170: Phrack

So the last two episodes talked about hacking in the '80s and '90s,

which was primarily phone-freaking.

“And those episodes I talked about a digital magazine called "Frak,"”

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 we get started as a hacker?" And then someone else simply say,

"Go to "Frak" site, start reading an issue one. If 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 interviewed two of the "Frak" staff. The magazine just celebrated their 40th anniversary, and I'm pretty sure if you run a hacker magazine for 40 years.

There's gotta be some interesting stories in there somewhere. These are true stories from the dark side of the internet. I'm Jack Recyter. This is Darknet Diaries.

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Okay, first, let's start out with some introductions.

Hi, my name is Skipa. I used to be the editor of the Frack magazine in the 2000-2005, and I've joined the Frack stuff recently again as an advisor. Hey, I'm Jim Z. I'm one of the current staff, and I just raise a Frack magazine.

“In your words, can you tell us what is Frack magazine?”

So Frack stands for freaking and hacking, and so 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.

Frack magazine, this is all sorts of things hacking related to be honest. I think there is a thing famous, a high ticker on how to make a bomb as well, from the best. Yeah, I mean, now I think I saw that even in issue one, there was a balloon that had a settling in it,

that we put like snap caps or pop caps on it, and throw some rocks together, and you throw the balloon off like a roof, and when it hits the ground, the snap pops, the little poppers snapped, and then it creates a little explosion.

I think that was issue one,

Like, like, bombs, what is this doing in a hacker magazine?

“I think we have to put this into different context”

of where we were 40 years ago. Terrorism didn't really happen, and I'd at least not in most countries. And so building bombs was not seen as necessarily something evil or criminal, but 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, Frack seems to capture some kind of counter culture. 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, ripers, 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. Frack was born out of, and has its roots in.

So the scene was made by like largely people trying things out with their new hardware that they found, or like trying to like make something do something that was not supposed to be doing, or there was not engineers to do.

“So that's what the original hacker was all about.”

I think if you summarise it, then Frack contains condensed hot-court technical articles without any bullshit. The stuff works and it's 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 at Star Hobby, but they're 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. 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. Some more people got fascinated with hacking and were contributing to things like Frack, 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 roller-blading cargo pants wearing Mohawk kids. The cybersecurity professional wears a colored shirt, and sometimes a tie. You can see the stark 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 Mohawk's.

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 to toil. We built things that weren't possible.

We did it without permission or rules. We pushed the boundaries and explored a new frontier. It's also like a lot of those things that actually paved the ground for a lot of the executing this exists now. So a lot of people's job exists because of some of the articles that were written there,

which is very interesting. At this point, we're 40 years into Frank. And some of the articles have historical significance. History of the significance has the article of the

“in 911 documentation that was released in 1989, I believe.”

I think it was issued in 2004, and it was a documentation that detailed how the emergency 911 system works in America.

And it was the first time that Frank wanted to do some legal problems with the authorities.

I think that has some significance because it had right after operation sand devil with the secret service, hunting hackers. And it's also sparked the creation of the electronic front of the foundation, because the the the the FRAC person who released that article was so unfairly treated by the government and by the corporates.

Yeah, I think that article solidified Frank as the coolest hacker magazine ever,

arrested for publishing an article and then fought the law and won. And so it's like, I got arrested for hacking and I beat it and I got off Scott free. And that that was just such a such a middle finger to the to the establishment of like no we're we're hackers and we can beat you and we did beat you in your core in your arena in your court of law we still want and we didn't do anything wrong screw off and leave us alone.

And that that must have been just like the most amazing epic moment for for the for the time

to to beat beat the law and and I know there was some other FRAC contributors that didn't weren't so successful with that E 911 article they played guilty before they could fight it, but the fact that that happened and one of the only times anyone ever just been arrested

“for a CFA violation and got off it's only like I can count on one hand I think how many times”

that's happened and FRAC was was one of them so yeah that was definitely quite an article. Yeah night lightning faces 60 years in prison and 120 2000 dollars in fine. That's a lot more money nowadays I think. Another article which made big ways was titled smashing the stack for fun and profit. So smashing stack for fun and profit issue 49 was the first article that told to the wider audience how buffer overflows work.

