Founder of phreak.fm. Music producer, hacker culture archivist, and the voice behind the long-form pieces. Writing about the people who bend signals since before most of you were born.
~ cut by ripper / phreak.fm ~
Danny Williamson took jungle out of the strobe-lit hardcore rooms and built something slower, jazzier, more spatial. Good Looking Records, the Speed club night, and the Logical Progression compilations defined what drum and bass sounded like when it learned to breathe.
Ripper :: April 18, 2026 :: 13 min read
In 1991, a peace activist in Boulder released a free encryption tool to protect dissidents from surveillance. Within months, federal investigators were treating his source code as illegally exported munitions. The three-year case that followed became the central battle of the Crypto Wars and the foundation for every secure messenger in your pocket today.
Ripper :: April 18, 2026 :: 9 min read
Four years before the Alvi brothers wrote Brain in Lahore, a fifteen-year-old in Pittsburgh wrote a self-replicating program that would copy itself onto every Apple II floppy in his social circle and, on the fiftieth boot, display a poem. This is the story of the first computer virus that actually got loose.
Ripper :: April 18, 2026 :: 8 min read
Jude Milhon was at the Selma march in 1965, was one of the few professional women programmers of the 1960s mainframe era, coined the word cypherpunk in the early 1990s as a wordplay on cyberpunk and cipher, and spent her last decades as the most beloved counterweight to the libertarian male orthodoxy that had grown up around the Cypherpunks list. The cypherpunk movement has the name she gave it. It has remembered her unevenly.
Ripper :: April 17, 2026 :: 10 min read
Peiter Mudge Zatko sat at the L0pht Heavy Industries table when seven hackers told the US Senate in 1998 that they could take down the internet in thirty minutes. Twenty-four years later he sat in front of Congress again, this time as the Twitter whistleblower describing security failures that helped reshape the largest social platform's legal exposure. The arc between those two appearances is one of the most useful careers to study in modern security.
Ripper :: April 17, 2026 :: 9 min read
In September 1992, three people met at a house in Oakland to talk about cryptography and decided to start a mailing list. Over the next nine years, that list became the workshop where Bitcoin, Tor, Signal, BitTorrent, and most of what we now call privacy tech was workshopped, argued out, and shipped.
Ripper :: April 16, 2026 :: 8 min read
A toy whistle from a cereal box turned out to produce the exact frequency that could seize control of AT&T's long-distance network. John Draper, known as Captain Crunch, built an entire subculture on that discovery.
Ripper :: April 15, 2026 :: 6 min read
Over four days in February 2000, a fifteen-year-old in suburban Montreal knocked Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, CNN, Buy.com, Dell, and E*Trade off the internet using a botnet of hijacked university workstations. The week DDoS stopped being a theory and became a permanent feature of the public web.
Ripper :: April 15, 2026 :: 8 min read
Eric Corley took a pen name from Orwell, founded a quarterly magazine in 1984 dedicated to a subculture that the rest of the world was already moving to criminalize, and spent the next four decades operating a radio show, a quarterly print publication, a biennial international conference, and a constant defense of the proposition that hackers are not the same as criminals. The hacker community has had institutional anchors come and go. Goldstein has been the steadiest of them.
Ripper :: April 14, 2026 :: 9 min read
In 1986, Basit and Amjad Farooq Alvi wrote a piece of code to protect their medical software from piracy. It became the first virus to infect IBM PCs, and it carried their real names, address, and phone number.
Ripper :: April 14, 2026 :: 12 min read
Cybersecurity reporting in 2010 was a niche beat with a small audience. By the time Kim Zetter finished publishing Countdown to Zero Day in 2014, she had done something that most security writers had never managed: she had told the story of a complex nation-state malware operation in a way that ordinary readers could follow without losing the technical truth. The shape of long-form security journalism since then is largely her shape.
Ripper :: April 13, 2026 :: 7 min read
Rykard returns on Hunya Munya Records with NCO, an album that sits at the intersection of ambient composition and something harder to name. A close listen.
Ripper :: April 5, 2026 :: 2 min read
Before hackers had keyboards, they had tone dialers. The story of phone phreaking, from Cap'n Crunch's whistle to the fall of the analog network, and why it still matters.
