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.

This one I'd regret wasting space in my trash.

> 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.

And I read 2600 and also occasionally submitted, but it certainly wasn’t treated as gospel. Also of course there was clout chasing — most of the scene was teenagers trying to impress each other!

Maybe like musicians use chord charts? In this analogy, sheet music plays a better role as the program.

https://www.bobek.cz/buse/

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 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.

Back then, if you were a phreaker, you basically got a few free phone calls. And learned a lot about the telephone system. I think for all intents and purposes you were a rounding error and really weren't doing any major harm (i.e. lowering slightly the profit of huge hulking corporations that were quite well). If you were a classic MIT hacker, you never even entertained criminal activities in the first place. I guess the 2600 culture and the Hacker manifesto is more descendant of phreakers and early internet hackers in the "break into computers" sense. But even then, as it says, "their crime was curiosity", and the purpose still was never to steal stuff. That's what criminals do. If you break things as you learn, you have the responsibility for your breakage. If you harm people that can be real harm. There's a difference between unsanitized (and harmless) and plainly an asshole. You gotta learn the difference.

Honestly I think this point is really important to drive today, because if we had script kiddies a few decades ago, today we can have Uber-Script-Kiddies, probably you can get a hold of some jailbroken LLM model and break serious things without technical knowledge or good intentions. Don't do it, kids.

But overall I don't see how it's worthwhile to actually do this kind of hacking today, specially the more attacking kind. I think there is today so many more resources for learning things non-destructively (although I'm sure there always were some).

The hacker mythos in my opinion is due to the mythos that are always built around power. There were the mythos of warriors, of sorcerers, etc., there was the shadowy ninja, and so many others -- they usually wielded some special skill, power or ability. In the case of hackers, they wielded special control and knowledge of computers to do their bidding. I think this kind of myth would happen regardless of intentions -- to break or to defend. It draws our attention and imagination I guess. Kind of like being a magician in an era dominated by communicating machines.

Naturally, the distinction between wielding those powers for good reasons and bad ones would emerge. That's the black hat and grey/white hats. Side note I think the black=bad, white=good association is just a kind of bad one, and nonetheless extremely overused at this point, but I digress. The thing is, what you do have consequences. If the only consequence is you learning stuff, maybe some minor nuisance to a megacorp (like downloading a e-book you don't plan on buying for <legitimate reasons>), then I think that's the good ole' hacker spirit.

I think the observation and a little bit of daredevil spirit is useful because almost every experiment we do IRL tends to carry at least a little bit of risk. We need to manage this risk wisely. For example, if you're messing with electronics you can run the risk of electrocuting yourself or destroying your device. The right spirit is not don't do it, but learn to do it safely enough, and at an acceptable risk to your device. If you wanted to play with radio transmissions, you run the risk of disrupting communications from emergency services and medical devices. Again, it's not "don't do it", but "know what you're doing". If you're playing with computers, (and you were skilled enough; which most of us (thankfully?) aren't) you can basically unleash a minor disaster. The answer is as always not "don't do it", but "know what you're doing and what you're playing with". Also of course for entrepreneurship as well, it's not "don't do it, never make anything". Everything carries risks. The important thing is to study well enough the risks of what you're doing until you can be reasonably sure (in proportion to the risk) the benefits outweigh the risks. Have integrity. Else yea, don't do it. Don't shove a gazillion ads into my eyeballs until I almost lose my mind, thank you very much.

Hackers are all part of society. That's what Hacking the Planet means in spirit. Use the magic sand to save the world. Wield the beauty of the baud... the mastery of the switch. Or Just learn and have some harmless fun, make someone smile, that might be better than any software or widget you could ever make.

Sad.

Who is in charge of this shit now?

Honestly I don't understand how anyone can defend this LLMish garbage.

in general though, i think it does get tiresome when people attack a piece solely based on the use of LLM editing instead of its merits (or lack thereof). That is ultimately an ad hominem. The reason to dislike LLM writing is because typically its vapid, not due to the LLM in and of itself.

Companies were always huge piles of proprietary custom code. Slowly what would emerge from those would occasionally be foundational software like ERPs, better databases, better message queues.

What I suspect will happen now is that everyone will simply construct their own distinct stacks of code, or just pile onto the existing proprietary ones inside companies. The "export" of code for general use will functionally disappear.

It's all throwaway, to be wastefully recomputed/rerendered by armies of H100s and only apathetically checked for utility.

I could be proven wrong, I'll know if Linux starts to miraculously close functionality and usability gaps with Windows/OSX, which would be the most visible example of LLM acceleration of development, but it so far has not.

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.

Related discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44945660

100%

So clearly not all sources are equal, and that applies to LLM too.

