From: nobody at tatooine.homelinux.net (starwars)
Subject: Phrack is dead, long live Phrack!


After several years of steady decline in the wrong hands, maybe it is too late to save Phrack. But I think we owe something back to the zine that gave us so much. Many us were drawn into computer security by Phrack, grew up along with it, and were nourished by the high quality papers of it's contributors.

The current editors of Phrack have decided to kill off Phrack for good. This is an outrage. Phrack has always purported to be for the community by the community. They have no right to kill off nearly twenty years of tradition.

Despite it's poor performance of late, Phrack still has
an unparalleled and awesome record as a technical source you can really
bite your teeth into. It's also had a major cultural impact over the
years:

"You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at
school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let
slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We've been dominated by
sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to
teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water
in the desert.
...
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. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.
"

-- A hacker's manifesto, the Mentor, 1986

The current "anonymous" batch editors have outgrown the zine. They were a bad choice to begin with, but regardless, that's happened to phrack before. On a regular basis. Every generation or so passes on phrack to the next. It's tradition.

What's different about the current batch of editors was their intense arrogance and unusualy patronizing attitude towards the scene. Phrack hasn't been about the computer underground for years. The last ten years have turned Phrack into a prestigious journal for security research. 

The anarchistic underground roots of phrack have been whitewashed away by the latest batch of editors. Go and read the issues from 1980s, early 90s.

The reason this happened was that when the scene moved to the Internet in the mid 90s the MIT hacker memes battled it out against "war games" hacker meme of the 80s. Hacker still has an 80s meaning for the general public, but the MIT hacker meme clearly won amongst the technically savy. The "cracker" and "script kiddy" memes were part of a process that turned Phrack's underground past into an embarrassment.

So Phrack gradually turned against it's own roots.  It's not for the hacker community by the hacker community anymore. Far from it. The current incarnation of Phrack actually spreads hypocritical anti-hacker memes between it's covers. It's BY $150-an-hour-security-consultants FOR our-reputation-in-the-security-industry.

Phrack has been hijacked by sellouts.

Aside from their snobbish elitist attitude, what have the recent editors of Phrack contributed? The articles are written by others. Try reading the "loopback" section written by the Phrack editors sometime. Degrading newbies never gets old for these guys. Ha ha! you're all so stupid! We're so uber elite!

So now what's happened is that these guys are so old school, so been-there-done-that, patronizing assholes that they've decided it's time for Phrack to die rather than evolve.

Here's an alternative to killing off a 20 year tradition: run a competition amongst would-be editors who can publish the best next issue of phrack. Then allow the PUBLIC to vote amongst alternatives as to whom succeeds the current editors.

The team that manages to hack together the best edition of phrack 64 wins.

Phrack is dead. Long live phrack!

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