170: Phrack

Introduction

0:00Hey, 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 Frack, which was incredibly influential to the hacking scene. It wasn't uncommon to be in a chat room and someone come in and ask, "How do I get started as a hacker?" And then someone else simply say, "Go to Frack'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

0:31doing 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 Frack staff. The magazine just celebrated their 40th anniversary. And I'm pretty sure if you run a hacker magazine for 40 years, there's got to be some interesting stories in there somewhere. These are true stories from the dark side of the internet.

1:01I'm Jack Reider. This is Darknet Diaries.

Guest Introductions

1:20Okay. First, let's start out with some introductions. >> Hi, my name is Skyper. I used to be the editor um of the Frack magazine in the year 2000 to 2005 and um I've joined the Frack staff recently again as an adviser. >> Hey, I'm TMZ. I'm one of the current staff and editors of Frack magazine. >> In your words, can you tell us what is Frack Magazine? So frack stands for freaking and hacking and it's a

1:51combination 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. >> Frack magazine. This is all sorts of things hacking related to be honest. Uh I think there is the famous article on how to make a bomb as well from the past. Yeah, I mean that was I think I I I saw that even in uh issue one. There was a balloon that had acetylene in it that you put like snap caps or pop caps

2:21on 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 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 kind of shows up in in frack like like bombs. What is this doing in a in a hacker magazine? >> I think we have to put this into um a different context of of where we were um 40 years ago. Terrorism didn't really

2:53happen, at least not 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.

Counterculture and History

3:14In my opinion, frack seems to capture some kind of counterculture. It's notes from the underground type stuff because back in the '90s, cyber security 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 cyber security. 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, cedars,

3:45which 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 Frack was born out of and has its roots in. >> So the scene was made by like largely people trying things out with their new hardware that they found or like trying to like make something do something that was not supposed to be uh doing or that was not engineered to do. So that's what the original hacker was all about. >> I think if you summarize it then frack

4:17contains condensed hardcore technical articles without any bullshit. the stuff works and it's practical. >> I'm fascinated by these two cultures, the cyber security 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,

4:48style.

Evolution of Hacking

4:50But 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

5:20contributing to things like frack submitting articles on how to do cool secret stuff on your computer. But also along with the rise of computers, the cyber security profession became popular which sort of brought in a whole new culture of hackers. These weren't the rollerblading cargo pantswearing mohawk kids. The cyber security 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 Defcon.

5:52At Black Hat, you see people wearing suits and ties. They say they're geeks and nerds, but they don't look it. At Defcon, 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 Defcon, 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. We were the kids who tried stuff with no manual or tutorial. We built things that weren't

6:23possible. We did it without permission or rules. We pushed the boundaries and explored a new frontier, >> which also like a lot of those things, they actually pave the ground for like a lot of the 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. At this point, we're 40 years into Frack. And some of the articles have historical significance. >> Historical significance has the article of the E911 documentation that was released um in 1989, I believe. I think

6:55it was issue 24. And um it was a documentation that detailed how the emergency um 911 system works in America. And it was the first time that um FRA gone into some some legal problems with the with the authorities. Uh I think that has some significance um because it it happened right after operation sundevil uh with the secret service hunting hackers and it also sparked the creation of the electronic front because the the the frack person

7:26who released that article was so unfairly treated by the government and by the corporates.

Notable Articles and Impact

7:32Yeah, I think that article solidified Frack as the coolest hacker magazine ever because the the the founder Night Lightning or one of the early early founders um got arrested for publishing that article and then fought the law and won. And so it's like I got arrested for hacking and I and I beat it and I got off scot-free. And that that was just such a such a middle finger to the to the establishment of like no we're we're

8:03hackers and we can beat you and and we did beat you in your core in your arena in your court of law. We still won and we didn't do anything wrong. Screw off and leave us alone. And that that must have been just like the most amazing epic moment for for for the time to to beat beat the law. and and I know there was some other Frack contributors who didn't weren't so successful um with that E911 article. They plead guilty before they could fight it. But the fact that that happened and it and one of the