If you spend 4h of your time writing an article on something you care about it’s likely to be interesting. If the extent of the effort you are willing to put in the topic is 10 seconds of your time to ask ChatGPT to « write an article about phrack », then just don’t bother. We can all ask our own GPTs to do it for us whenever we want.

In theory someone could iterate for 4h with ChatGPT to get to the exact words they wanted to say without having written a line of it, but unfortunately for those folks, 99% of the content generated in that way will be nice sounding emptiness, and people don’t want to read 100 pieces of BS just to find 1 good one. There is too much content online and not enough time to read it all, we gotta filter somehow, and LLM sounding prose is one of the best filter available today.

I am. It sounds like it was written by an LLM. That's synonymous with uninteresting and derivative.

BTW, likening not wanting to read LLM output to racism is possibly one of the funniest things I've ever seen on this website. Thank you.

for example, i would describe this article as grandiose, overdramatic and excessively ornate. ironically those styles show a lack of humanity.

it has vanishingly little substance. take "a poetic snapshot of a subculture forming in the shadows". this is meaningless!

it's generic, everything about the article is stating the mean belief. where is the controversy, where is the drama that would justify these massive sentences?

you can also notice that everything about an llm text has this repulsive corporate optimism, a desperation to deliver a redeeming conclusion.

so this article says, the hero meets the challenge in the journey, "We used opcode charts like musicians used sheet music. We owned the stack." oh no. we reached the bottom. but! watch out! because, we will be redeemed, "That spark is hard to find now, but it still lives in the rarest of places". how about this: no it fucking doesn't, the spark is dead, bled out and buried in a block of concrete. end of article.

i studied humanities but i hope that readers of any subject would react the same way.

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 the West is more related to creating a thing, and doing everything yourself from scratch on bare metal components - often for the fun and challenge, rather than necessity.

Another one got caught today, it's all over the papers. "Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering"... Damn kids. They're all alike.

But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950's technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him? I am a hacker, enter my world... Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me... Damn underachiever. They're all alike.

I'm in junior high or high school. I've listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. "No, Ms. Smith, I didn't show my work. I did it in my head..." Damn kid. Probably copied it. They're all alike.

I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me... Or feels threatened by me... Or thinks I'm a smart ass... Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here... Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike.

And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is found. "This is it... this is where I belong..." I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I know you all... Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They're all alike...

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.

This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. 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, 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. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.

I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike.

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.

Just to be pedantic, the Luddites weren't anti-technology, they were fighting against a means of production that they could never hope to own and which was ruining their livelihoods.

I'd say the opposite is true. Taking that new and corporate thing and making it into something that works for you as a tool for hacking is exactly what the hacker spirit is about.

> I run an "abliterated"/uncensored local model on a spare PC downstairs.

Exactly like that.

You've got it all wrong. I pay three AI subscriptions and I use LLMs every day, for various tasks.

I know models are here to stay (not just LLM ones). At least 12 computers at home (well counting the Pis and NUCs as computers) and at all times at least half of those turned on. And more VMs than that (and agents running into those VMs).

I'm all but a luddite but this doesn't mean I don't find itprofoundly lame when such a venerable institution as Phrack can't even bother to write one page of text without using a LLM.

Also they use a monospaced font and there's ONE fucking non-ASCII character in the entire prose that appears several times: the em-dash from LLMish.

Now I wrote (and typeset) books: I can tell you about various types of dashes and spacing characters (in both english and french). I'm not saying we shouldn't be using em-dashes. But when you use a monospace font to look old-school cool using ASCII art, then maybe you could have removed that one LLMish artefact and use, I dunno, two minus signs like in the good old days?

They didn't even bother to replaced these em-dashes.

Here's what Gemini (on purpose) has to say about the text:

There is exactly 1 unique non-ASCII character in the provided text (see what I'm doing here? I'm using a LLM):

The Em Dash (—): Used throughout the text (e.g., "2025 — 40 years", "Dead—Long Live", "criminals." — The").

All other characters—including the quotes (", '), ellipsis (...), and formatting symbols (|, =, -)—are standard ASCII characters."

Why, just why? Why are ellipsis ASCII ... ? Did they replace the Unicode ellipsis codepoint with three ASCII dots? They forgot to replace the em-dash?

>Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

I can't think of any comment less interesting and more tangential these days than yet another screed about LLMs using em dashes or particular speech patterns. Seriously who fucking cares

I learned about em-dashes from one of clients who used them. She used Microsoft Word it took a chord key sequence but was in her skill set. I think it was shift-option hyphen.

I think using em-dashes to detect LLMs reveals the divide between computer science and liberal arts.