170: Phrack

Phrack is legendary. It is the oldest, and arguably the most prestigious, underground hacking magazine in the world. It started in 1985 and is still running today. In this episode we interview the Phrack staff to hear some stories about what it’s like running a hacker magazine for 40 years. phrack.org https://phrack.org/ SponsorsSupport for this show comes from ThreatLocker® https://www.threatlocker.com/. ThreatLocker® is a Zero Trust Endpoint Protection Platform that strengthens your infrastructure from the ground up. With ThreatLocker® Allowlisting and Ringfencing™, you gain a more secure approach to blocking exploits of known and unknown vulnerabilities. ThreatLocker® provides Zero Trust control at the kernel level that enables you to allow everything you need and block everything else, including ransomware! Learn more at www.threatlocker.com https://www.threatlocker.com/. Support for this show comes from Drata https://drata.com/darknetdiaries. Drata is the trust management platform that uses AI-driven automation to modernize governance, risk, and compliance, helping thousands of businesses stay audit-ready and scale securely. Learn more at drata.com/darknetdiaries https://drata.com/darknetdiaries. This episode is sponsored by Meter https://www.meter.com/, the company building networks from the ground up. Meter delivers a complete networking stack - wired, wireless, and cellular - in one solution that’s built for performance and scale. Alongside their partners, Meter designs the hardware, writes the firmware, builds the software, manages deployments, and runs support. Learn more at meter.com https://www.meter.com/.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jack Rhysider?

  Hey, it's Jack, host of the show. So the last two episodes talked about hacking in the 80s and 90s, which was primarily phone-freaking. In those episodes, I talked about a digital magazine called FRAC, which was incredibly influential to the hacking scene. It wasn't uncommon to be in a chatroom and someone come in and ask, "How do we get started as a hacker?" And then someone else simply say, "Go to FRAC's site, start reading it at issue one, and by the time you're all caught up, you'll be a great hacker." It's probably good to go and listen to the two episodes before this, before doing this one, just to have the context. But you don't have to if you'd rather not. But the thing is, is that in this episode, I interview two of the FRAC staff. The magazine just celebrated their 40th anniversary,

• 0:43Jack Rhysider?

  and I'm pretty sure if you run a hacker magazine for 40 years, there's gotta be some interesting stories in there somewhere.

• 0:54Jack Rhysider?

  These are true stories from the dark side of the internet.

• 1:01Jack Rhysider?

  I'm Jack Reisider. This is Darknet Diaries.

• 1:22Jack Rhysider?

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• 2:06Jack Rhysider?

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• 2:26Jack Rhysider?

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• 3:11Jack Rhysider?

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• 3:29Jack Rhysider?

  Okay, first, let's start out with some introductions.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  Hi, my name is Skypa. I used to be the editor of the FRAC magazine in the year 2000 to 2005. And I've joined the FRAC staff recently again as an advisor.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  Hey, I'm TMZ. I'm one of the current staff and editors of FRAC magazine.

• 3:50Jack Rhysider?

  In your words, can you tell us what is FRAC magazine?

• 3:56Speaker 01

  So FRAC stands for "freaking and hacking." 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.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  FRAC magazine, this is all sorts of things hacking-related, to be honest. I think there is the infamous article on how to make a bomb as well from the past.

• 4:20Jack Rhysider?

  Yeah, I mean, I think I saw that even in 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 when it hits the ground, the snap pops, the little popper snap, and then it creates a little explosion. I think that was issue one. And so it's interesting how anarchy kind of shows up in in frac. Like bombs, what is this doing in a hacker magazine?

• 4:53Speaker 01

  I think we have to put this into a different context of where we were 40 years ago. Terrorism didn't really happen, at least not in most countries. And so building bombs was not seen as necessarily something evil or criminal, but was just young kids exploring things. What can they do? They didn't mean to do any harm with them. They were just experimenting.

• 5:23Jack Rhysider?

  In my opinion, frac 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 freakers, 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. And I think it was this underground scene that frac was born out of and has its roots in.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  So the scene was made by largely people trying things out with their new hardware that they found, or like trying to make something, do something that was not supposed to be doing or that was not engineered to do. So that's what the original hacker was all about.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  I think if you summarize it, then frac contains condensed hardcore technical articles without any bullshit. The stuff works and is practical.

• 6:33Jack Rhysider?

  I'm fascinated by these two cultures, the cybersecurity professional and the scene hacker. One does it for money and it's their career. And one does it for fun. It's their hobby. But they are both passionate about it. One tries to do it in the light. One wants to do it in the shadows. But they both like sharing what they know. What's the difference, honestly? Attitude? Style?

