My forward to the 40th anniversary Phrack, released today at [un]prompted. A true honor, and responsibility, I will not soon forget. Thank you to the Phrack team for all you do, and for being what this community is about for so long. We owe you so much. Our Greatest Hacks Are Yet to Come You are holding in your hands the 40th anniversary issue of Phrack, the zine that shaped so much of hacker culture. Reading it today, I find myself searching for answers. I feel the very core of hacker identity has taken a hit. With restless curiosity, hackers explore where no one else would, and then we share. Yet now the knowledge we shared so freely has been used to train our replacement. For many, hacking isn’t fun anymore. Some of my friends say, "security was never about the bugs”, but for many - it was. Yesterday, we were explorers, mapping the uncharted edges of human understanding, how things work, and how they could. Today, here we are, wondering if we’ll still have jobs tomorrow. It took me a while, but I now recognize what I'm feeling. For all my optimism about AI, I'm in mourning. And, if you’re like me, perhaps you are too. Skills it took years to hone, skills we took pride in, like reverse engineering and code auditing, are now a commodity. After all, everybody with a keyboard is now finding high-value 0days left and right. The all-nighters we used to pull to find that one missing piece of the puzzle? Replaced with a prompt. But while our tools may be replaced, what makes us hackers is immutable. We’ll research, experiment, question everything, and find new flow states to immerse ourselves in. I can't help but walk around grinning, like Dan Kaminsky used to, imagining the endless possibilities hackers will discover in how to use AI, subvert it, and break it, going far beyond what its creators could have imagined. Our true identity as hackers will shine through, helping shape this most interesting and consequential era in history. I recognize that things are different now, but refusing change leads to irrelevance. I, for one, choose to adapt with this new reality. With so much to discover, wasting away as doomers would be remarkably uninspired. We’ve always automated ourselves out of the work we were doing, inventing what came next. It has never really been about what we do. It’s about who we are. And the new tools we build? They will blow open the event horizon of the possible. As you read through this issue of Phrack, remember that we also have each other. Our community is growing again. I’ve watched a 12-year-old build their first cluster and, to my horror, salespeople commit to my GitHub. Hacker culture is very much alive. I don’t know when jobs will become redundant, but I can’t think of a better community to find ways to make sure people don't. Art didn’t end with the brush. Keep on hacking. /With thanks to Michal Kamensky and Karen Castelletti for your contributions, and to all who helped along the way./