I think it captures the original motivation and thrill of exploration beautifully. Who doesn’t remember as a kid seeing a blinking cursor and the feeling there was an entire universe to be discovered?
I’m 100% on board with the message of getting back to exploration for its own sake, and that conformity gets in the way of that.
> Then: Phrack was the Rosetta Stone. 2600 was gospel. IRC was sacred ground.
Zines were copied, not monetized. We earned respect by contributing tools,
ideas, or code, never by chasing clout.
2600: The Hacker Quarterly is definitely not quite what it was decades ago, but I was still so giddy when my first article got published there that I dereferenced a null pointer on purpose.
The original "manifesto" was a deeply cringe zine article written about a group of people who would go on to run IT security practices at the major I-banks.
This update applies a fresh layer of vaseline to the camera lens: "creators in a world of closed systems", "anarchists with a cause". "Our goal was not destruction." Who are you calling "we"? I was there. It was for the most part a bunch of people trading scripts and running them in the hopes of possibly shutting people's phones off or stealing mail spools.
I'm not high-horsing or condemning 90s hackers. They were teenagers fucking around doing what teenagers do (though: I cough a bit when I read Blankenship writing about how we all "existed without skin color" and not "judging people for what they looked like").
What's insidious about this piece is how they use hagiography to cover for a pure gatekeeping argument. Bug bounties commoditizing vulnerability development to produce CVEs! Why, I never: the audacity to pay teenagers in Indonesia to document vulnerabilities when our forebears had to surreptitiously trade source trees on EFNet to participate in the scene.
This piece was written about 6 months before LLMs upended vulnerability research. What LLMs are going to do to the scene is a can of worms, so let's just put a pin in that, and judge it by the standards of August 2025, which by the standards of 1994 were a golden age of hacking, both in opportunity and in the intellectual depth of the field and the possibilities for engaging meaningfully with computer science.
this doesnt really reflect the vibe old school hackers give. "solder a wifi module to a calculator" sounds like a cartoon-inspired project.
Why not reference call spoofing (i forgot the name) where they were able to call for no charge because they were able to spoof a real call. that's the kind of hacker vibe i want continued.
The word "hacker" comes from MIT students who would cut up circuit boards with a hacksaw and connect the pieces together in different ways. Soldering a WiFi module to a calculator is very oldschool hacker.
The word you're looking for is phreaking. I must admit, since the title of TFA's website is only two letters away, it's funny you forgot it.
For me, I still tend to use the older definition of “hacker” (not necessarily someone exploiting systems which feels more like a “cracker” to me), but someone who has an innate curiosity about the world around them, and finds interesting ways to solve problems or create new things.
That is not something that should be encouraged. Hacking together projects like a wifi calculator is fun, harmless and builds knowledge. Hacking a phoneline can land a kid in jail. Attacking public infra is not something that should be treated lightly.
Many of the most prolific and successful offensive hackers, the people that actually made their way into switches and onto hardened SunOS servers, were the least capable technologists. The archetype is Kevin Mitnick, who wasn't a coder and barely understood the cookbook tools he used. The field benefited enormously from its sanitization, and the 80's and 90's reputation could use some scuffing up.
It was written by ChatGPT which would avoid examples that are explicitly illegal, and would stop short of advocating things that contravene ToS agreements.
I was about to say, it is still these but pushed tot he outer regions. There are still many Linux distros that have this spirit but they are usually used by maybe a few thousand people at best.
The text written in LLMish for that Phrack intro uses ASCII characters for everything, including quotes and ellipsis. There's one non-ASCII Unicode codepoint that made it through and it's the telltale sign of LLMish. They also use a monospaced font and ASCII art (well at least ASCII aligned titles) to make it look old-school cool.
Honestly I don't understand how anyone can defend this LLMish garbage.
The Hacker Spirit was largely subsidized on the (relatively) high salaries afforded to engineers*.
What happens when that well dries up?
Plus the relative freedom available to said hackers in the past, that is now being choked by the very same tools they've built.
We like to think of ourselves as capable systems designers, coming up with complex reliable/durable/highly-available/distributed systems to be proud of. But we can't stop and think about the only system that really matters in the end.
* Not saying it was 100% the case, nothing ever is, but you can't deny that a large part of historic and modern hacker culture grew from well off places who could afford it. Sure, sure "necessity is the mother of all invention" and all that, but that breeds a different kind of innovation.
The hacker culture in Latin America was largely driven by frustration with the subpar hardware/software options available to the general public, and the financial inaccessibility of better options. So I wouldn't say that financial stability is a prerequisite for hacker culture to thrive.
No. It doesn’t matter whether it was created by an LLM or an Indian - as long as it is good. The methods are not important.
Skin color of the creator is not important. Even if their ethnic background is visible through the use of one specific word a lot and slang or dialect, it doesn’t matter. Similarly it doesn’t matter whether it was made with an LLM.