• 6:58Jack Rhysider?

  But as computers grew more mainstream, becoming more common in every house, more interest grew in hacking. I mean, I'm sure you've gotten some kind of new electronic at some point in your life, and you sat down and you said to yourself, "What are all the cool things that this thing can do?" So imagine getting a computer and learning that it can print stuff, and play games, and make sounds, but then also hearing about some of the secret stuff it can do, like hack other people's computers. So more people got fascinated with hacking, and were contributing to things like FRAC, submitting articles on how to do cool, secret stuff on your computer. But also, along with the rise of computers, the cybersecurity profession became popular, which sort of brought in a whole new culture of hackers.

• 7:43Jack Rhysider?

  These weren't the roller-blading, cargo-pants-wearing Mohawk kids. The cybersecurity professional wears a collared shirt, and sometimes a tie. You can see the stark contrast of these two cultures when you go to conferences like Black Hat and DEF CON. At Black Hat, you see people wearing suits and ties. They say they're geeks and nerds, but they don't look it. At DEF CON, there's a lot of people wearing cargo shorts, black shirts, hoodies, having mohawks. At Black Hat, I feel like those people have to be there for work. But at DEF CON, I feel like those people want to be there for the fun. And because I grew up in the scene, my heart is still there.

• 8:27Jack Rhysider?

  We were the kids who tried stuff with no manual or tutorial. We built things that weren't possible. We did it without permission or rules. We pushed the boundaries and explored a new frontier.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  Which also, like a lot of those things, they actually paved the ground for like a lot of the security industry exists now. So a lot of people's job, they exist because of some of the articles that were written there, which is very interesting.

• 8:49Jack Rhysider?

  At this point, we're 40 years into FRAC, and some of the articles have historical significance.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  Historical significance has the article of the E911 documentation that was released in 1989, I believe. I think it was issue 24. And it was the documentation that detailed how the emergency nine one one system works in America. And it was the first time that FRAC got into some legal problems with the with the authorities. I think that has some significance because it happened right after Operation Sun Devil with the Secret Service hunting hackers. And it also sparked the creation of the Electronic Frontiers Foundation because the the the FRAC person who released that article was so unfairly treated by the government and by the corporates.

• 9:40Jack Rhysider?

  Yeah, I think that article solidified FRAC as the coolest hacker magazine ever because the the founder, Night Lightning, or one of the early founders, got arrested for publishing that article and then fought the law and won. And so it's like, well, I got arrested for hacking and I and I beat it and I got off, got free. And that that was just such a such a middle finger to the to the establishment of like, no, we're hackers and we can beat you and we did beat you in your court, in your arena, in your court of law, we still won. We didn't do anything wrong. Screw off and leave us alone.

• 10:21Jack Rhysider?

  And that that must have been just like the most amazing epic moment for for the for the time to to beat beat the law. And I know there were some other FRAC contributors who didn't weren't so successful with that E nine one one article. They pled guilty before they could fight it. But the fact that that happened and it was and one of the only times anyone ever has been arrested for a CFAA violation and got off, it's only like I can count on one hand, I think, how many times that's happened. And FRAC was was one of them. So, yeah, that was definitely quite an article.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, Night Lightning faces sixty years in prison and hundred twenty two thousand dollars in fine.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  That's a lot more money nowadays, I think.

• 11:05Jack Rhysider?

  Another article which made big waves was titled "Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit."

• 11:10Speaker 01

  So "Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit," issue 49, was the first article that told to the wider audience how buffer overflows work. So in the olden days, buffer overflows were used to trigger a computer target to execute a program that is not intended to execute, to break into computer systems, so to say. And this article detailed it, how to do it yourself, how you can do it. It was not the first time it was used on the internet. The first time was probably by Robert T. Morris, who wrote the very first internet worm. And there were other articles around how to manipulate the stack,

• 11:53Speaker 01

  but it was never that detailed in that clarity and reaching such a wide audience.

• 11:58Jack Rhysider?

  When this article came out, buffer overflows became the new favorite way hackers would break a system. And it was a favorite because of how successful it was to do. Programs just weren't designed to stop this from happening. And so many things were vulnerable.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  I think the race just started with source code reviews and finding vulnerabilities, disclosing them, irresponsibly disclosing them in the olden days, and then slowly getting an idea of what responsible disclosure is, that not every corporate is your enemy, and trying to work together with them, trying to find common ground, how we can make the internet a better place for everybody.