So in the olden days buffer overflows were used to trick a computer a target to execute a program that is not intended to execute to break into computer systems so to say and this article detailed it I'm how to do it yourself how you can do it. I was not the first time it was used on the internet the first time was probably by Robert Tim Morris who wrote the very first

internet worm and there were other articles around how to manipulate the stack but it was never that

detailed in that clarity and reaching such a wide audience. When this article came out buffer overflows became the new favorite way hackers would break a system and it was a favorite because of how successful it was to do programs just weren't designed to stop this from happening

“and so many things were vulnerable. I think the race just started with source code reviews”

and finding vulnerabilities disclosing them irresponsibly disclosing them in the olden days and then slowly getting idea of what response with disclosure is that not every corporate is the enemy and trying to work together with them trying to find common ground how we can make the internet a better place for everybody. And this is one of those cases that this was like a very elite in underground technique no problem just by governments or things like this that when he

did when the article was written it just like collecting so many people's minds so there was like this medium of software that's like abundantly available and like most likely vulnerable they can just fool around it like everywhere so yeah. So just to put this into perspective when I started out with computer security and hacking when I wanted to learn how to break

“and computer system I've been told what you have to do is you have to go to the library you have”

to find the book about Robert T. Morris you have to find and read the articles and news articles to piece together information how he did it and then when Frag came out with smashing stack and fun and profit it was all clear immediately. Back then hackers weren't very respected companies would try to ignore the vulnerabilities that they were told about almost with the audacity of being upset that somebody would buy their software and then try to break it

as if hackers were the problems like they were just some punk kids trying to jab their fingers

and somebody's eye. I think that has flipped and I love always like to compare it against the

the early companies who did safety assessment for for cars the car industry tried to try to sue them and outlaw them and says what you're doing you can't show the people how they interested to drive without seatbelt but they did and now everybody has learned that it is right to have a seatbelt good to have a seatbelt and the same thing happened with this article and then with the exploit development in the beginning they were hesitant they were

blaming the hackers for release and such destructive technology but if the hackers hadn't released them other governments surely would have exploited these holes anyway. No they don't they don't do it designed for the front they do this mainly for the profit and it 100% became a business in a career people are hired now to hack companies to you know assess their security like you see this every day

they hired people to do like penetration testing and their physical security and all those things

“this was unthinkable back then I think there are so many good articles on frack. I think the”

you know the end map one the ports can be the art of ports can be from issue 51 but you're there which followed the release of the end map to end map was the the grandfathers old ports can us out there. Oh wow yeah end map is the de facto tool almost a standard for how we do ports scanning today it's a super simple command line tool and the person who made end map published how to effectively port scan using the tool on frack and that taught millions of people how to port scan

even today and map is still highly used by just about everyone in cybersecurity and there's another article on frack which goes into detail of how to do GPS jamming. I like that this articles in there because it shows that GPS jamming is not really cybersecurity but it is GPS and itself is a technology that everybody uses and that nobody ever really thought about how vulnerable it is

“and because it is already a week very week signal coming from the satellites of course you can jam it”

but it was not apparent to everybody until we release article and then you could buy Jammer as you know two years later the Jammer's all over the place from China and whatnot for very low money but it was was frack first who released that article and got this idea out there that hey GPS actually very easy to jam the one ever thought about that. Hmm that's a good point I don't know

always know where the line is and whether something is a cybersecurity problem or not. I posted an

episode recently about a credit card skimmer and a lot of you complained and said that episode had nothing to do with cybersecurity and it made me wonder okay well if it's not a cybersecurity problem who's problem is it? I mean if you call articles on frack hacker magazine that shows you how to exploit a technology and compromise the integrity of it then maybe that is a cybersecurity problem. And of course we had the hackers manifesto articles for from 1986 that was like that.

For me this is the most significant article in an all-off event just because it sets out the the baseline and the conduct how hackers should behave and what hackers should do and should not do and how we think. Oh yeah I told you about the hacker manifesto in one of the previous episodes

one of the legion of doom members wrote it and published it first on frack and I'll give you a

short excerpt from it. I'm reading from frack here. This is our world now the world of the electron and the switch the beauty of the bod we explore and you call us criminals we seek after knowledge and you call us criminals we exist without skin color without nationality without religious bias and you call us criminals you build atomic bombs you wage wars you murder you cheat and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good yet we're the criminals yes I am a criminal my

crime is that of curiosity my crime is that of judging people by what they say and think not what they look like I am a hacker and this is my manifesto you may stop this individual but you can not stop a saw after all we're all alike yeah these things are still valid today maybe perhaps even more valid today than they were back then that we all equal it we don't care about skin color

