Recently, I’ve been on the hunt for cyberpunk podcasts. Between the sci-fi dramas and current news shows, I found a surprising amount of references to Chromed Pork, an interesting podcast by a group of phone phreaks and hackers that ran for 22 episodes from early 2008 to early 2009.

Chromed Pork seems to have started out as a group of friends on IRC. They came together (originally or later I don’t know) on Binary Revolution, a hacking website which previously ran the popular Binary Revolution Radio show and published its own zine. The radio show has since been merged into Hacker Public Radio, though BinRev is kept alive through forums and IRC. I have been a member of the BinRev forums for 10 years now and missed this show when it first premiered. In 2008, the podcast scene was more immature but still well established. There was an explosion of content and it proved hard to keep up.

The BinRev forums do have archival posts, and I can find accounts for three hosts of Chromed Pork Radio: Multi-Mode, tacomaster, and Inode. Communication with them seems difficult. The most recent login date for any of these three accounts is 2010, and tacomaster’s email address on his profile returns as unreachable if you try to push to it.

I did a little more digging on Chromed Pork’s old blogspot site which contains old number scans and podcast show notes. I found links to episodes that have since died, apparently hosted on a “mobile-node.net” domain. This domain now points to yet another domain, but I’m not sure of that domain owner’s involvement if any. I’ve reached out to him and still hope to hear back one way or the other, but no word yet. I also found an old Chromed Pork general email address, but this too is deactivated.

Later, I reached out to /u/r3dk1ng on Reddit whom I saw posting about Chromed Pork, and he was able to get me a good amount (15/22) of episodes which I have since put on the Internet Archive here.

For reference, here is a list of the files I am still looking for:

ChromedPork-0012-Assorted_Bullsh-t.mp3
ChromedPork-0013-Phreaking.mp3
ChromedPork-0014-Guest-Wesley_Mcgrew.mp3
ChromedPork-0015-Newscasting.mp3
ChromedPork-0018-Porktopia_Election-Night.mp3
ChromedPork-0019-MC-Colo_and_other_news.mp3
ChromedPork-0020-Killing_Time.mp3

And here is a description of the podcast from the defunct radio.chromedpork.net site:

Chromed Pork Radio is an open information security “podcast”, featuring a variety of security related topics, such Info and Comms Sec, Telephony, Programming, Electronics and Amateur Radio. We do our best to work on an open contribution model, meaning any listener is a potential host. We do not censor our shows but do ask that contributors keep all contributions purely informational or hypothetical. Contributions should consist only of material the contributor is legally entitled to share.
Given our open uncensored model, the views and opinions expressed in this “podcast” are strictly those of the contributor. The contents of this “podcast” are not reviewed or approved by Chromed Pork Media.
If you would like to contribute, or provided feedback please visit our contribute section for details.

My trail has gone cold, and I’m still on the lookout for the remaining episodes or anyone who may have them.