• 12:35Speaker 02

  This is one of those cases that this was like a very elite and underground technique, known probably just by governments or things like this, that when it hit, when the article was written, it just like clicked in so many people's minds. So there was like this myriad of software that's abundantly available and most likely vulnerable. They could just fool around with it, like everywhere. So, yeah.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  So just to put this into perspective, when I started out with computer security and hacking, when I wanted to learn how to break a computer system, I've been told what you have to do is you have to go to the library. You have to find the book about Robert T. Morris. You have to find and read the articles, the news articles to piece together information how he did it. And then when Frag came out with smashing Stack and fun and profit, it was all clear immediately.

• 13:31Jack Rhysider?

  Back then hackers weren't very respected. Companies would try to ignore the vulnerabilities that they were told about, almost with the audacity of being upset that somebody would buy their software and then try to break it? As if hackers were the problems, like they were just some punk kids trying to jab their fingers in somebody's eye.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  I think that has slipped and I always like to compare it against the early companies who did safety assessment for cars. The car industry tried to sue them and outlaw them and says, what are you doing? You can't show the people how dangerous it is to drive without a seatbelt. But they did and now everybody has learned that it is right to have a seatbelt, it's good to have a seatbelt. And the same thing happened with this article and then with the exploit development. In the beginning, they were hesitant, they were blaming the hackers for releasing such destructive technology. But if the hackers hadn't released it, then other governments surely would have exploited these holes anyway.

• 14:34Speaker 02

  True. Now they don't do this only for the fun, they do this mainly for the profit. And it 100% became a business and a career. People are hired now to hack companies to assess their security. Like you see this every day, there's a lot of episodes that you covered already about like this, like companies that they hired people to do penetration testing and their physical security and all those things. This was unthinkable back then, I think.

• 15:01Jack Rhysider?

  There are so many good articles on FRAC.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  I think the, you know, the Nmap one, the port scanning, the art of port scanning from issue 51 by Feodor, which followed the release of the Nmap 2.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  Nmap was the grandfather of all port scanners out there.

• 15:18Jack Rhysider?

  Oh, wow. Yeah, Nmap is the de facto tool, almost the standard for how we do port scanning today. It's a super simple command line tool, and the person who made Nmap published how to effectively port scan using the tool on FRAC. And that taught millions of people how to port scan. Even today, Nmap is still highly used by just about everyone in cybersecurity. And there's another article on FRAC which goes into detail of how to do GPS jamming.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  I like that this article is in there because it shows that GPS jamming is not really cybersecurity. But it is, GPS in itself is a technology that everybody uses and that nobody ever really thought about how vulnerable it is. And because it is already a weak, a very weak signal coming from the satellites, of course you can jam it. But it was not apparent to everybody until we released the article. And then you could buy jammers, you know, two years later you could jam us all over the place from China and whatnot for very low money. But it was, was FRAC first who released that article and got this idea out there that, hey, GPS is actually very easy to jam. No one ever thought about that.

• 16:28Jack Rhysider?

  Hmm, that's a good point. I don't always know where the line is on whether something is a cybersecurity problem or not. I published an episode recently about a credit card skimmer, and a lot of you complained and said, "That episode had nothing to do with cybersecurity." And it made me wonder, okay, well, if it's not a cybersecurity problem, whose problem is it? I mean, if you've got articles on FRAC, Hacker Magazine, that shows you how to exploit a technology and compromise the integrity of it, then maybe that is a cybersecurity problem.

• 16:57Speaker 02

  And of course, we had the hackers manifesto articles from 1986. That was like a...

• 17:03Speaker 01

  For me, this is the most significant article in all of FRAC. Just because it sets out the baseline and the conduct, how hackers should behave and what hackers...

• 17:16Speaker 01

  Should do and should not do and how we think.

• 17:19Jack Rhysider?

  Oh yeah, I told you about the Hacker Manifesto in one of the previous episodes. One of the Legion of Doom members wrote it and published it first on Frac. And I'll give you a short excerpt from it. I'm reading from Frac here. "This is our world now. The world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the bod. 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, you 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.

• 18:04Jack Rhysider?

  I am a hacker and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you cannot stop us all. After all, we're all alike."

• 18:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, these things are still valid today. Maybe perhaps even more valid today than they were back then. That we are all equal, that we don't care about skin color, religion, our nationality. And you know, a lot of criminals forget this. And that's why they are criminals, they are not hackers. If you hack for a nation, you're not a hacker. You're actually more concerned about your nationality than about the Hacker Manifesto. We don't care about that. We only care about skills.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  Correct. Yeah, I wrote a little bit about it in the last Frac, Frac 72.

• 18:47Jack Rhysider?

  We're gonna take a quick ad break here, but stay with us because when we get back, we're gonna get into my favorite Frac stories.