8:33only times anyone ever has been arrested for a CFAA violation and got off uh it's only like I can count on my one hand I think how many times that's happened and frack was was one of them. So yeah, that was definitely quite an article. Yeah, Night Lightning um faces 60 years in prison and $122,000 in fine. >> That's a lot more money nowadays. I think >> another article which made big waves was titled Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit. >> So, Smash the Stack Fun and Profit issue

9:0349 um 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 computer a target to execute a program that is not intended to execute to break into computer systems so to say. And this article detailed it um 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

9:34Robert T. Morris um who wrote the the very first internet worm. And there were other articles around how to manipulate the the stack, but it was never that detailed in that clarity and reaching such a wide audience. 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. I think the race just

10:05started with source code reviews and finding vulnerabilities, disclosing them, um, 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. Yeah, 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 uh that when it hit the the when the

10:38article was written it just like it clicked in so many people's minds. So there was like this myriad of software that's like abundantly available and like most likely vulnerable. They can just fool around with it like everywhere. So yeah. So just to put this into perspective, when I started out with computer security and hacking, uh 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

11:09Robert T. Morris. You have to find and read the articles, the news articles to piece together information how he did it. And then when Frack came out with Smashing Stack and Fun and Profit, it was all clear immediately. 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

11:40their fingers in somebody's eye. I think that has flipped and I always like to compare it against the the early companies who who did safety assessment for for cars. Um the the car industry tried to tried to sue them and outlaw them and says what are you doing? You can't show the people how how dangerous is to drive without seat belt. Um but they did and now everybody has learned that it is right to have a seat belt. It's good to have a seat belt and the same thing happened with their with with

12:10this 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 them other governments surely would have exploited these holes anyway. >> True. Now they don't they don't do this only for the fun. They do this mainly for the profit. And it 100% became a business uh and a career. People are hired now to hack companies to you know assess their security. Like uh you see this every day. There's a lot of

12:41episodes that you covered already that about like this like you know companies that they hire people to do like penetration testing and their physical security and all those things. This was unthinkable back then. I think >> there are so many good articles on frack. >> I think the um you know the end map one the port scanning the art of port scanning from issue 51 by fodor uh which followed the release of the uh end map tool. >> N MAPAP was the the grandfather of all port scanners out there. >> Oh wow. Yeah. N MAPAP is the de facto

13:11tool almost the standard for how we do port scanning today. It's a super simple command line tool and the person who made end mapap published how to effectively port scan using the tool on frack and that taught millions of people how to port scan even today end mapap is still highly used by just about everyone in cyber security and there's another article in frack which goes into detail of how to do GPS jamming >> I like that this article is in there because it shows that GPS jamming is not

13:42really cyber security 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 jammers all over the place from China and whatnot for very low money. But it was was Frank first who released

14:14that article and got this idea out there that hey GPS is actually very easy to jam. No one ever thought about that. >> H that's a good point. I don't always know where the line is on whether something is a cyber security 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 cyber security and it made me wonder okay well if it's not a cyber security problem whose problem is it? I mean, if you've got articles on Frack Hacker magazine that shows you how to exploit a technology and compromise

14:44the integrity of it, then maybe that is a cyber security problem. And of course we had the hackers manifesto article as far from from 1986 that was like a >> for me this is the most significant article in in all of just because it it sets out the the baseline and the conduct how hackers should behave and what hackers >> should do and should not do and how we think. >> Oh yeah, I told you about the hacker manifesto in one of the previous episodes. One of the Legion of Doom

15:15members wrote it and published it first on Frack. And I'll give you a short excerpt from it. I'm reading from Frack here. This is our world now. The world of the Electron and the Switch, the beauty of the Baud. 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

15:45the criminals. Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is out of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. 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. >> Yeah, these things are are still valid today. Maybe perhaps even more valid today than they were back then. that we all equal, that we don't care about skin color, religion, our nationality.

