| ---[ Phrack Magazine Volume 7, Issue 51 September 01, 1997, article 04 of 17 | |
| -------------------------[ P H R A C K 5 1 P R O P H I L E | |
| --------[ Grandmaster Ratte' | |
| ----------------[ Personal | |
| Handle: Grandmaster "Swamp" Ratte' | |
| Call him: Kevin | |
| Past handles: KP Neato Dee (local BBSes) | |
| Handle origin: from playing around (and falling in) a swamp all the time | |
| as a kid | |
| Date of Birth: April, 1970 | |
| Height: 6' | |
| Weight: 155 lbs. | |
| Eye color: blue | |
| Hair Color: brown | |
| Computers: Apple ][ (plus/e/c/gs), PC (8088 laptop/'286), | |
| Amiga (500/600), Macintosh (Plus/7200) | |
| Admin of: Demon Roach Underground BBS, The Polka AE from Sept. | |
| '85-present | |
| Sites Frequented: Not much really. Mindvox can be pretty cool and | |
| interesting. I used to regularly call boards like The | |
| Works, Digital Logic's Data Service, the various | |
| Metallands, Speed Demon Elite, P-80, Kingdom of Shit, | |
| Ripco, The Metal AE, Dark Side of the Moon, The Missing | |
| Link, etc. | |
| URLs: www.l0pht.com/cdc.html, and the new www.cultdeadcow.com | |
| Email: gratte@cultdeadcow.com | |
| ----------------[ Favorite Things | |
| Women: that aren't crazy, freshly-scrubbed | |
| Cars: ones that run, muscle cars with lots of chrome | |
| Bikes: BMX 24" cruisers, Schwinn Stingrays with metal-flake paint | |
| Foods: cheap. Sunkist Orange Slurpees. | |
| Music: 1970's funk and soul, rock, hip-hop, hillbilly country, | |
| reggae, dance... | |
| Bands: Run-DMC, Beatles, KISS, Marvin Gaye, Suicidal Tendencies, | |
| Black Uhuru, Public Enemy, Stevie Wonder, Rolling Stones. | |
| Zapp, Parliament/Funkadelic, Grandmaster Flash & The | |
| Furious Five, Dead Kennedies, Black Sabbath, Carpenters, | |
| James Brown, Metallica, Sly & The Family Stone, Lynyrd | |
| Skynyrd, Jimi Hendrix, Slayer, Minor Threat | |
| Instruments: Fender guitars and basses, Kurzweil K2000 series synths | |
| Computers: Apple ][s and Macintoshes | |
| Movies: Star Wars, The Manchurian Candidate, Krush Groove, | |
| Apocalypse Now | |
| Comics: Peanuts, Calvin & Hobbes, Bloom County | |
| Sports: Ultimate Frisbee, bicycling, wandering around outside, | |
| climbing trees and rocks, boating with inflatable life | |
| rafts in drainage lakes, club dancing | |
| Books: _Foucault's Pendulum_ by Umberto Eco, The Bible, Farrah | |
| Fawcett's biography, and _Understanding Media_ by Marshall | |
| McLuhan | |
| Magazines: Tons... 2600, Grand Royal, Wired, Macworld, Barely Legal, | |
| Thrasher, Big Brother, Ride BMX, Urb, Guitar Player, | |
| Keyboard, Cool Beans, Might, Stress, Slap, Crank, 4080, | |
| Cometbus, EQ, and whatever else I can get my grubby hands | |
| on. I really dig magazines. Uh, and Phrack! | |
| TV: The Six Million Dollar Man, The Simpsons, Charlie's Angels, | |
| X-Files, A-Team, Mod Squad | |
| My Bands: Superior Products (bass), Weasel-MX (vox, programming), | |
| Jinx Unit (bass, phat beatz) | |
| Quotes: "Fully equipped with an army of lawyers." -ad for Zoo York | |
| skateboards | |
| People: Evel Knievel, Boba Fett, Mr. T, and the CULT OF THE DEAD | |
| COW Multimedia Superstarz! | |
| Misc: thrift stores, huge shiny belt buckles, phresh new laces | |
| in my kicks, playing shows with my band(s), exploring | |
| buildings, big trees and rocks | |
| Turn Ons: energy | |
| Turn Offs: pretentiousness | |
| ----------------[ Passions | |
| If you can't tell from the list up there, I'm really into music. It all | |
| started when the neighborhood teenagers would let me sit around with them and | |
| listen to the hard-rockin' soundz of KISS and Led Zep when I was a little kid. | |
| So my mom (bless her heart) under their advisement, bought me Led Zeppelin | |
| _IV_ and KISS _Alive!_ which I took to kindergarden class and was reprimanded | |
| for. A few years later my grade school friends and I would spend hours | |
| sitting around a cassette player making "radio shows" with our Saturday Night | |
| Fever soundtrack and various 7" singles from K-Mart. We were rollin' with the | |
| phattest mixtapes at age nine, fool! Somehow this led to MIDI and drum | |
| machines and CD burners and now I spend tons of time recording and sequencing | |
| and playing music. I do a lot of recording for the local punk and hip-hop | |