• 18:55Jack Rhysider?

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• 19:36Jack Rhysider?

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• 20:04Jack Rhysider?

  The first issue of FRAC was published in 1985, before websites were popular. So it was just hosted on a BBS and you had to use your home phone and dial into it and read it that way. And they wanted the articles to spread, so they encouraged people to mirror it on other people's BBSs in other towns. But eventually, when websites became popular, FRAC moved to frac.com. And that became its new home. But it didn't stay that way.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  I think frac.com got hacked at least once. The web server was often down, not reachable.

• 20:38Jack Rhysider?

  Somewhere around 1998, frac.com went offline. It stopped publishing articles for two years and was down most of the time. I should also mention that FRAC changed owners quite a bit. The original founders went off and did something else. New people came in and they were doing stuff, but it's a free magazine and they never tried to make money. So it relied on volunteers to keep it going. And they could only spend so many years of their life before going off and doing something else. By 2000, the site looked dead. The website had been mostly offline for the past few years and no new articles for two years. And at that point, it was ran by Mike Schiffman, aka Rout. Skiper wasn't involved at all. And Mike didn't even know who Skiper was,

• 21:22Jack Rhysider?

  but Skiper had a plan. He wanted to revive FRAC and needed to do something epic to prove his worthiness.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  And so I decided to steal a domain, which was frac.org, which back then was not owned by the FRAC staff. It was owned by somebody who probably didn't even know about FRAC.

• 21:43Jack Rhysider?

  How did you steal a domain?

• 21:47Speaker 01

  Luckily, in the olden days, these things were rather easy. You would go to the domain registrar, and this example was a French one, gandhi.net, and you would initiate a domain transfer. And it would ask you that you need the authorization code to transfer it. And you would right-click on the webpage and say "View source code of the webpage", and the authorization code would be written there in a hidden HTML tag, in a form tag. And that was all you needed back then to do hacking.

• 22:18Jack Rhysider?

  Wow, so just by looking at the view source of a website, it would show you the authorization code that it was expecting in order to prove that you're the owner of the site. I mean, it has to compare the authorization code you type in with something, right? So there's some logic on the backend somewhere. It just happened to be right there in the source code of the site. It was as simple as just doing "view source", and then you could take over anyone's domain.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  But you also have to put this into perspective. Back then, not many browsers had a feature to actually view the source code.

• 22:46Jack Rhysider?

  So Skyperr had frac.org and wanted to use it to revive frac.com. But he wasn't doing this alone. He actually was involved with a few hacking groups, specifically Hurt and TESSO.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  So Hurt stands for the Hackers Emergency Response Team. And Hurt was founded around the same time when the CERTS were founded, the Computer Emergency Response Team. And it was meant to be a counterweight to the CERT, because the community felt that often the CERT, the Computer Emergency Response Team, didn't really know what they were doing, and the publications were often not technically correct. And so the community created the Hackers Emergency Response Team, where the hackers published their version of the vulnerability and their exploits and their assessment of the risk. And yeah, that was what Hurt was.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  And TESSO was a German/Austrian hacker group, who later became more internationally, and went by the name of Team TESSO.

• 23:51Jack Rhysider?

  So with frac.org in hand and with TESSO and Hurt behind them, Skyperr got busy recreating the site to show he can manage a website like that.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  And then I spent many days and many nights to recreate all the articles. I put them in an SQL database that was searchable and copied all the data. I created the webpage and then put it online. And then... Called Mike Schiffman, who was the editor in chief back then. I called him during breakfast. He was literally saying, I'm just having breakfast, but what you're saying sounds great. So let's do it. There was no hesitation. And it was a combination of people from TESSO and HURT, who took over the FRAC magazine in 2000, or revived the FRAC magazine in the year 2000.

• 24:40Jack Rhysider?

  So Skypr was now in control of FRAC and it officially moved from frac.com to frac.org, which is where it remains today. And it was a whole new, fresh team. Nobody from the old FRAC staff was around to write any articles or to help. So this new team got busy with a fresh, new issue, issue 57.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, first one already was the first hardcover release ever. So we decided we want to land with a big bang and decided for our very first release, not just are we going to write all the articles ourselves? We also created the first hardcover release, which we released at a hack conference, a physical copy.

• 25:14Jack Rhysider?

  So in 2001 was the first time FRAC had a hard copy created, elevating it to the next level.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  It was fantastic. It was a fantastic success. I think we printed 800 hard copies or so. We all picked them up with a car, with a rented car. And these hard copies are heavy to pick them up in the printer in Netherlands. And the car almost crashed with all the load in the trunk on the backseats. And we drove to the conference and went to the main tent and announced that we are, I'm going to distribute FRAC in half an hour. And we had a great party and handed out the magazines and lots of alcohol and celebrating and talking about it. It was a fantastic time.

