Joseph Matheny

speaker

2,628 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 1 Jun

Joseph Matheny’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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The Why Files: Operation Podcast · The Basement: Joseph Matheny | The Man Who Hacked Reality Before the Internet Existed · 1 Jun 2026 podcast

Because at the time that that happened, all of a sudden, all these businesses, we have to have email.

We have to have web.

who can we call?

Oh, there's this weirdo that knows all this stuff.

And my phone started ringing.

And then I did a hack, which a guy from Spin Magazine wrote about, where the Clinton administration came out and said that they were going to have email in the White House, which at the time was like,

wow, I could write president at whitehouse.gov.

Not that he's ever going to answer me, but I could write him.

And I watched the server come up, and I'm like, I bet they didn't lock this down.

So I sent an email to president at whitehouse.gov, and then I sent a second email to president at whitehouse.gov, and then a third and a fourth.

I'm like, they didn't turn it off.

So they had an auto-reply message.

which you had at that time, now it comes stock or eventually came stock.

But at the time when you deployed your mail server, you had to manually change this, that when you got an email, if you got a second email from that email address, you shouldn't send an auto reply.

24 hours later, right?

It used to be like, if you just did it, it came.

So I started spamming emails in the White House.

I called it the Reign of Toads.

I did ASCII pictures of toads.

And I was raining toads on the White House.

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