16:16And you know, a lot of 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 where we don't care about that. We only care about skills. >> Correct. >> Yeah. I wrote a little bit about it um in the last Frack, Frack 72. We're going to take a quick ad break here, but stay with us because when we get back, we're going to get into my favorite frack stories.

Frack's Revival and Challenges

16:46The first issue of Frack was published in 1985 before websites were popular. So, it was just hosted on a BBS and you had to like 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 BBS's and other towns. But eventually, when websites became popular, frack moved tofrack.com. and that became its new home. But it didn't stay that way. >> I think frack.com got hacked at least once. Uh the web server was often down,

17:18not reachable. >> Somewhere around 1998, frack.com went offline. It stopped publishing articles for 2 years and was down most of the time. I should also mention that Frack 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

17:49dead. The website had been mostly offline for the past few years and no new articles for 2 years. And at that point, it was ran by Mike Schiffman, aka Route. Skyper wasn't involved at all. And Mike didn't even know who Skyper was. But Skyper had a plan. He wanted to revive Frack and needed to do something epic to prove his worthiness. And so I decided to to steal a domain which was frack.org, which back then was not owned

18:20by the Frack staff. It was owned by somebody who probably didn't even know about Frack. >> What how did you steal a domain? Well, luckily in in the olden days, these things were rather easy. Uh, you would go to the domain register, in this example was a French one, gandi.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 web page and say few source code of the web page and the authorization code would be

18:51written there in a hidden HTML tag, in a form tag. And that was all you needed back then to to do hacking. >> 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 back end 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. But you also have to put this

19:23into perspective. Back then, not many browsers had a feature to actually view the source code. >> So, Skyper had frack.org and wanted to use it to revive frack.com. But he wasn't doing this alone. He actually was involved with a few hacking groups, specifically hurt and tesso. >> So, Hurt is stands for the hackers emergency response team. And Hurt was founded around the same time when the searchs were founded, the computer emergency response team. And it was meant to be a counterweight to the um C

19:56um because the community felt that often their the S 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 um yeah that was was how it was and Tessle was um a German/Austrian

20:27um hacker group who later became more internationally um and went by the name of team Tesso. >> So with frack.org Oregon hand and with Tesso and Hurt behind him, Skyper got busy recreating the site to show he can manage a website like that. >> And then I I spent many days and many nights to recreate all the articles. I put them in an SQL database so it was searchable and copied all the data and created the web page and um then put it online and then called Mike Schiffman

20:58who was the editor-in chief back then. I caught him during breakfast. He's he was literally saying, "I'm just having breakfast, but what you're saying sounds great, so let's do it." Uh there was no hesitation. And it was a combination of people from Tesso and Herd um who took over the Frack magazine in 2000 or revived the Frack magazine in the year 2000. So Skyper was now in control of Frack and it officially moved from frack.com to frack.org, which is where

21:28it remains today. And it was a whole new fresh team. Nobody from the old frack staff was around to write any articles or to help. So this new team got busy with a fresh new issue, issue 57. >> 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 artics ourselves, we also create the first hard coverver release which we release at a at a hack conference, a physical copy. So in 2001 was the first time Frack had a hard copy created,

22:00elevating it to the next level. >> It was fantastic. It was a fantastic success. We I think we printed 800 hard copies or so. Uh we all picked them up with with a car with a rented car and these hard copies were heavy. We to picked them up in a printer in Netherland and the car almost crashed with all the with all the load in in the trunk on the back seats. Uh we drove to the conference and uh went to the main tent and announced that we are I'm going to distribute frack in half an hour and

22:32we had a great party and handed out the magazines and lots of alcohol and celebrating and talking about it. It was a fantastic time. >> So hackers trying to hack a hacker website is always going to be a thing and frack.org Borg had its fair share of attacks and uh there was a group that particularly was trying to take down frack and they called themselves the frack high council or PHC. >> Yeah. Around that time there was a movement called the anti-security

