The Destruction Side: Phrack Magazine
Phrack is a self‑published hacker zine founded in 1985, distributed via dial‑up bulletin board systems (BBS) rather than mainstream media. Its name combines "phreak" (phone phreaking) and "hack," reflecting its content. Early Phrack issues were gritty compilations of phone‑phreaking techniques, war stories, and even how‑to bomb recipes knowledge freely shared among curious technologists. Crucially, Phrack emphasized that understanding systems is not malice: Issue 7 (Jan 1986) published Loyd Blankenship's "The Conscience of a Hacker," popularly known as the Hacker Manifesto. In it a teenage hacker protests that "My crime is that of curiosity", not malice. The essay asserts that hacking has a purpose beyond selfish gain to expand our horizons and keep the world free. This defense of pure curiosity over vandalism has echoed through hacker culture for decades.
Key Phrack milestones:
- 1986 (Issue 7): Published "The Conscience of a Hacker" by The Mentor — the original Hacker Manifesto.
- 1996 (Issue 49): "Smashing The Stack for Fun and Profit" by Aleph One, the seminal buffer‑overflow tutorial, which taught a generation of security researchers how stack overflows work.
- 1997 (Issue 51): "The Art of Port Scanning" by Fyodor, introducing the Nmap tool its full source code was appended for readers to use.
- Legal clash: In 1989, Phrack published an internal BellSouth Enhanced-911 memo. Editor Craig "Knight Lightning" Neidorf was arrested (Operation Sundevil), but the Electronic Frontier Foundation intervened. The case collapsed when it was shown the same document cost $13.50 from BellSouth. This episode became a catalyst for EFF's founding and underscored that knowledge itself was treated as a criminal threat.
Throughout, Phrack was run by volunteers with no corporate backing. It tracked hacking and phreaking culture through the 1990s and beyond, reflecting the scene's shifts from telephone systems to computer security. Today all 72 issues (1985–2025) remain freely available on phrack.org, demonstrating Phrack's continuity. As its current introduction proudly notes, "For 40 years, Phrack has published papers that have reflected and shaped hacker culture… Phrack is written by hackers, for hackers."
The Creative Side: Newgrounds
Newgrounds began as a teenage passion project, not a polished startup. In 1991, 13‑year‑old Tom Fulp created a Neo Geo console fanzine called New Ground, mailing it to ~100 Prodigy online service members. When the web arrived, he turned it into New Ground Remix (1995) and started uploading Flash animations and games people sent him. In the mid‑1990s he made crude, amateur Flash games Club a Seal, Assassin, which drew attention for being transgressive yet exuberant. These early projects showed the platform's ethos: everything goes, as long as it's tagged with an appropriate content rating.
The watershed came on April 6, 2000, when Fulp and collaborator Ross Snyder launched the automated Newgrounds Portal. For the first time, anyone could upload a Flash animation or game directly to the site with no gatekeeper years before YouTube or social media existed. Newgrounds' own history calls this "changing the landscape of the Internet forever," because it provided "an instant publishing system for games and movies." It let rough, amateur creations find an audience. In 1999, Fulp's own Flash game Pico's School was noted for its polish and credited with launching the Flash games boom.
Newgrounds' content was wildly varied: crude and brilliant, juvenile and visionary, often all at once. Every piece of user content could be rated Everyone, Teen, Mature, or Adult, but nothing was outright censored if rated. This openness meant real risk-taking: games could flop or they could become phenomena. A striking example is the "Numa Numa" meme: in December 2004, teenager Gary Brolsma uploaded a silly lip-sync video of himself on Newgrounds. Before YouTube took off, his "Numa Numa Dance" racked up millions of views, teaching the internet about viral media. More recently, in April 2021 the Newgrounds debut of the indie rhythm game Friday Night Funkin' made by a four-person team drew an unprecedented crowd. Tom Fulp reported "Friday Night Funkin' had 1.2 million plays, a new single‑day record for anything on the site" so much traffic it briefly crashed the site.
Newgrounds remains independent and user‑funded. There are no venture capitalists or mass ad-tracking. Its founder proudly reminds users: "I created Newgrounds. It wasn't made by some giant company; just some dumb kid who now has help." The site solicits voluntary Supporter subscriptions ($25/year) to stay 100% ad-free and does not sell personal data. Its goal is to remain independent so creators get a space to share freely.
The Same Room
On the surface, Phrack and Newgrounds seem very different one is a technical hacker journal, the other a haven for Flash games and cartoons. Yet structurally they're remarkably alike. Both were built by individuals who refused to wait for permission and had no corporate umbrella. Each grew out of hobbyist networks when mainstream institutions didn't recognize the value of what they were doing. Both treated their subject matter with utter seriousness while the wider culture still dismissed it: Phrack saw phreaking as a deep craft, Newgrounds saw creative experimentation as worth showcasing. Both survived for decades on volunteer labor and fan loyalty, not venture funding or ad revenue.
Each delivered a similar feeling to its discoverers: we found a secret door into a room where the conversation was already happening. For Phrack readers, that meant seeing the knowledge architecture of telephony and computing laid bare learning that the system can be understood, and that understanding it is not a crime. For Newgrounds visitors, it meant discovering that you can make something and share it without approval. Early users remember refreshing the homepage obsessively for new cartoons or games. In both cases the message was radical: you don't need to ask a gatekeeper to exist online, and the unfinished or even "bad" work has value.
Phrack's Manifesto argued that hacking is driven by curiosity and community, not malice. Newgrounds' structure embodied the idea that genuine creative expression doesn't require polishing for advertisers it's okay to be messy, experimental, or offensive as long as it's labeled. Both insisted that knowledge and creativity should be shared freely, without algorithms deciding who deserves an audience.
Why It Still Matters
Unlike most early internet projects, both Phrack and Newgrounds are still alive. Phrack's entire run Issues 1–72, November 1985 through August 2025 is online in plaintext with no paywall. Newgrounds is still run by Tom Fulp from his office in suburban Pennsylvania, averaging tens of millions of views per month on community-made content, paid for by fan supporters rather than ads.
Neither fits the current mold of the web. They aren't optimized for ad revenue, they don't run recommendation algorithms, and they don't sanitize content to appease sponsors. They live on through communal love. Their survival proves a point: the web can still be a room where curious people gather and speak freely.
Both of these platforms shaped how I think. Newgrounds taught me that I can express myself through art and code... Phrack taught me that understanding a system really understanding it isn't the same as attacking it. They are pioneers for pushing through the friction no matter how messy, and that distinction has mattered to me in ways that go well beyond code.
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