Bruce Fancher - Early Years

Early Years

Bruce Fancher grew up in New York City. He is the son of Ed Fancher, who founded the Village Voice with Dan Wolf and Norman Mailer, in 1955.

Much like Patrick Kroupa and many compatriots from the Legion of Doom, Bruce Fancher was part of the first generation to grow up with access to home computers and the networks that pre-dated the wide-scale adaptation of what became known as the internet.

Unlike most others, Fancher seems to have met most of the people who played major roles in his formative years, in person, at the YIPL/TAP meetings that were taking place on the Lower East Side of New York City. Fancher's peers included several hackers and phone phreaks of the day.

The hacker publication Phrack is filled with out-of-character rants at the games Fancher was playing. All of this culminated right around the time MindVox was first launched, with Phrack's first (and only) humor issue (Phrack #36) Phrack Magazine, also called "Diet Phrack", which was filled with LOD members stepping out from behind their usual handles and acting more like what the world had grown to expect from their rival gang, MOD (Masters of Deception).

Among other articles, such as Chris Goggans' "jive" version of the Book of MOD that set off the Great Hacker War, Phrack 36 included the first and last, official publication of an article co-written by Fancher and Kroupa, called "Elite Access", which was a cynical and funny expose of the "elite" and private hacker underground of the day. The article was apparently worked on and edited during a 5 year period, and there are at least 3 different versions of it that still remain online, including a much earlier, hardcore technical revision which has most of the commands to control phone company computers, deleted out of it.

Fancher and Kroupa's games with the "elite" made it into Kroupa's "Agr1ppa", a surreal parody of William Gibson's Agrippa, which had been leaked to the world from MindVox. The opening verses include a letter dated 1985, from the SysOp (System Operator) of a pirate Bulletin Board System which had apparently thrown both Fancher and Kroupa off the system, for uploading cracked software, which they then infected with a virus.