Phrack

[upbeat music] Okay, first, let's start out with some introductions.

Hi, my name is Skyper.

I used to be the editor, um, of the Phrack Magazine in the year 2000 to 2005, and, um, I've joined the Phrack staff recently again as an advisor.

Hey, I'm TMZ.

I'm one of the current staff and editors of Phrack Magazine.

In your words, can you tell us what is Phrack Magazine?

So Phrack stands for phreaking and hacking, and 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.

Phrack Magazine, this is all sorts of things hacking-related, to be honest.

Uh, [chuckles] I think there is the infamous article on how to make a bomb as well from the past.

Yeah, I mean, that w- I think I, I, I saw that even in, uh, issue one, there was a balloon that had acetylene 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 it- when it hits the ground, the snap pops.

The, the pops, the little popper snap, and then it creates a little explosion.

I think that was issue, issue one.

And so, um, it's, it's interesting how anarchy kinda shows up in, in Phrack.

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

I think we have to put this into, um, a different context of, of, of where we were, um, 40 years ago.

Terrorism didn't really happen, at l- at least not in, in, in most countries, and so building bombs was not seen as necessarily something evil or criminal, but was, you know, just young kids exploring things.

What can they do? They, they didn't mean to do any harm with them.

They were just experimenting.

[pensive music] In my opinion, Phrack 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 phreakers, 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.