| groups and it's hella fun. The back of the building I live in is a small | |
| empty warehouse where we have all-ages music shows and that's pretty neat too. | |
| It's called MOTOR... If you're in a touring band, lemme know and send me a | |
| tape or whatever you've got. | |
| ----------------[ Memorable experiences | |
| Hmm. Well, this is probably my best story, so here we go: I found myself | |
| all alone at night inside a telco's switching station. Ooh, look... a terminal | |
| keyboard. In the dim glow of the red "EXIT" signs, that keyboard represented | |
| all my hopes for a glorious unification of the human spirit through the global | |
| telecommunications network. How could I best express my ...love... for this | |
| network and all that it represents? Write a poem? Done it already, hundreds | |
| of times. Every cDc file I've put out is a gesture of affection. So I did | |
| what any red-blooded American male wouid do. I dropped my pants, "threw | |
| jacks" as it were, and doused that human-machine interface unit with my | |
| Seekrut Sauce. | |
| Then I cleaned myself and got the hell out of there... pulse pounding, | |
| freaked by my own insatiable lust. Is what I did "WRONG"? Don't judge me | |
| with your pithy concepts of morality! I stood before God with my pants around | |
| my ankles and expressed what was in my heart. If that's wrong, damn... I | |
| don't want to be right! | |
| --- | |
| Playing a party where a gang fight broke out, caps were busted during our | |
| set, and we had to drop our instruments to flee for our livez (and hide under | |
| cars). | |
| --- | |
| Falling in love. Getting dumped. Lather, rinse, repeat. | |
| --- | |
| Going to the various hacker cons is always a blast. Some people have a | |
| negative attitude about these things 'cause a lot of kids go and act retarded. | |
| Which is unfortunate, but I always manage to have a great time. These are the | |
| only times I get to visit with cDc people and it's like a big bonding | |
| session... we just run around and hang out. Meet lots of cool people in | |
| general, every time. So go to the cons and don't cause problems, and | |
| everything'll be fine. | |
| --- | |
| Starting cDc communications. In some ways this has been an important item | |
| in my life. Not that editing text files is a huge important thing, 'cause it's | |
| not. But cDc, at its best, has taught me that I can have a role in making | |
| something creative and interesting and lasting. Things like that can carry | |
| over into a lot of aspects in your life. In 1984 I was a junior high student | |
| and now I'm 27 years old. cDc has changed a lot of course, as it should, but | |
| I think with our longevity we've worked towards finding a new way to relate to | |
| technology and the emerging global structure. I was fourteen and part of the | |
| wave of hacker kids who had been growing up with Atari 2600s at home and the | |
| video arcade after school... we saw the movie Wargames and got excited. I was | |
| lucky and had an Apple ][ at home, and soon a modem my dad brought home from | |
| work. You figured out some Stupid Phone Tricks and bam, in no time you were | |
| typing away to other kids on BBSes across the country, sharing.... codez and | |
| warez, sure, but more importantly we shared experiences. This was NEW. | |
| I remember how exciting it was to call teenager-run boards across the country | |
| in the early '80s and exchange messages with these people. Now kids can grow | |
| up from the get-go with the Internet in their house and I think that's just | |
| great. So my friends and I were writing things and doing goofy drawings and | |
| whatnot, and could have put out a regular paper 'zine. But we figured out | |
| pretty early on that the one big advantage these text files we wrote had over | |
| some photocopied sheets we could staple together was distribution. If we'd | |
| done a paper 'zine, we could have maybe scraped up enough cash for 50 copies | |
| or so and forced some friends to take them and then they'd end up at the | |
| bottom of a closet or in the trash in a few weeks, forgotten. But instead, we | |
| used those Stupid Phone Tricks hundreds of times... staying up all night, with | |