“religion our nationality and you know a lot of a lot of criminals forget this and that's why”

they are criminals they're not hackers if you hack for a nation you're not a hacker you actually more concerned about your nationality than about the hacker manifesto where we don't care about that we only care about skills right yeah wrote a little bit about it in the last frack for 72 we're gonna take a quick ad break here but stay with us because when we get back we're gonna get into my favorite frack stories this episode is sponsored by meter the company building networks

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hosted on a VBS and you had to like use your home phone and dial in to it and read it that way and they wanted the articles to spread so they encouraged people to mirror it on other people's BBS's and other towns but eventually when websites became popular they're frack moved to frack.com

“and that became its new home but it didn't stay that way. I think frack.com got hacked at least once”

the website was often down not reachable somewhere around 1998 frack.com went offline it stopped publishing articles for two years and was down most of the time. I should also mention that frack changed owners quite a bit. The original founders went off and did something else new

people came in and they were doing stuff but it's a free magazine and they never tried to make money

so it relied on volunteers to keep it going and they could only spend so many years of their life before going off and doing something else. By 2000 the site looked dead. The website had been mostly offline for the past few years and no new articles for two years and at that point it was ran by Mike Schiffman aka route. Skyper wasn't involved at all and Mike didn't even know who

“Skyper was but Skyper had a plan. He wanted to revive frack and needed to do something epic to prove”

his worthiness. And so I decided to steal a domain which was frack.org which back then was not owned by the frack staff it was owned by somebody who probably didn't even know about frack. How did you

steal a domain? Luckily in the olden days these things were rather easy. You could go to the

domain register and this example was a French one, Gandhi.net and you would initiate the domain transfer and it would ask you that you need the authorization code to transfer it and you would right click on the webpage and say few source code of the webpage and the authorization code would be written there in the hidden HTML tag in a form tag. And that was all you needed back then to do hacking. Wow so just by looking at the view source of a website it would show you the authorization code

“that it was expecting in order to prove that you're the owner of the site. I mean it has to compare”

the authorization code you type in with something, right? So there's some logic on the backend somewhere it just happened to be right there in the source code of the site. It was as simple as just doing view source and then you could take over anyone's domain. But you also have to put this into perspective back then not many browsers had a feature to actually view the source code. So Skype or had frack.org and wanted to use it to revive frack.com but he wasn't doing this alone he actually

was involved with a few hacking groups specifically hurt and tesou. And so hurt is stands for the hackers emerged as a response team and hurt was found it around the same time when the search were found that the computer merged as a response team. And it was meant to be a counterweight to the search because the community felt that often there the search the computer merged as a response team didn't really know what they were doing and the publications were often not technically

correct. And so the community created the hackers' admission response team where the hackers published their version of the vulnerability and their exploits and their assessment of the risk. Yeah that was what hurt was and tesou was a German/Austrian hacker group who later became more internationally and went by the name of team tesou. So with frack.org in hand and with tesou and hurt behind him Skype forgot busy recreating the site to show he can manage a website like that.

And then I spent many days and many nights to recreate all the articles I put them in an SQL database that was searchable and covered all the data I created the webpage and then put it online and then called Mike Schiffman who was the editor and she's back then. I called him doing breakfast. He was just saying I'm just having breakfast but what you're saying sounds great so let's do it. There's no hesitation and it was a combination of people from tesou and hurt who took over

the frack magazine in 2000 or revive the frack magazine in the year 2000. So Skypeer was now in control of frack and it officially moved from frack.com to frack.org which is where it remains today and it was a whole new fresh team. Nobody from the old frack staff was around to write any articles or to help so this new team got busy with a fresh new issue issue 57.

Yeah, our first one already was the first hot cover release ever. So we decided we want to land with

ourselves. We also create the first hot cover release which we released at a at a hack conference physical copy. So in 2001 was the first time frack had a hard copy created elevating it to the

“next level. Fantastic was fantastic success. I think we printed 800 hot copies or so. We all picked”

them up with with a car with a rented car and these hot copies are heavy. We took pick them up in the printer and metal and the car almost crashed with all the with all the load in the trunk on the back seats. We drove to the conference and went to the main tent and announced that we are I'm going to distribute frack in half an hour and with a great party and handed out the magazines and the loss of alcohol and celebrating and talking about it was fantastic time.

