Chapter 1: What is the history of Phrack magazine?
Hey, it's Jack, host of the show. So the last two episodes talked about hacking in the 80s and 90s, which was primarily phone-freaking. In those episodes, I talked about a digital magazine called Frack, which was incredibly influential to the hacking scene. It wasn't uncommon to be in a chat room and someone come in and ask, how do I get started as a hacker?
And then someone else simply say, go to Frack's site, start reading it at issue one, and by the time you're all caught up, you'll be a great hacker. It's probably good to go and listen to the two episodes before this, before doing this one, just to have the context. But you don't have to if you'd rather not. But the thing is, is that in this episode, I interview two of the frack staff.
The magazine just celebrated their 40th anniversary. And I'm pretty sure if you run a hacker magazine for 40 years, there's got to be some interesting stories in there somewhere.
These are true stories from the dark side of the internet. I'm Jack Recider. This is Darknet Diaries.
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Chapter 2: How did Phrack influence the hacker community?
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Chapter 3: What notable articles have been published in Phrack?
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That's Vanta spelled V-A-N-T-A. Vanta.com slash Darknet. Okay, first, let's start out with some introductions.
Hi, my name is Skyper. I used to be the editor... of the Frack Magazine in the year 2000 to 2005. And I've joined the Frack staff recently again as an advisor. Hey, I'm Tim Zee. I'm one of the current staff managers of Frack Magazine.
Chapter 4: How did the culture of hacking evolve over the years?
In your words, can you tell us what is Frack Magazine?
So Frack stands for freaking and hacking. It's a combination of these two words. And it used to be the manipulation of the phone lines. Effectively, The main goal was to get you free phone calls that are very hard to trace.
Fract Magazine, this is all sorts of things, hacking related, to be honest. I think there is the infamous article on how to make a bomb as well in the past.
Yeah, I mean, I think I saw that even in issue one, there was a balloon that had acetylene in it.
where you put snap caps or pop caps on it and throw some rocks together, and you throw the balloon off a roof, and when it hits the ground, the little popper snaps, and then it creates a little explosion. I think that was issue one. And so... It's interesting how anarchy kind of shows up in frack. Like bombs, what is this doing in a hacker magazine?
I think we have to put this into a different context of where we were 40 years ago.
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Chapter 5: What challenges has Phrack faced in its 40-year journey?
Terrorism didn't really happen, at least not in most countries. And so building bombs was not seen as necessarily something evil or criminal, but it was just young kids exploring things. What can they do? They didn't mean to do any harm with them. They were just experimenting.
In my opinion, frac seems to capture some kind of counterculture. It's notes from the underground type stuff. Because back in the 90s, cybersecurity wasn't quite a mainstream profession yet. Like schools didn't teach you how to secure networks or how to hack. But nowadays, almost every major university has a major in cybersecurity.
So back in the 90s, there was just this underground group of people breaking computers, basically, and talking about it in chat rooms and on forums. You had freakers, hackers, rippers, crackers, seeders, which welcomed in artists and musicians who were making things on their computers. And this was collectively known as the scene back then.
And I think it was this underground scene that frack was born out of and has its roots in.
So the scene was made by largely people trying things out with their new hardware that they found or trying to make something do something that was not supposed to be doing or there was not engineers to do.
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Chapter 6: How has Phrack adapted to changes in technology and society?
So that's what the original hacker was all about.
I think if you summarize it, then Frag contains condensed, hardcore technical articles without any bullshit. The stuff works and is practical.
I'm fascinated by these two cultures, the cybersecurity professional and the scene hacker. One does it for money, and it's their career. And one does it for fun. It's their hobby. But they are both passionate about it. One tries to do it in the light. One wants to do it in the shadows. But they both like sharing what they know. What's the difference, honestly? Attitude? Style?
But as computers grew more mainstream, becoming more common in every house, more interest grew in hacking.
Chapter 7: What is the significance of the Hacker Manifesto in Phrack's history?
I mean, I'm sure you've gotten some kind of new electronic at some point in your life, and you sat down and you said to yourself, what are all the cool things that this thing can do? So imagine getting a computer and learning that it can print stuff and play games and make sounds, but then also hearing about some of the secret stuff it can do, like hack other people's computers.
So more people got fascinated with hacking and were contributing to things like Frac, submitting articles on how to do cool secret stuff on your computer. But also, along with the rise of computers, the cybersecurity profession became popular, which sort of brought in a whole new culture of hackers. These weren't the rollerblading cargo pants wearing mohawk kids.
The cybersecurity professional wears a collared shirt and sometimes a tie. You can see this dark contrast of these two cultures when you go to conferences like Black Hat and DEFCON. At Black Hat, you see people wearing suits and ties. They say they're geeks and nerds, but they don't look it. At DEFCON, there's a lot of people wearing cargo shorts, black shirts, hoodies, having mohawks.
At Black Hat, I feel like those people have to be there for work. But at DEFCON, I feel like those people want to be there for the fun. And because I grew up in the scene, my heart is still there. We were the kids who tried stuff with no manual or tutorial. We built things that weren't possible.
Chapter 8: What does the future hold for Phrack and the hacking community?
We did it without permission or rules. We pushed the boundaries and explored a new frontier.
Which also, like a lot of those things, they actually pave the ground for like a lot of the security industry exists now. So a lot of people's jobs, they exist because of some of the articles that were written there, which is very interesting.
At this point, we're 40 years into FRAC, and some of the articles have historical significance.
Historical significance has the article of the E911 documentation that was released in 1989, I believe. I think it was issue 24. And it was the documentation that detailed how the emergency 911 system works in America. And it was the first time that FRAC got into some legal problems with the authorities.
I think that has some significance because it happened right after Operation Sun Devil with the Secret Service hunting hackers. And it also sparked the creation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation because the FRAC person who released that article was so unfairly treated by the government and by the corporates.
Yeah, I think that article solidified Frack as the coolest hacker magazine ever because the founder, Knight Lightning, or one of the early founders, got arrested for publishing that article and then fought the law and won. And so it's like, well, I got arrested for hacking and I beat it and I got off scot-free. And that was just such a...
such a middle finger to the establishment of like, no, we're hackers and we can beat you. And we did beat you in your court, in your arena, in your court of law. We still won. We didn't do anything wrong. Screw off and leave us alone. And that must have been just like the most... amazing, epic moment for the time to beat the law.
And I know there were some other frack contributors who didn't, weren't so successful with that E911 article. They pled guilty before they could fight it. But the fact that That happened. And one of the only times anyone ever has been arrested for a CFAA violation and got off, it's only like, I can count on one hand, I think, how many times that's happened. And frack was one of them.
So yeah, that was definitely quite an article.
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