• 26:00Jack Rhysider?

  So hackers trying to hack a hacker website is always going to be a thing. And frac.org had its fair share of attacks. And there was a group that particularly was trying to take down FRAC. And they called themselves the FRAC High Council, or PHC.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, around that time, there was a movement called the anti-security movement. And it was around the time when hacking really got commercialized. And many, many, many companies entered the community and started to sell cybersecurity technology. And hackers would start working for these companies and they would, they would sell the secrets that they did not research and did not discover, but that were given to them by the community. And they were making lots of money from it. And the community was not very happy about that because effectively these people stole from the community.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  And so a movement emerged called the anti-security movement. And which basically said, well, that's, that's not okay. We can't do that. And out of that, the PHC materialized and they were probably, let's call them the radical form of anti-security movement. They would do witch hunt and they would try to hunt down every hacker who would work for corporate. I call it hacker cannibalism, where hackers ate other hackers and destroyed other hackers, often unfairly and unjustified. It was really a witch hunt. And that went on for some time and PHC then tried to take over FRAC because they were

• 27:40Speaker 01

  not happy with the editorial staff who was running FRAC. Of course, they tried to hack into the servers and things that you would do, but they also tried to steal articles or sent out call for papers and pretending that they were FRAC, but they never owned the domain.

• 27:57Jack Rhysider?

  Oh, how interesting. They tried to pretend to be FRAC by publishing look-alike articles that pretended to expose secrets, but they weren't actually secrets. A little war was breaking out between the corporate cybersecurity culture and the underground hacker culture. The FRAC High Council thought, if FRAC publishes articles on how to hack, that it'll be used by corporations to make money, so therefore don't publish any articles at all or publish articles that would be detrimental to the cybersecurity professionals out there who are trying to profit from it.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, they wanted to keep all the secrets among themselves and so that only they can use them. It's very selfish and it's also counterproductive. In a, in an intellectual society, you need to share your ideas to inspire other people and for other people also to verify your ideas and. To take your ideas further to the next step. Otherwise, it's stagnation and you won't go anywhere.

• 28:55Jack Rhysider?

  Okay, so they they tried to publish an article as FRAC, just posing as them. What else?

• 28:59Speaker 01

  They actually stole some of the pre-release of FRAC. And so what happened is that and the FRAC staff always releases the upcoming FRAC release to the community, to some trusted friends. And then after it's released to trusted friends, then it's released to some lesser trusted friends and so on and so on. And after a few days, it ended up before the official webpage release in the hands of a PhD guy. So this PhD guy knows that we haven't released it publicly yet, that it's still a community release only. And he modifies the FRAC articles, puts some backdoors in there and then publishes on his webpage, a PhD webpage, as a new FRAC release.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  And these backdoors, they were not even clever backdoors. They were just very destructive backdoors. They would delete your entire computer.

• 29:50Jack Rhysider?

  Wow. So have you ever looked up a tutorial online and it had some some script or code or something and that's what you needed to do? That's the command you were looking for? And so you just copy and paste it into your computer, but you don't actually know what it does? Yeah, well, if you would have tried to copy and paste this script, it had the command rm-rf, which would delete your whole hard drive. How funny is that? Obviously, FRAC staff didn't put that destructive command in their magazine, but that version of the article still existed out there somewhere. Skyperr and his team had brought FRAC back. They were publishing yearly issues of FRAC. But then Skyperr moved on to do other things. But there was enough momentum and there was enough people involved with FRAC at that point for it to keep going on its own.

• 30:35Jack Rhysider?

  But it was slow going. Yearly issues turned into every other year issues. And then sometimes there'd be four years between issues. And in 2016, it seemed like that was the last issue of FRAC. FRAC staff just wasn't there anymore and there were no issues coming out. But five years after that, in 2021, to all our surprise, a new issue of FRAC was released. We thought it was dead, but we were super happy to see a new issue. And I remember hearing people at DEFCON tell me that year that they used an exploit that they saw in that new issue of FRAC to make a bunch of money on bug bounties that year. So it still had teeth and grit and was hard hitting, or at least until things got patched. But that seemed to be the last hurrah for FRAC.

• 31:20Jack Rhysider?