23:02movement and it was around the time when um hacking really got commercialized and many many many companies entered the community and started to sell cyber security technology and um 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

23:34not very happy about that because effectively these people stole from the community and so a movement emerged called the anti-security movement and uh 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 their 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

24:07hacker cannibalism where hackers ate other hackers and destroyed other hackers often unfairly and unjustified. It was really a witch hunt. Um and that went on for some time and PhD then tried to take over frack because they're not happy with the editorial staff that who was running frack. Of course, they tried to hack into the servers and things that you would do, but they also tried to to to steal articles or send out cold for papers and pretending that they were

24:37frack, but they never never owned the domain. Oh, how interesting. They tried to pretend to be frack by publishing lookalike articles that pretended to expose secrets, but they weren't actually secrets. A little war was breaking out between the corporate cyber security culture and the underground hacker culture. The Frack High Council thought if Frack 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 cyber security professionals out there who are trying

25:07to profit from it. >> Yeah, they wanted to keep all the secrets among themselves and so that only um they can use them. Um it's very selfish. Um and it's also counterproductive in a in a in an intellectual society. You need to share your ideas um 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 a stagnation and you won't go anywhere. >> Okay, so they they tried to publish an

25:39article as frack just posing as them. What else? they actually stole some of the pre-release of frack and um so what happened is that and uh the frack staff always releases the upcoming frack release to the community to some trusted friends and um 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 web page release in the hands of a PHC guy so this PHC

26:10guy knows that we haven't released it publicly yet, that it's still a community release only. And he modifies the Frack articles, put some back doors in there, and then publish on his web page, the PHC web page, as a new frack release. And these back doors, they were not even clever back doors. They were just very destructive back doors. It would delete your entire computer. >> 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

26:41just 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, Frack Staff didn't put that destructive command in their magazine, but that version of the article still existed out there somewhere. Skyper and his team had brought Frack back. They were publishing yearly issues of Frack. But then Skyper moved on to do other things. But there

27:12was enough momentum and there was enough people involved with Frack at that point for it to keep going on its own. 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 Frack. Frack staff just wasn't there anymore. And there were no issues coming out. But 5 years after that in 2021, to all our surprise, a new issue of Frack was released, we thought

27:42it 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 Frack to make a bunch of money on bug bounties that year. So it still had teeth and grit and was hard-hitting. Well, at least until things got patched. But that seemed to be the last harrah for Frack. The internal Frack 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

28:13discuss the future of frack >> and we actually met in Spain to to discuss a bit the future about uh frack and we decided that's not just for 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 um maybe six or eight people of the old stuff and new stuff on there and we discussed what we should do and

28:44there were various options. Some people said, "Hey, let's do one more frack and let's just call it. That's it." You know, the last frag. 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, "No, no, the community is always there. There is still a community that deserves a magazine like this. There's always curiosity out there and always the need for for people to to publish articles and we have to provide a platform for them so they can do it.

29:14and Frack is the perfect platform for for these articles. Uh so we were brainstorming about um who we could contact out there who who has experience with running a magazine um who who would enjoy running magazine and who is also technically skilled because you know Frack in the end is a is a very technical magazine. So the the group that came to our minds were the people who were running already Tempout magazine. >> Temp out is very similar to Frack. It's an eene which posts articles on hacking.

29:46It has its own edgginess to it like there's a bunch of asy art and hard-hitting articles and it was TMZ here who co-ounded Tempout. >> So Temp is a group that uh is a research group that we formed maybe 5 years ago now. Uh we started as I three people we just wanted to like uh research uh ELF infection techniques or Linux viruses and things like this. We thought it was like a very niche area that we had like a people in common that wanted to do that and so we kind of you know

30:18brainstormed a little bit and then more people were joining and then eventually we had like a discord channel there's like 1,500 people there now and uh suddenly you know the community was like okay what if we make like a zen you know like in the old days uh people like oh yeah I wanted to write the script or whatever so we just give it a go like and we made four uh volumes already of it uh so far and it's been like really really nice >> and we contacted them and um we went had

