An awesome ezine that brings fond teenage memories, luckily still staying true to its origins, and keeping strong. Hopefully for many more years to come.
Agree! I remember printing each issue and reading it over and over. So inspiring, convinced me that it's possible to figure out how everything works in tech, down to the wire.
It wasn't exactly easy to find Phrack in 1992, but I found my way there. I haven't seen an archive of it online in many years. Love seeing this online now, especially with a new issue published! I'm looking forward to reading the recent ones.
> After the past several decades of humanity putting all of its collective
knowledge online, we are seeing more ways to prevent us from accessing it.
This hits so hard, especially for someone who saw the Internet becoming this awesome, huge open library that everyone can access and contribute and then witnessing it being paywalled, drowned with ads and slop, monetized to oblivion, sometimes straight up disappear. It's heartbreaking.
Pretty fitting as I can't get on that site because it's marked as "Radicalization and Extremism" by SonicWall's content filter on our corporate firewall.
The worst part of it is that the "true Internet" is probably still out there, but we can't find it anymore. The search engines have gotten way worse over the years and we no longer have good enough filters to ignore all the nonsense.
the last article "Calling All Hackers" touches on this. There are still plentiful communities and resources outside of the mainstream internet. A lot of what I personally refer to as the "real internet" are these smaller indie sites and communities.
adding to that, I currently see the internet as a "noise-first" kind of library, transformed from one that had little signal but where noise was sparse too
at the same time, (some of) the awesome people are still here, and they're still doing amazing stuff :)
The whole introduction is great and hits the nail on the head. A hearty greeting also goes to all uncritical LLM apologists, whose sometimes brainless efforts and arguments do a disservice to freedom of information (and thus to humanity in the long term). Packaging free knowledge together with false information in an unsolicited and non-transparent manner and then selling it as the new saviour should bring all hackers to the barricades - thank you, Phrack, for speaking the truth!