Ripper :: April 1, 2026 :: 9 min read
Three decades after its release, Northern Exposure remains the benchmark for what a mix album can be. A retrospective on the compilation that turned the DJ mix into an art form.
Ripper :: March 25, 2026 :: 3 min read
Founded in 1985 by Taran King and Knight Lightning. Phrack published the Hacker Manifesto. Ran for 69 issues across four decades. The Bellcore document controversy nearly ended it. Phrack defined what hacker writing looked like and how the underground published itself.
Ripper :: March 24, 2026 :: 6 min read
Ripper :: March 16, 2026 :: 6 min read
Ripper :: March 15, 2026 :: 6 min read
Two brothers in the Scottish Highlands built the most haunted sound in electronic music. Twenty years later, their nostalgia machines still ping something deep in the listener's brain.
Ripper :: March 5, 2026 :: 7 min read
Ripper :: March 5, 2026 :: 7 min read
Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson took Kraftwerk, Parliament, and Alvin Toffler's 'Third Wave' and invented an entire genre in the suburbs of Detroit. Why techno is Black music and why that historical fact still matters.
Ripper :: February 15, 2026 :: 10 min read
Jeff Moss started DEF CON in 1993 as a goodbye party for the local BBS scene. It became the world's largest hacker conference. How a one-off event created the physical space where hacker culture became itself.
Ripper :: February 7, 2026 :: 8 min read
The Mentor's Hacker Manifesto, published in Phrack 7 in 1986 after his arrest. The document that defined hacker philosophy for forty years. Why it still resonates when the world it described is almost entirely gone.
Ripper :: February 3, 2026 :: 7 min read
Roland designed the TB-303 to simulate bass guitar lines for solo musicians. It was a commercial failure. Then Chicago producers got their hands on it and accidentally invented acid house.
Ripper :: January 31, 2026 :: 6 min read
When the Cult of the Dead Cow released Back Orifice at DEF CON 6 in 1998, they called it a legitimate remote administration tool. Microsoft called it malware. The truth was more complicated, and more important.
Ripper :: January 21, 2026 :: 4 min read
Eighteen years later, Will Bevan's masterpiece still captures something essential about late-night solitude, longing, and the particular beauty of lost nights in cities.
Ripper :: January 20, 2026 :: 6 min read
May 1990. Secret Service raids across 14 American cities. 42 computers seized. 23,000 floppy disks confiscated. The government made it clear: the hacker underground was now a national security threat. But the raids created something larger than themselves. The EFF was founded in response. And hackers started organizing legally.
Ripper :: January 19, 2026 :: 7 min read
Richard D. James hid images inside his music. Run certain Aphex Twin tracks through a spectrogram and you will see faces, spirals, and hidden messages encoded in the frequency domain. It is audio steganography as art.
Ripper :: January 15, 2026 :: 5 min read
At 18, Mark Abene (Phiber Optik) of the Masters of Deception understood AT&T's telephone network at an engineering level most professionals never reached. His arrest showed how unprepared the justice system was for teenage technical genius.
Ripper :: December 12, 2025 :: 6 min read
From punk fanzines to Phrack to phreak.fm: how self-publishing shaped hacker culture, electronic music, and outsider networks. The direct line from photocopies to personal blogs.
Ripper :: November 19, 2025 :: 8 min read
In 1998, seven members of the L0pht hacker collective testified before the U.S. Senate and told them, plainly, that they could take down the entire internet in 30 minutes. Congress listened. Then did nothing.
Ripper :: November 15, 2025 :: 8 min read
Ripper :: November 14, 2025 :: 6 min read
Ripper :: November 10, 2025 :: 5 min read
Ripper :: October 22, 2025 :: 6 min read
Kieran Hebden proved that electronic music could be emotionally overwhelming without abandoning the laptop. In the process, he rewrote what was possible in electronic production.
Ripper :: October 22, 2025 :: 7 min read
The media called him the most dangerous hacker in America. But Kevin Mitnick's greatest weapon was never a computer. It was his voice, his confidence, and his ability to get people to hand over the keys.
Ripper :: October 18, 2025 :: 8 min read
Ripper :: October 8, 2025 :: 7 min read