always find something interesting in useful in Phrack.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
2600 magazine seems to keep a little more up-to-date than phrack anyways.
It seems to have been killed now...CONGRATULATIONS, you've slashdotted the body into its grave!
It seems they have been using the same server since 1985.
/var/www/phrack.org/htdocs/.config/phracksql_inc.p hp on line 106
Warning: mysql_connect(): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (11) in
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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..
Judging by the release rate of the last few years "apathy" on the part of the Phrack editors seems to be the order of the day, but that's perhaps a little unfair. There have been scores of papers published that would have been worthy of Phrack at its best in that time. The problem is that everyone writing such papers can just as easily create their own website and publish their works there. Why wait for what might be several months to see you work published for what little kudos being published in Phrack still has left and risk someone else stealing your fifteen minutes of fame?
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
The way Phrack has presented security information with a sense of humor has always made Phrack an entertaining read. Even when the articles weren't funny, and were serious, the tone had already been set with the loopback section. It is sad that Phrack will no longer be something to look forward to.
However, anyone who has followed Phrack will admit that it peaked long ago, and has slowly been going away. Phrack closing shouldn't be a shock to anyone. I'm glad someone finally decided to say 'it's over' rather than having one issue a year.
time is a perception of a being's consciousness
time is your 6th sense, the wierd ones are 7+
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
It is official; Netcraft confirms: Phrack is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered hax0r community when IDC confirmed that Phrack market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all k-l33t readers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Phrack has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Phrack is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent International Blue Boxing Competition.
You don't need to be an Erik Bloodaxe to predict Phrack's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Phrack faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Phrack because Phrack is dying. Things are looking very bad for Phrack. As many of us are already aware, Phrack continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
There can no longer be any doubt: Phrack is dying.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
What's the purpose of it, other than male sex appeal?
I don't understand the question.
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!
Full content of website is archived at http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.phrack.org /
This Is Not a Sig
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.