  The internal FRAC staff just sort of fizzled out. There wasn't support much for it. The people were just very loosely involved at that point. And they decided to get together in 2023 to discuss the future of FRAC.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  And we actually met in Spain to discuss a bit the future about FRAC. And we decided that's not just for two or three people to decide that we should really ask Mike Schiffman again and some of the old staffers and previous staffers, what their opinion is. And then eventually we had a big phone call with maybe six or eight people of the old staff and new staff on there. And we discussed what we should do. And there were various options. Some people said, hey, let's do one more FRAC and let us call it. That's it, you know, the last FRAC. And then other people said, no, we can't even do that. The community is dead. And most importantly, there were the very few of us who said,

• 32:18Speaker 01

  no, no, the community is always there. There is still a community that deserves the magazine like this. There's always curiosity out there and always the need for people to publish articles. And we have to provide a platform for them so they can do it. And FRAC is the perfect platform for these articles. So we were brainstorming about who we could contact out there, who has experience with running a magazine, who would enjoy running a magazine and who is also technically skilled. Because, you know, FRAC in the end is a very technical magazine. So the groups that came to our minds were the people who are running already Temp Out magazine.

• 32:59Jack Rhysider?

  Temp Out is very similar to FRAC. It's an e-zine which posts articles on hacking. It has its own edginess to it. Like, there's a bunch of ASCII art and hard-hitting articles. And it was TMZ here who co-founded Temp Out.

• 33:13Speaker 02

  So Temp Out is a group that uh is a research group that we formed maybe five years ago now. Uh we started in R S T as three people. We just wanted to like uh research uh E L F infection techniques. So Linux viruses and things like this. We thought it was like a very niche uh area that we had like a people in common that wanted to do that. And so we kind of, you know, brainstormed a little bit. And then more people were joining and then eventually we had like a Discord channel. There's like a thousand five hundred people there now. And uh suddenly we, you know, the community was like, okay, what if we make like a zine, you know, like in the old days? Uh people like, oh yeah, I wanted to write this script or whatever.

• 33:55Speaker 02

  So we just gave it a go like uh and we made four uh volumes already of it uh so far. And it's been like a really, really nice.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  And we contacted them and um we went, had a phone call together and the rest is history.

• 34:13Speaker 02

  I was honestly like speechless when that happened. Like I was very, very anxious. I remember that I was uh on vacation. And I just ran to the uh, I was actually to about to catch a flight. So I just like found like a the quietest corner of the airport lounge that I could find and had the call with them. And took notes of everything. Uh essentially like I did, the idea was like, okay, uh if you wanted to to give it a go, you know, trust you with that. The former staff also was saying like, okay, we we maybe should, you know, do something different this time, like uh make Frack like well-known again.

• 34:51Jack Rhysider?

  The Temp Out team had already established themselves as a group who was technical, smart and could ship articles. And immediately got busy reviving Frack. Once again, I had no idea that the teams behind Frack have shifted so much throughout the forty years. But when it's volunteer-driven, I suppose that's what happens. So the Temp Out team was excited to be taking over Frack and wanted to make their first issue a big one. It was twenty twenty-three and in the seven years before that, there had only been one Frack issue released. So a lot of people just thought it was dead, but to show them that it wasn't dead, they wanted to make a physical copy and release it at DEF CON.

• 35:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, uh we just thought actually about doing only an online release. Uh we we didn't really thought about actually doing a physical release last year. Uh until kind of late uh in the process. And then we were just like, okay, what if we do it, you know? Can we do it? Do we have like some budgets? Can we like talk to some people? So we're able to raise some funds uh and we're able to get like five hundred copies down to uh to Vegas. Yeah, it was the first, a very interesting first experience on logistics. Because you know, releasing a physical copy of things, it's it's not as easy as it sounds like. Not not only like you have to actually make the material, uh but you know, the distribution, especially at FCon.

• 36:10Jack Rhysider?

  Wow. Okay, so last year you actually reached out to me to uh you were looking for a place to to spread them or give them out.

• 36:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we had a few of them uh downstairs, right? And then we're just like, yeah, sure. But we kind of wanted like a place more centralized for that. And that uh was very nice to to get some of the copies there at the party, at the Dark Nadares party. People really liked it. And I remember like a lot of people were so happy. And I think that's what made uh me feel like very realized. So I was like, a lot of people, they looked at it and they looked at it as the most precious thing that I ever touched. Like, you know, they they say, yeah, I I'm here and I like what I do now because of Frack like twenty five years ago, thirty years ago. So, you know, that that's that's really like a very, very nice to hear.

• 36:59Jack Rhysider?

  It was a special moment for me. I mean, the fact that the Frack staff came in and started handing out Frack magazines at my party. Was I felt like, man, I I this is this is special. This is cool. I didn't, I I I'm I feel honored to have been one of the places to uh to spread it. Because I think you only you can pick like three or four places to spread out the magazines there.