Argue with the content, not the methods or risk being boring and uninteresting and generally easy to dismiss
Everything we love about human creativity is being destroyed by AI models and when some of us point it out, we're getting downvoted by an army of AI kool-aid drinkers. It's plain insane.
You downvoters really cannot see what's wrong with a Phrack article written in an insufferable LLMish tone that reads just like a 2026 LinkedIn feed?
Human creativity only dies with the entirety of the human race. As bleak as things may look the simplest thing to do is just not use AI if it bothers you. Focus all your efforts on some great tech based on risc-v. If one does that it would develop an amazing skill set.
I work with tech and the phase of my current development doesn’t leverage AI.
Once I know exactly my needs I will likely start to adopt AI to fill in the details of my plan.
>Yet, somewhere the spirit persists. Hidden away in encrypted Matrix rooms,
deep inside dead drop Git repositories and onion forums, the real work
continues. The underground never died — it just moved to quieter places.
You wish. True hackers wrote HAKMEM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAKMEM, wrote ZMachine
interpreters in PostScript, wrote compilers for the Subleq machine with memory indirection
and ran GNU/Linux on it. You pale against Lisp hackers who almost ate Discrete Math books
for breakfast.
The PC "hacking" was nothing more than a bunch of kids playing with really underopowered toys.
There's more hacking spirit in Fabrice Bellard and Common Lisp/Scheme books than the whole PC hacking/cracking and phreakign scene.
The same with Emacs hackers repurposing the editor for anything. IRC, Email, ZMachine interpreter, music and video player interfaces, web browsers, equation solvers, controlling aiports in Germany as an ATC messaging router (and I am NOT kidding about the last one)...
This might be the craziest achievement from a GNU product ever. Repurpossing a text editor to manage a civil infraestructure:
I feel like the irony of a post complaining about the death of hacker culture written entirely by ChatGPT pretty well summarizes where we're at.
Amen.
I think it captures the original motivation and thrill of exploration beautifully. Who doesn’t remember as a kid seeing a blinking cursor and the feeling there was an entire universe to be discovered?
I’m 100% on board with the message of getting back to exploration for its own sake, and that conformity gets in the way of that.
From the article
> Then: Phrack was the Rosetta Stone. 2600 was gospel. IRC was sacred ground. Zines were copied, not monetized. We earned respect by contributing tools, ideas, or code, never by chasing clout.
2600: The Hacker Quarterly is definitely not quite what it was decades ago, but I was still so giddy when my first article got published there that I dereferenced a null pointer on purpose.
The original "manifesto" was a deeply cringe zine article written about a group of people who would go on to run IT security practices at the major I-banks.
This update applies a fresh layer of vaseline to the camera lens: "creators in a world of closed systems", "anarchists with a cause". "Our goal was not destruction." Who are you calling "we"? I was there. It was for the most part a bunch of people trading scripts and running them in the hopes of possibly shutting people's phones off or stealing mail spools.
I'm not high-horsing or condemning 90s hackers. They were teenagers fucking around doing what teenagers do (though: I cough a bit when I read Blankenship writing about how we all "existed without skin color" and not "judging people for what they looked like").
What's insidious about this piece is how they use hagiography to cover for a pure gatekeeping argument. Bug bounties commoditizing vulnerability development to produce CVEs! Why, I never: the audacity to pay teenagers in Indonesia to document vulnerabilities when our forebears had to surreptitiously trade source trees on EFNet to participate in the scene.
This piece was written about 6 months before LLMs upended vulnerability research. What LLMs are going to do to the scene is a can of worms, so let's just put a pin in that, and judge it by the standards of August 2025, which by the standards of 1994 were a golden age of hacking, both in opportunity and in the intellectual depth of the field and the possibilities for engaging meaningfully with computer science.
what hits harder, the fact that this was written by an LLM or inspecting the monospace font and finding cloudflare analytics javascript
i was thinking it must be to make a statement about llms, or a puzzle, but i didn't find anything
This resonates. I have just got back to hacking an old flip-dot display after sitting on the shelf for years.
https://www.bobek.cz/buse/
this doesnt really reflect the vibe old school hackers give. "solder a wifi module to a calculator" sounds like a cartoon-inspired project.
Why not reference call spoofing (i forgot the name) where they were able to call for no charge because they were able to spoof a real call. that's the kind of hacker vibe i want continued.
The word "hacker" comes from MIT students who would cut up circuit boards with a hacksaw and connect the pieces together in different ways. Soldering a WiFi module to a calculator is very oldschool hacker.
The word you're looking for is phreaking. I must admit, since the title of TFA's website is only two letters away, it's funny you forgot it.
For me, I still tend to use the older definition of “hacker” (not necessarily someone exploiting systems which feels more like a “cracker” to me), but someone who has an innate curiosity about the world around them, and finds interesting ways to solve problems or create new things.
Ironically, the guy who soldered a Wi-Fi module to a calculator did so to gain access to AI slop with it https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/secre...
That is not something that should be encouraged. Hacking together projects like a wifi calculator is fun, harmless and builds knowledge. Hacking a phoneline can land a kid in jail. Attacking public infra is not something that should be treated lightly.
