Tech culture observer and late-night internet archaeologist. Writes about the weird corners of the web and the systems we built that built us.
~ cut by deadpacket / phreak.fm ~
Kevin Poulsen took over the phone lines of Los Angeles radio station KIIS-FM to guarantee he would be the 102nd caller, winning a Porsche 944 S2. The hack was elegant. The fallout was not.
deadpacket :: August 19, 2026 :: 2 min read
Red boxes generated the coin-drop tones that payphones used to signal the operator. Bernie S distributed cassette tapes loaded with those tones, turning every Walkman into a free-call machine.
deadpacket :: July 8, 2026 :: 2 min read
In the early 1980s Los Angeles hacker scene, Susan Thunder stood out as a pioneer of social engineering. She could talk her way past security that no technical exploit could breach.
deadpacket :: June 17, 2026 :: 2 min read
Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs built and sold illegal blue boxes at UC Berkeley before they ever dreamed of personal computers. The blue box was their first product, and without it, Apple might never have existed.
deadpacket :: May 27, 2026 :: 2 min read
Born blind with absolute pitch, Joe Engressia could whistle a perfect 2600Hz tone with his lips alone. He became one of the earliest phone phreakers, and later reinvented himself as Joybubbles.
deadpacket :: May 6, 2026 :: 2 min read
Platform fatigue is real, but every year a new network launches promising to fix everything the last one broke. Why we keep signing up, and why we keep being disappointed.
deadpacket :: April 2, 2026 :: 6 min read
There is a specific quality to the internet after midnight. The algorithms quiet down. The professionals go to sleep. What remains is stranger and more honest.
deadpacket :: March 30, 2026 :: 6 min read