• 37:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, correct.

• 37:21Jack Rhysider?

  And uh.

• 37:21Speaker 02

  Thank you for having us. It was really.

• 37:23Jack Rhysider?

  I I cherish my copy that I got from you. I wish I got it signed as soon as I left that night. I was like, oh, no. How did I not get it signed by you? But um yeah, that's that feels like a very special um book to to own. It's it's more of a book. It's in my hand here and my gosh, this this thing is heavy. So Frack seventy one, um I'm just looking through it. It's very text. There's hardly any pictures at all. And I guess that's because you were saying, you you know, we weren't even thinking about printing it. And then when you finally got around to printing it, it's like, okay, well, we'll just print the articles.

• 37:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, so editing this is already hard, you know, for somebody that doesn't have like, you know, that doesn't work with it, I guess. But we also like, okay, we keep the style, right? Like, that's what the first thought like also. So it's easier because it's less editing, but also like, which is already pretty hard, but, you know, we keep the text, plain text style, which a lot of people relates to and really like.

• 38:21Jack Rhysider?

  So Tempo proved themselves to be able to ship and issue a Frack. Great. But Frack started in 1985. So with 2025 coming, it would mark the 40th anniversary of Frack, which got a lot of people excited to pitch in and help make a great new issue.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Frack 72, because it's marked our 40th anniversary. We all wanted to make something very special. So we, the initial idea was to go back to the Netherlands to release a magazine there again as a hard copy, where we released the first hard copy 24 years before. But we got enough funding and we got enough community support to then be able to coordinate a release at three different conferences at the same time, which was in Netherlands and at DEFCON in Las Vegas and at Hope in New York City. And then very smaller conferences all around the world.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  So that was, that was beautiful how the community came together and everybody chipped in some dollars and helped us.

• 39:25Jack Rhysider?

  The one that I have actually has a DEFCON special edition written on the cover. So were there multiple covers?

• 39:32Speaker 02

  Yes, we have three different covers, actually four. One of them is going to be released later this year.

• 39:39Speaker 01

  I'd like to add something there. When TMZ says there are four covers, three that are already released and one of them that will be released at the end of the year, it's because we're going to release the PDF online for everybody to print it at home or print it on a professional print shop and get it shipped to their home address.

• 39:59Jack Rhysider?

  So FRAC issue 72 was released at DEF CON in 2025, and I was there to get a copy of it.

• 40:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, this year we turned it up a notch. This year, we didn't show up with 500 copies. We turned up with close to 8,000 copies at DEF CON.

• 40:14Jack Rhysider?

  Most, if not all, articles of FRAC are simply text files. There are no visuals or graphics at all. Well, I should say you can see some ASCII art there, but that's just still text in the shape of a picture. But this 40th anniversary edition, man, is it pop. Every page has a graphic on it, and it's really cool. It feels like a high-quality magazine at this point, and it's bulky and has a ton of articles in it.

• 40:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we got the opportunity to have the wonderful people from PageDoubt, which is another magazine as well, to do the graphics for us. I mean, as you can, as you know, because you saw it already, it's just, it's mind-blowing, and the quality is so, so good. And I remember when I got the confirmation that they would do it, I was so relieved that I didn't have to do it myself, because the one, I mean, I know that it's hard for me because I'm not an expert on this. And second, like, I would never be able to match this quality, or nobody, at least that it's in the current staff. And they just like, it's just incredible. And I think like FRAC would never look that good.

• 41:21Jack Rhysider?

  Yeah. It looks great, yeah. You've, it feels like you're coming of age, but even 40 years later, and it's like, looking great. I like that. That makes me excited about the future. Getting it, getting, you said 8,000 copies to DEF CON?

• 41:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, we had, I think, around 15,000 copies spread amongst those three conferences.

• 41:44Jack Rhysider?

  Yeah, I mean, gosh, how much does that even weigh? How do you even get that to DEF CON?

• 41:52Speaker 02

  It's part of the problem as well. Um, first, uh, to solve these issues, we tried to find like local printers, right? And it is, it is very, very challenging, uh, because the transportation is very costly. So we, we found a Vegas printer and I think the, for DEFCON, that was ten tons or something.

• 42:12Jack Rhysider?

  Ten tons.

• 42:13Speaker 02

  Of paper.

• 42:13Jack Rhysider?

  Wow.

• 42:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the logistical issue is, is that you don't only have to deliver it by truck to DEFCON. You also need manpower on the ground to

• 42:26Jack Rhysider?

  Yeah.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  hand carry ten tons from the loading bay to the registration desk. So all these little details, we had to learn and figure out.