This is exactly the kind of sanitized hacking this article is talking about.
Many of the most prolific and successful offensive hackers, the people that actually made their way into switches and onto hardened SunOS servers, were the least capable technologists. The archetype is Kevin Mitnick, who wasn't a coder and barely understood the cookbook tools he used. The field benefited enormously from its sanitization, and the 80's and 90's reputation could use some scuffing up.
It was written by ChatGPT which would avoid examples that are explicitly illegal, and would stop short of advocating things that contravene ToS agreements.
Sad.
Who is in charge of this shit now?
Because phreaking in the traditional sense hasn't worked for decades?
Blue box and phreaking.
Hacker culture is still alive at NetBSD community
I was about to say, it is still these but pushed tot he outer regions. There are still many Linux distros that have this spirit but they are usually used by maybe a few thousand people at best.
Here is an exercise, find one character usage that the original didn't have and that this new one is littered with...
The original phrack was (i'm assuming) 7-bit ascii, so obviously it wouldn't have used characters that aren't ascii...
The text written in LLMish for that Phrack intro uses ASCII characters for everything, including quotes and ellipsis. There's one non-ASCII Unicode codepoint that made it through and it's the telltale sign of LLMish. They also use a monospaced font and ASCII art (well at least ASCII aligned titles) to make it look old-school cool.
Honestly I don't understand how anyone can defend this LLMish garbage.
Emmm...dash?
Some of us use em-dashes habitually, and did so before LLMs. Call it le ponctuation juste.
The Hacker Spirit was largely subsidized on the (relatively) high salaries afforded to engineers*.
What happens when that well dries up?
Plus the relative freedom available to said hackers in the past, that is now being choked by the very same tools they've built.
We like to think of ourselves as capable systems designers, coming up with complex reliable/durable/highly-available/distributed systems to be proud of. But we can't stop and think about the only system that really matters in the end.
* Not saying it was 100% the case, nothing ever is, but you can't deny that a large part of historic and modern hacker culture grew from well off places who could afford it. Sure, sure "necessity is the mother of all invention" and all that, but that breeds a different kind of innovation.
The hacker culture in Latin America was largely driven by frustration with the subpar hardware/software options available to the general public, and the financial inaccessibility of better options. So I wouldn't say that financial stability is a prerequisite for hacker culture to thrive.
I see it the other way. Applying the skills to a job is much more lucrative, so most do that instead.
This sounds like ChatGPT.
>this is not a eulogy, it's a reckoning
100%
is that why it's impossible for me to read? my brain has read so much llm output that i can only skim it now.
Uh, should have used Claude. Gpt is embarassing.
You won’t get my point so I have to lay it bare: That doesn’t matter. Content counts and not the methods to create it.
You’re right. The content sucks, because it was created with an LLM.
No. It doesn’t matter whether it was created by an LLM or an Indian - as long as it is good. The methods are not important.
Skin color of the creator is not important. Even if their ethnic background is visible through the use of one specific word a lot and slang or dialect, it doesn’t matter. Similarly it doesn’t matter whether it was made with an LLM.
Argue with the content, not the methods or risk being boring and uninteresting and generally easy to dismiss
Everything we love about human creativity is being destroyed by AI models and when some of us point it out, we're getting downvoted by an army of AI kool-aid drinkers. It's plain insane.
You downvoters really cannot see what's wrong with a Phrack article written in an insufferable LLMish tone that reads just like a 2026 LinkedIn feed?
You are lost.
Human creativity only dies with the entirety of the human race. As bleak as things may look the simplest thing to do is just not use AI if it bothers you. Focus all your efforts on some great tech based on risc-v. If one does that it would develop an amazing skill set.
I work with tech and the phase of my current development doesn’t leverage AI.
Once I know exactly my needs I will likely start to adopt AI to fill in the details of my plan.
>Yet, somewhere the spirit persists. Hidden away in encrypted Matrix rooms, deep inside dead drop Git repositories and onion forums, the real work continues. The underground never died — it just moved to quieter places.
You wish. True hackers wrote HAKMEM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAKMEM, wrote ZMachine interpreters in PostScript, wrote compilers for the Subleq machine with memory indirection and ran GNU/Linux on it. You pale against Lisp hackers who almost ate Discrete Math books for breakfast.
The PC "hacking" was nothing more than a bunch of kids playing with really underopowered toys.
There's more hacking spirit in Fabrice Bellard and Common Lisp/Scheme books than the whole PC hacking/cracking and phreakign scene.
This is a genuine hacking act:
https://bellard.org/dvbt/
This too:
http://www.erikyyy.de/tempest/
The same with Emacs hackers repurposing the editor for anything. IRC, Email, ZMachine interpreter, music and video player interfaces, web browsers, equation solvers, controlling aiports in Germany as an ATC messaging router (and I am NOT kidding about the last one)...
This might be the craziest achievement from a GNU product ever. Repurpossing a text editor to manage a civil infraestructure:
https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsStories