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The Hacker's Renaissance (2025)

phrack.org

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Re: The Hacker's Renaissance (2025)

#51

Post by tptacek »

ajam1507 wrote: post #48
AuthAuth wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not something that should be encouraged. Hacking together projects like a wifi calculator is fun, harmless and builds knowledge. Hacking a phoneline can land a kid in jail. Attacking public infra is not something that should be treated lightly.

This is exactly the kind of sanitized hacking this article is talking about.

Many of the most prolific and successful offensive hackers, the people that actually made their way into switches and onto hardened SunOS servers, were the least capable technologists. The archetype is Kevin Mitnick, who wasn't a coder and barely understood the cookbook tools he used. The field benefited enormously from its sanitization, and the 80's and 90's reputation could use some scuffing up.

Re: The Hacker's Renaissance (2025)

#53

Post by onoesworkacct »

ramon156 wrote: post #8

this doesnt really reflect the vibe old school hackers give. "solder a wifi module to a calculator" sounds like a cartoon-inspired project. Why not reference call spoofing (i forgot the name) where they were able to call for no charge because they were able to spoof a real call. that's the kind of hacker vibe i want continued.

It was written by ChatGPT which would avoid examples that are explicitly illegal, and would stop short of advocating things that contravene ToS agreements.

Sad.

Who is in charge of this shit now?

Re: The Hacker's Renaissance (2025)

#58

Post by sailingparrot »

juleiie wrote: post #32
nearlyepic wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re right. The content sucks, because it was created with an LLM.

[flagged]

It matters if an article was written by an expert or someone that only has surface knowledge about the topic. It matters if it’s written by someone talented with words or by someone that has to churn 10 articles a day for a content farm.

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.

Re: The Hacker's Renaissance (2025)

#59

Post by kstrauser »

annzabelle wrote: post #43
detourdog wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other thing is who really knows if it was human or LLM. I think I have been accused of writing like an LLM.

With em dashes in particular, a human would have to go to explicit effort to use a non-ascii character. I like a good em-dash myself, but I just use a hyphen because I'm not going to go to the effort of using a character that's not on my keyboard in a blog post or comment. Using em dashes, especially in an otherwise monospace retro-computing theme, is a sure sign of llm output.

I have a keyboard macro set up so typing “—-” yields “—”. I set this up like a decade ago and it’s just habit now.

Re: The Hacker's Renaissance (2025)

#60

Post by kstrauser »

anthk wrote: post #15

>Yet, somewhere the spirit persists. Hidden away in encrypted Matrix rooms, deep inside dead drop Git repositories and onion forums, the real work continues. The underground never died — it just moved to quieter places. You wish. True hackers wrote HAKMEM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAKMEM , wrote ZMachine interpreters in PostScript, wrote compilers for the Subleq machine with memory indirection and ran GNU/Linux o…

That’s a pretty sweet gate! How long you been keeping it?
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