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PHRACK Final
lbolla writes ""...a glorious era comes to an end. #63 will be _our_ last PHRACK RELEASE -- ever...
Phrackstaff is pleased to bring you _our_ last ever call for papers for the final release of phrack.
We are preparing for a hardcover and ezine release at a major hacker convention near you!
We ask everyone to submit a paper. Great care will be taken to ensure that only the best articles make it into PHRACK FINAL.""
Didn't they do a final call for papers a few months ago?
Your ad here.
... and we could have issues up to 127
Use http://www.phrack.org/
I hate it when you have to use "www".
Considering their emphasis in the official announcement, one is likely to think that they expect another body to take over the release, but haven't found any suitable. It is a common pattern to announce the end of something, then to discover this great possibility for a sequel. I have no doubt they're different.
Take off every 'ZIG' !!
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
they used a 6-bit counter :(
Looking at the cover of their previous issue... is it any surprise that hackers have a reputation as being hairy palmed, sex-starved, sad sack porno hounds?
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Man, they made really a lot of big things, "Smashing the stack for fun and profit" in Phrack 49, its maybe the bible for actual Exploits ( BoF ). Or the Fyodor paper for Remote OS Detection.... Those where great times. In fact i dont know a single actual publication that has that professional level. Those people are real security specialist. I'll miss that e-zine
Phrack has been on a "final issue ever" several times. There's very little going on these days in it and the main contributors seem to be idiots with very little l33t sk1llz. Gone are the days of VAX hacking, the best techniques for trashing and how to make petrol bombs. These days everyone has open access to all of this information and more with google and basic internet. I wonder what happened to Taran King and Knight Lightning .......
Acting stupid isn't much fun when there's someone around who knows better
Two words: burn victims.
twitter.com/gravitronic
I thought that the entire community of real hackers moved on to more intelligent, less "omfg 1337 lol" material, like 2600. For every interesting article in Phrak, there are 2 uninformative or just-plain-dumb articles.
With a list of possible submissions including:
- hacking
- phreaking
- spying
- carding
- reverse engineering
- anarchy
- conspiracy
could all get you labeled as a terrorist, charged by the DMCA, and in general land you in GITMO. The homeland security bill and other draconian laws are the reason why this will be the last Phreak ezine. This is because all the good hackers have gone underground (any of these themes remind you of Farenheit 451?).
It's sad when the free exchange of information, ideas, and determining security exploits outside of anonymity could get you into lots of trouble.
No news... I saw it already in that 0-day news site...
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
I've always gotten a kick out of this article in the first issue of PHRACK:
http://www.phrack.org/show.php?p=1&a=7
In it, the poster spells out a recipe for an acetylene balloon bomb. Fill up a plastic bag with acetylene, put some rocks in it, put some of those little fun-spans in it, then throw it out the window... Always cracks me up when I think about some fucktard throwing fun-snaps into a bag filled with rocks and acetylene/oxygen...
Maybe it's because of articles like this that PHRACK is dead.
bash: rtfm: command not found
It seems that all the fun stuff in the technology world is going away. The whole mentality of the industry has changed. I remember when computers were neat and fun, now they are just about as amusing as a toaster.
Remember all the innovative games? Remember when new things came out? Remember when you spent hours in the basement trying to trick it all into doing things it wasn't supposed to?
I do.
But those days are long gone. I think it's because you can do too much with cheap hardware now. There is no challenge. Getting that last few compute cycles out of a program saves you a millionth of a microsecond. Who cares? The machines are too capable, so there is no challenge, hence no fun.
Now to go write some code for my hp48. At least it's still sufficiently slow!
I am the penguin that codes in the night.
One thing that turned me away from Phrack a while back (around Y2K-ish?) was the total lack of editing and their focus on newbish-related topics. Older copies of the e-zine contained a plethora of articles on advanced computer security topics, and were very well-written. Looking through the last few issues of Phrack it's painfully obvious that's not the case anymore. Current articles are geared towards script kiddies and are written in broken english.
Of course maybe I'm just biased because I fell out of the "underground" scene around the time that the accessability of Phrack-related information became magnitudes easier to obtain and the scarcity factor was lost.
"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned for SEGA. ..."
Phrack lost it's glamour when they put them on the net. Lost are the days when you had to struggle to find the latest issue on your local underground bulletin board system.
It was in this way that I came to an understaning that technology is not read-only; not simply a malevolent behemoth controlled by presidents and CEO's to manipulate a passive citizenry; but is in fact waiting to be created and tinkered with by such inquiring minds as my (former) self. Although my initial motives may have been anti-social I have since been able to contribute to society in a way that is, on balance, positive. I hope PHRACK continues to inspire others in the same way.
That and Steven Levy's Hackers probably saved me from a destiny as an ineffectual philosophy professor or some other brand of malcontent fat-assed intellectual.
I honestly didn't know Phrack was still around. I'd like to say it's sad to see them going, but then again I haven't seen or heard anything relating to Phrack in 15 years.
//e at 300 baud (When I finish school and get a job, someday I'll be able to afford a 1200 baud modem...I can't wait!!).
Phrack conjures up memories--now viewed through rose colored glasses--of a time when computing, as well as the culture surrounding computers, seemed far more interesting then it is today. Late at night watching text files stream across a black and green 80 column monitor, being pumped to my beloved Apple
I remember sitting at my desk spitting Dr. Pepper through my nose reading text files on BBS systems from the likes of "The Cult of the Dead Cow", or the seminal "How to Have Fun in K-Mart", or viewing works of the Phrack variety on hacking, cracking, and security with immense curiosity. It was great, because this computer I had was giving me a window into a world populated with people who, in many respects, were just like me.
Then as the 80s turn to the 90s, I got my first shell account on the Internet, and traded love of BBS systems for IRC, Usenet and gopher. A few years later, hypertext markup hit, and com programs like Telemate, Procomm, or Qmodem quietly were replaced by Trumpet winsock.
It didn't take long for the Internet to catch on, and a few years later IRC and discussion boards turned from being meeting points for curious, likeminded nerds to massive bland playgrounds seemingly populated by the same kind of people I initially used computers for to help get away from.
Then again, maybe the olden days weren't really as great as I remember them.
The Internet is generally stupid
I think a big part of the problem is that computer security research has gone mainstream. It's now very common to see Usenix's ;login: or the ACM's Communications packed full of new research. Between that and the fact that the blackhats have moved a bit further underground, it's not surprising that Phrack is filled with content that would only appeal to a script kiddie.
noah
Slashdot's style of hiding posts that have been modded down does lead to some interesting threads, where else would you get the argument "I hate having to add www. to a domain" being dismissed with "so what? the number of the beast is 616 anyway"