So hackers trying to hack a hacker website is always going to be a thing and frack.org

had its fair share of attacks and there was a group that particularly was trying to take down frack and they called themselves the frack high council or phc. Yeah around the time there was a movement called the anti security movement and it was around the time when hacking really got commercialized and many many many companies entered the community and started to sell cybersecurity technology and hackers would start working for these companies and they would

sell the secrets that they did not research and did not discover but that we're given to them by the community and they were making lots of money from it and the community was not very happy about that because effectively these people stole from the community and so a movement emerged called the anti security movement and with basically said well that's that's not okay we can't do that and out of that the phc materialized and they were probably it's called the the

radical form of anti security movement they would do witch hunt and they would try to hunt down every hacker who would work for corporate. I call it hacker cannibalism where hackers ate other hackers and destroyed other hackers often unfairly and unjustified it was really a witch hunt and that went on for some time and phc then tried to take off frack because they're not happy with their editorial staff who was running frack of course they tried to hack into the servers and

things that you would do but they also tried to to steal articles or sent out call for papers

and pretending that they were frack but they definitely never wanted to main. Oh how interesting

they tried to pretend to be frack by publishing look alike articles that pretended to expose secrets but they weren't actually secrets a little war was breaking out between the corporate cyber security culture and the underground hacker culture the frack high council dot if frack publishes articles on how to hack that will be used by corporations to make money so therefore don't publish any articles at all or publish articles that would be detrimental to the

cyber security professionals out there who are trying a profit from it. Yeah they wanted to keep all the secrets among themselves and so that only they can use them it's very selfish and it's also

“counterproductive in an intellectual society you need to share your ideas to inspire other people”

and for other people it's diversify your ideas and to take your ideas further to the next step otherwise its our stagnation and you won't go anywhere. Okay so they tried to publish an article as frack just posing as them what else they actually stole some of the previously so frack

and so what happened is that and the frack stuff always releases the upcoming frack release

to the community to some trusted friends and then after some trusted friends then it's released to some lesser trusted friends and so on and so on and after a few days it ended up before the official web patronies in the hands of a PhD guy so this PhD guy knows that we haven't released a publicly yet but it's still a community release only and he modifies the frack articles put some back doors in there and then published on his web page a PhD web page as a new frack

release and these back doors they want to even travel back doors they were just very destructive back doors they'll delete your entire computer. Wow so if you ever looked up a tutorial online

“it had some some script or code or something and that's what you needed to do that's the command”

you were looking for and so you just copy and paste it into your computer but you don't actually know what it does yeah well if you would have tried to copy and paste this script it had the command

put that destructive command in their magazine but that version of the article still exists

out there somewhere. Skyper and his team had brought frack back they were publishing yearly issues of frack but then Skyper moved on to do other things but there was enough momentum and there was enough people involved with frack at that point for it to keep going on its own but it was so going yearly issues turned into every other year issues and then sometimes there'd be four years between issues and in 2016 it seemed like that was the last issue of frack frack staff just wasn't there

anymore and there were no issues coming out but five years after that in 2021 to all our surprise a new issue of frack was released we thought it was dead but we were super happy to see a new issue

“and I remember hearing people at Defcon tell me that year that they used and exploit that they saw”

in that new issue of frack to make a bunch of money on bug bounties that year so it still had teeth

and great and was hard hitting at least until things got patched but that seemed to be the last to rot for frack. The internal frack staff just sort of fizzled out there wasn't support much for it the people were just very loosely involved at that point and they decided to get together in 2023 to discuss the future of frack and we actually met in Spain to discuss a bit the future about frack and we decided that's not just for two or three people to decide that we should really ask

Mike Schismen again and some of the old staffers and previous staffers what they're opinion is and then eventually we had a big phone call with maybe six or eight people of the old staff

“a new staff on there and we discussed what we should do and there were various options”

some people said hey let's do one more frack and let's just call it let's say you know the last frack and then other people said no we can't even do that the community is dead and

most importantly there were the very few of us who said no no the community is always there

that there is still a community that deserves the magazine like this there's always curiosity as they are and always the need for for people to to publish articles and we have to provide the platform for them so they can do it and frack is the perfect platform for these articles so we were brainstorming about who we could contact out there who has experiences running magazine who would enjoy running magazine and who's also technically skilled you know frack in the end is a

it's a very technical magazine so the the group that came to our minds with the people who running already temp out magazine temp out is very similar to frack it's an easy which post articles on hacking it has its own edginess to it like there's a bunch of asky art and hard hitting articles and it was TMZ here who co-founded temp out so temp up to the group that is a research group that we formed maybe five years ago now we started in ISDs that

three people were just wanted to like research ELF infection technique so Linux fires and things that this we thought was like a very niche area that we had like a people in common that wanted to do that and so we kind of you know brainstormed a little bit and then more people are joining and eventually we had like a discord channel there's like 1,500 people there and suddenly we you know the community was like okay what if we make like a scene you know like in the old days

people like oh yeah wanted to write the script or whatever so we just give it a go like and we made four volumes already of it so far and it's being like a real nice and we contacted them and we went ahead of phone call together and the rest is history hours honestly like speechless