• 42:36Jack Rhysider?

  It was great to see FRAC all over the place at DEFCON this year. People were showing me how excited they were when they got their copy. Some got it signed by the FRAC staff, some had me sign it for some reason. It was a wonderful time. But what surprised me is that this is such a high quality magazine, but then thousands of them were given out to everyone just for free?

• 42:58Speaker 02

  FRAC is for the community always, uh, it's always free. So, uh, somebody tries to sell you a FRAC, you know that it's not from us.

• 43:05Jack Rhysider?

  You, you say you're never gonna charge for these things?

• 43:09Speaker 01

  We're never gonna charge.

• 43:09Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 43:11Jack Rhysider?

  It's so cool having.

• 43:12Speaker 02

  You're more welcome to help us in any way, right? The community is there for this. People can help us with like article reviews with, uh, uh, art as well, uh, and the people did, which is very, very nice to see. Like this years, uh, there's a lot of people involved, uh, you know, the artists that draw, the time to cover us, for example, as well. So there's several ways that people can help us make this happen and, and we do it for them and they do it for, for the community as well.

• 43:40Jack Rhysider?

  Uh, it's, uh, impressive that you're able to make it happen and, and have such a high quality print, uh, print magazine here. I mean, this, uh, this thing is like a hundred pages long.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  It needs to be said that, of course, these things cost money to print. The printer still wants to be paid. He doesn't do a favor for FRAC. And so the, the DEFCON print in its own was about, um, fifty five thousand US dollars. So this is still money that we had to raise from the community. But good thing is that many of our friends who who were doing FRAG with us in the year two thousand and two thousand one and who are reading FRAG with us and who have writing articles for us, now twenty four years later, they have all made their fortunes, they're running big companies, some of them are traded on the stock exchange.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  But these people came back to us and they were happy to support us financially and and help us with this immense cost.

• 44:39Jack Rhysider?

  The magazine that launched ten thousand cybersecurity careers, huh?

• 44:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 44:46Jack Rhysider?

  Well, so that's where we're at today, fortieth anniversary. Well, congrats on the on a forty years of running a running a thing or keeping it going. And it's so fascinating that it's community driven, almost like Dread Pirate Roberts, right? He's his name lives on, but it's not always the same person that lives on, right? And so FRAG continues to live on because the community keeps it going.

• 45:07Speaker 02

  And the community is as strong as ever now, and I think it's gonna grow even further.

• 45:12Jack Rhysider?

  Yeah, tell us about the future.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think we really want to keep the community growing. We want to get a little bit better, so every time we do a release, we learn a lot about everything, right? Logistics and article reviewing and, you know, project management and all those things. So we're not experts on that on this. We also like have, you know, our day jobs and all those things. So we're learning as we go as well, and the community, I think, we want to grow and have like more people involved to help us. We have a lot of people that sometimes they say, yeah, I don't have time to to write an article this year or something like this. But, you know, they do have spare time to like help with article reviews. So for this is already like a very big help.

• 46:00Speaker 02

  I think in the future, we want to get more people involved, like if you want to to say like in a very brief way, we want like to be accessible.

• 46:09Jack Rhysider?

  Okay, so I got a physical copy, but that's just because I happened to be at the right time and right place. Is there a way to get a physical copy by ordering it?

• 46:15Speaker 02

  Yes, like last year, we made it available for self-print at cost, obviously, so we don't profit. And of course, you can print anywhere you want. We have just a recommended printer, whatever, it doesn't really matter, because we released the full, high-quality PDF as well. So you can print and edit if you want at your own local print shop. And this year is gonna be the same.

• 46:37Jack Rhysider?

  FRAC is currently looking for new articles for their upcoming issue. If you've got a new hacking technique or are thinking of researching a specific technology or protocol, reach out to the FRAC staff with your draft or even just an idea. They are very helpful at giving you feedback to help you draft a great article. Even if your English is not very good, they can help co-author the article with you. And of course, you can still read every issue of FRAC free of charge at frac.org. Here's to another 40 years of an awesome hacker magazine.

• 47:18Jack Rhysider?

  A big thank you to Skypr and TMZ for coming on the show and sharing the history and stories of FRAC. It really is looking better than ever, and I can't wait to see what they make next. In the show notes, you'll find links to where you can order a physical copy of issue 72 or just download the PDF and print it at home. This show is made by me, the pack of tickler, Jack Recider, editing by the Ctrl-Alt-Delight Tristan Ledger, mixing by Proximity Sound, and our theme music is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. I named my dog Red Jacks because nobody understands him, not even me. This is Darknet Diaries.