30:50a phone call together and the rest is history. >> I was honestly like speechless when that happened. Like I was very very anxious. I remember that I was 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 the idea was like, "Okay, uh, if you wanted

31:21to 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 Frock like well known again." The Tempout 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 40 years. But when is volunteer-driven, I suppose that's what happens. So, the Temp Out team was

31:51excited to be taking over Frack and wanted to make their first issue a big one. It was 2023 and in the 7 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 Defcon. >> 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

32:22if we do it? you know, can we do it? Do we have like some budget? Can we like talk to some people? So, we're able to raise some funds. Uh, and we were able to get like 500 copies down to uh to Vegas. Yeah. Was the first very interesting for us to experience some logistics because, you know, releasing a physical copy of things, it's it's not as easy as it sounds like not only like you have to actually make the material uh but, you know, the distribution, especially at FCON. >> Wow. Okay. So, last year you actually

32:55reached out to me to uh you were looking for a place to to spread them or give them out. >> 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 it was very nice to to get some of the copies there at the party at the Dark in the Darkness party. People really liked it. And I remember like a lot of people were so happy and uh I think that's what made uh me feel like very realized. That's why I was like a lot of people they

33:25looked 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 frock like 25 years ago 30 years ago. So you know that that's that's really like a very very nice to >> it. It's 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 feel honored to have been one of the places to uh to

33:56spread it because I think you only you pick like three or four places to spread out the magazines there. >> Yeah, correct. >> And uh >> yeah, thank you for having us. It was really >> 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 thing is heavy. So, Frack 71. Um I'm just looking through it. It's very text. There's hardly any

34:27pictures at all. And I guess that's because you were saying, >> 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. >> 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. >> Um, 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, you know, less editing, but also like which is already pretty hard, but you know, we keep the the text

34:57plain text style, which a lot of people relate to and really really like. >> 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. If Frack 72, because it's marked our 40th anniversary, we we all wanted to to make something very special. So we the initial idea was to go back to the

35:30Netherland to release the magazine there again as a hard copy where we released the first hard copy 24 years before. Um but we got enough funding and we got enough community support to then be able to coordinate um a release at three different conferences at the same time which was in Netherland and at Defcon in Las Vegas and at Hope in in New York City and then very smaller conferences all around the world. Uh so that was

36:01that was beautiful how the community came together and everybody chipped in some dollars and helped us. The one that I have actually has a Defcon special edition written on the cover. So, were there multiple covers? >> Yes, we have three different covers. Actually, four. Uh, one of them is is going to be released later this year. >> I'd like to add something there. When TMZ says, um, there are four covers. um 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

36:31release the PDF online for everybody to to print it at home or print it on a on a professional print shop and get it shipped to their home address. >> So, Frack issue 72 was released at Defcon in 2025, and I was there to get a copy of it. >> Yeah. This year, we turned it up a notch. This year, we didn't show up with 500 copies. turned up with close to 8,000 copies at Defcon. >> Most, if not all, articles of Frack are simply text files. There are no visuals or graphics at all. Well, I should say

37:02you can see some ASI art there, but that's just still text in the shape of a picture. But this 40th anniversary edition, man, does it pop. Every page has a graphic on it, and it's really cool. It feels like a highquality magazine at this point, and it's bulky and has a ton of articles in it. >> Yeah. So uh we got the opportunity uh to have the wonderful people at page from page out which is another magazine as well uh to do the graphics for us. I mean as you can as you know because you saw it already it just it's mindblowing.

37:34the 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 one, I mean, I know 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 Fra never looked that good. >> Yeah.

38:04It looks great. Yeah, you've uh it feels like you're um coming coming of age, but even 40 years later and it's like looking great. Uh I like that. That that makes me excited about the future. Um getting it getting you said 8,000 copies to Defcon. >> Yeah, we had I think around 15,000 copies spread amongst those three