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After 20 Years, Phrack's Final Issue Looms

Posted by timothy on from the don't-renew-your-subscription dept.

akahige writes "According to BBC News, the legendary phreaking/hacker magazine is set to close up shop after the publication of its forthcoming issue, no. 63 (which will be hardbound in commemoration). The editorial staff is stepping down, and no one has expressed an interest in taking up the reins. Bruce Sterling is quoted as saying, 'I'd be surprised to see the thing stay dead. They've got no fixed address and anonymous contributors.' If you've ever wanted to helm a magazine, here's your chance!" (See this earlier story as well.)

2 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. Practice what they preach? by drspliff · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Again, SlashDot is prooving that it's no longer at the forefront of IT industry and geek news (as if we didn't know it already).. This story was out last week at the BBC..

    The problem with looking for candidates to take over as the editorial team for the magazine is that they really should be 'inactive hackers'.

    By this I mean that they should have the theoretical knowledge behind it to validate articles and write their own, but given the background of Phrack you just know that the FBI/CIA/MI5 will be paying a lot of attention to whoever steps up to take the role.

    If the new candidate were ever to practice what they preach, you can be assured that they'll be looking for a new Phrack editor faster than you can say 'mandatory 20-year exemplary sentance'.

  2. Re:Hacker mag quality decline by l0rd · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I would definatley agree with this. The cause of this (and the overal decline of quality in the "hacker" scene) is two things IMHO:

    1) People entering the scene are getting dumber. While this could be said in general for the current generation (brainwashed by MTV, the whole No Logo thing etc. etc.), they are also being dumbed down by the computers/OSes they're using.

    Windows is all click and play. Because of the internet theres no need to code stuff yourself (and therefore learn from it). Whereas in the old days one would pull out the debugger & hex editor when one wanted to crack a game, you can now just download the crack without problems. This is also true of all of the hacker tools.

    Windows not having a standard built in programming enviroment (ala qbasic for dos) doesn't help either. While it can be argues that you can just install linux/bsd and be done with it, even linux is so easy to install these days any moron can do it without delving into how the OS itself works.

    2) Like the article says, the learning curve is much higher for beginners. Before you can do something cool you have to learn a lot, essentially catching up with all the security progress that's been had these past couple of decades. It's not like the "good ol days" when you could just dial up/ connect to some system and use some arcane bug that's 2 years old to login.

    I personally find this a sad state of affairs. It seems that few people in it for fun any more and only want a career as a "security consultant". :-(