“when it happened like I was very very anxious remember that I was a vacation and I just ran”

to the I was actually the boss to catch a flight so I just like found like a the quiet corner of the airport launch that I could fight and had to call with them and took notes of everything to give it a go you know trust you with that the former staff us was saying like okay we maybe should you know do something different this time like make for like well known again the tempo team had already established themselves as a group who was technical smart

and could ship articles and immediately got busy reviving frack once again I had no idea that the teams behind frack have shifted so much throughout the 40 years but when his volunteer driven I suppose that's what happens so the temp out team was excited to be taken over frack and wanted to make

frack issue released so a lot of people just thought it was dead but to show them that it wasn't

“dead they wanted to make a physical copy and release it a deathcon yeah we just thought actually”

about doing only our online release we didn't really thought about actually doing a physical release last year until kind of late in the process and then we were just like okay what if we do it you know can we do it do we have like some budget can we like talk to some people so we were

able to raise some funds and we were able to get like 500 copies down to Vegas yeah it was the first

very interesting for us to experience some logistics because you know releasing a physical copy of things it's not as easy as it sounds like not only like you have to actually make the material but you know the distribution especially a deathcon wow okay so last year you actually reached out to me to you were looking for a place to spread them or give them out yeah yeah yeah yeah so we had a few of them downstairs right and then we just like yeah sure but we kind of wanted like a place more

essentialized for that and that was very nice to get some of the copies there had the party that's the darkness part we really liked it and I remember like a lot of people were so happy

“and I think that's what made me feel like very realized it's always like a lot of people”

they looked at it and they looked at it as the most precious thing that I ever touched like you know

they they say yeah I'm here and I like what I do now because of frost like 25 years ago 30 years ago so you know that that's that's really like very very nice to me it's a special moment for me I mean the fact that the frack staff came in and started handing out frack magazines at my party was I felt like man I this is this is special this is cool I didn't I'm I feel honored to have been one of the places to to spread it because I think you only isn't even pick like three or four places to

spread out the magazines there yeah Chris and thank you for having us was really nice I cherish my copy that I got from you I wish I got it signed as soon as I left that night I was like oh no how did I not get it signed by you but yeah that that feels like a very special book to to own it's it's more of a book it's in my hand here and my gosh this thing is heavy so frack 71 I'm just looking through it it's very text there's hardly any pictures at all and I guess that's

because you were saying you know we weren't even thinking about printing it and then when you find the guy around printing it's like okay well we'll just print the articles yeah so editing these is already hard yeah for somebody that doesn't have like you know that doesn't work with it they guess

“but we also like okay we we keep the style right like that's what the first thought like also”

so it's easier because it's not less editing but that was to like which is already pretty hard but you know we keep the text plain text style which a lot of people relate to and really be like the tempo proved themselves to be able to ship an issue of frack great but frack started in 1985 so with 2025 coming it would mark the 40th anniversary frack which got a lot of people excited to pitch in and help make a great new issue it freck 72 because it's marked our 40th anniversary

we we all wanted to to make something very special so we the initial idea was to go back to the

Netherlands to release the magazine there again as a hot copy where we released the first hot copy

2024 years before but we got enough funding and we got enough community support to then be able to coordinate it really set three different conferences at the same time which was in Netherlands and at the Afghan and Las Vegas and at hope in in New York City and then very small conference all around the world so there was those beautiful how the community came together and everybody checked in some dollars and helped us the one that I have actually has a dev

cons special edition written on the cover so where their multiple covers yes we have three different covers actually four one of them is the it's gonna be released later this year I like to add something there when teams that says there are four covers um three that are all released and one of them that we released at the end of the year it's because we're going to release the PDF online for everybody to to print it at home or print it on a professional print up and get it shipped to

their home address so frack issue 72 was released at Defcon in 2025 and I was there to get a copy of it yeah this year we turned it up in notch this year we didn't show up with 500 copies we turned up with close to 8000 copies at Defcon most if not all articles of frack are simply text files there are

still text in the shape of a picture but this 40th anniversary edition man is it pop every page has a graphic on it and it's really cool it feels like a high quality magazine at this point and it's bulky and has a ton of articles in it yeah so we got the opportunity to have the wonderful people based from beige dot which is another magazine as well to do the graphics for us I mean as you can as you know because you you saw it already it just it's mind blowing at the quality is so so good

and I remember when I got the confirmation that they would do it I was so relieved that I didn't have to do it myself because one I mean I know that it's hard for me because I'm not an expert on this

and second like I would never be able to match this quality or nobody at least that it's in the