| school looming ahead in a few hours. But hey, gotta call that AE in New | |
| Jersey and upload the latest text files. You can always sleep through class. | |
| But what makes CULT OF THE DEAD COW different and has enabled us to last | |
| is that cDc has never been about technology... we didn't form to trade "inpho" | |
| and hack together like the other groups. We used technology, be it hand - | |
| hacked MCI codes or the Internet to get our "messages" out there. Hacking is | |
| a means to an end. I don't give a rat's ass about hacking or any of that crap | |
| on its own. I just want to make cool stuff. Now we're starting a "paramedia" | |
| concept which means the end of cDc as a "hacker group that puts out text | |
| files." Now we're putting out our own original music and other audio files, | |
| to be distributed just like our text stuff has traditionally been. The | |
| bandwidth is finally here where we can do it... and when it's practical, we'll | |
| be putting out video stuff too. The idea is to be able to do whatever sort of | |
| creative work we want and to use our huge distribution network to disseminate | |
| it. That's what "cDc paramedia" and the future of our whole group is about. | |
| Somebody who was making his college schedule wrote me email the other day, | |
| and asked "What classes should I take? I wanna be a hacker." I told him he'd | |
| be better off with some history and business courses. Please understand, I | |
| don't mean to diss on hacking. I'm all for having all the knowledge you can | |
| and exploring things, whatever they may be. But I've met a lot of bitter old | |
| "gadget freaks" in this scene, and that's something you want to stay away from. | |
| That mentality will crush the life out of you under the weight of a | |
| thousand bits of trivia. Go outside, there's a world there already. It's a | |
| zillion times more exciting and vibrant that what you can build staring into a | |
| monitor's dim glare. Hour after hour, year after year. As your eyesight | |
| fails you and your head draws nearer the image, your shoulders slump. You | |
| become weak. You are less. | |
| ----------------[ People to mention | |
| The Egyptian Lover: The whole 806 NPA's only real phreak who ran a great | |
| BBS, The Missing Link, in 1984. I've only seen him a couple of times in | |
| person, but have to give him mad props for helping Franken Gibe and myself | |
| get situated with the phreak knowledge. His board attracted guys from The | |
| Apple Mafia and The Untouchables (the first warez groups ever), and The | |
| Knights of Shadow. Though I'd been getting warez since 1982, The Missing | |
| Link was our first contact with the real "elite" h/p scene, and it both | |
| fascinated and repulsed us. | |
| Franken Gibe: Bill helped start and really define cDc back in the day. | |
| He's a really cool guy. I've known him for over ten years. What can I say? | |
| We're still, to this day, working on things; though he hasn't been active in | |
| cDc since '89 or so. Now we're trying to start an advertising agency. | |
| Tippy Turtle: Jason gave me my first local BBS number. I pushed him to | |
| finish "Bunny Lust", which is one of our most popular articles ever. There | |
| have been court cases inspired by that file, and he wrote it when he was | |
| fourteen. He came back to town last Christmas and I showed him the cDc web | |
| site. His comment? "That's totally evil. I can't believe how evil this is." | |
| Mohawk Dave: Christoph is another one of my oldest friends who never | |
| fails to diss cDc. He's a mega-talented AI/robotics guy, and a rad | |
| guitarist and BMX freestyle rider too. Our group of friends spent countless | |
| hours cruising the neighborhoods of our hometown on bikes, talking, setting | |
| fires, breaking & entering, and having a good ol' time. | |
| Ex-girlfriends: Blech. | |
| All the other cDc people. Dang, there've been maybe fifty or so over the | |
| years and they've all done their thing well and I'm really happy they did. | |
| They know what's up... this part could run on forever, so I'll just stop. | |
| ----------------[ Pearls Of Wisdom | |
| Procrastination is the denial of death. | |
| Lift with your legs, not your back. | |
| ----[ EOF | |