“current staff and they just like it's just incredible and I think like frack never looked at”

good yeah it looks great yeah it feels like you're coming coming of age but even 40 years later and it's like look and great I like that that makes me excited about the future um getting it getting you said 8000 copies to Defcon yeah we had a think around 15000 copies spread the long amongst those three conferences yeah I mean gosh how how much does that even weigh how do you even get that to Defcon it's part of the problem first to solve these issues we tried to

find like local printers right and it is it is very very challenging because the transportation is very costly so we we found a Vegas printer and I think the for Defcon that was 10 tons or something 10 tons of paper wow yeah yeah so the logistical issue is is that you don't

“only have to deliver it by truck to Defcon you also need manpower on the ground to hand carry 10”

tons from the loading bay to the registration desk so all these little details we had to learn and figure out it was great to see frack all over the place at Defcon this year people were showing me how excited they were when they got their copy some got it signed by the frack staff some had me signed it for some reason it was a wonderful time but what surprised me is that this is such a high quality magazine but then thousands of them were given out to everyone just for free

frack is fairly community always it's always free so uh somebody tries to tell you a frack

you know that is not from us you you said you're never going to charge for these things we're never going to charge no no it's so cool happening well welcome to help us in any way right so the community is there for this people can help us with like article reviews with art as well and they people did which is very nice to see like this year there's a lot of people involved you know the artist that draw the time the covers for example is for so there's seven ways

the people can help us make this happen and we do it for them and they do it for for the community as well it's impressive that you're able to make it happen and have such a high quality print magazine here I mean this thing is like a hundred pages long at least we said that of course these things cost money to print the printer still wants to be paid he doesn't do a favor for frack and so the the desk on print in its own was about

55,000 US dollars so this is still money that we had to raise from the community but good thing is that many of all friends who who were doing frack with us in the year 2000 in 2001 and who are reading frack with us and who are writing articles for us now 24 years later they have all made their fortunes they're running big companies some of them are traded on the stock exchange but these people came back to us and they were happy to

support us financially and and help us with this immense cost magazine that launched 10,000 cybersecurity careers on exactly well so that's where we're at today 40th anniversary will congrats on the 40 years of running a thing or keep it a go and it's so fascinating that's community driven almost like a dread pirate robber it's right he's his name lives on but it's

not always the same person that lives on right and so frack continues to live on because the

“community keeps it going and the community is as strong as ever now and I think it's gonna grow”

even further yeah tell us about the future yeah so I think we really want to keep the community

everything right logistics and article review and you know project management and other things

“so we're not experts on our team on this we also like have you know our day jobs and other things”

so we're learning as we go as well and the community I think we want to grow and have like more people involved to help us we have a lot of people that sometimes they say yeah I don't have

time to write an article this year or something like this but you know they do have spare time to

like help think the article issues so this is already like a very big deal I think in the future

“we want to get more people involved like if you want to say like in a very brief way we want to”

be accessible okay so I got a physical copy but that's just because I happen to be at the right

time and right place is there a way to get a physical copy by ordering it yes like last year

we made it available for self-print at cost obviously so we don't profit and of course you can print anywhere you want we have the just recommended printed whatever it doesn't be the matter

“because we release the full high quality PDF as well so you can print and edit if you want”

that your own local print shop and this year is going to be the same practice currently looking for new articles for the upcoming issue if you've got a new hacking technique or think it of researching a specific technology or protocol reach out to the frack staff with your draft or even just an idea they are very helpful at giving you feedback to help you draft a great article even if your English is not very good they can help co-author the article with you and of course

you can still read every issue of frack free of charge at frack.org here's to another 40 years of an awesome hacker magazine a big thank you to Skyper and TMZ for coming on the show and sharing the history and stories of frack it really is looking better than ever and I can't wait to see what they make next and the show notes you'll find links to where you can order a physical copy of issue 72 or just download the PDF and print it at home the show is made by me the packet tickler

jackre cider editing by the control alt delight Tristan Ledger mixing by proximity sound and our theme is because by the mysterious breakmaster cylinder I named my dog red jacks because nobody can't wait to see what's going on.