It's been *40 years* since #EmmanuelGoldstein launched the seminal, essential, world-changing *@2600: The #Hacker Quarterly*. *2600* wasn't the first #phreak/hacker zine, but it was the most important, spawning a global subculture dedicated to the noble pursuit of technological self-determination:
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/19/hope-less/#hack-the-planet
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*2600* has published hundreds of issues in which digital spelunkers report eagerly on the things they've discovered by peering intently at the things no one was supposed to even glance at (I'm proud to be one of those writers!). They've fought legal battles, including one that almost went to the Supreme Court:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS
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They created a global network of meetups where some of technology's most durable friendships and important collaborations were born. These continue to this day:
And they've hosted a weekly radio show on NYC's #WBAI, @OffTheHook:
https://wbai.org/program.php?program=76
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When WBAI management lost their minds and locked the station's most beloved hosts out of the studio, Off the Hook (naturally) led the rebellion, taking back the station for its audience, rescuing it from a managerial coup:
https://twitter.com/2600/status/1181423565389942786
But best of all, *2600* gave us #HOPE - both in the metaphorical sense of "hope for a better technological tomorrow" and in the literal sense, with its biannual #HackersOnPlanetEarth con:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers_on_Planet_Earth
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We're happy to announce that @WBAI has gotten an injunction to stay the takeover of the station by @RadioPacifica. All programming will resume and the next court date is October 18th. Should be a good show this Wednesday! @HackerRadioShow
For decades HOPE had an incredible venue, the Hotel Pennsylvania (memorialized in the phreak anthem "PEnnsylvania 6-5000"), a crumbling pile in midtown Manhattan that was biannually transformed into a rollicking, multi-day festival of forbidden technology, improbable feats, and incredible presentations. I was privileged to keynote HOPE in 2016:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1D7APjmVbk
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But after the 2018 HOPE, the Hotel Pennsylvania was demolished to make way for the Penn15 (no, really) skyscraper, a vaporware mega-tower planned as a holding pen for luxury shopping and empty million-dollar condos sold to offshore war-criminals as safe-deposit boxes in the sky. The developer, Vornado (no, really) hasn't actually done all that - after demo'ing the Hotel Pennsylvania, they noped out, leave a large, unusable scar across midtown.
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But HOPE wasn't lost. In 2022, the ever-resilient 2600 crew relocated to Queens, hosted by St John's University - a venue that was less glamorous that the Hotel Pennsylvania, but the event was still fantastic. Attendance fell from 2,000 to 1,000, but that was something they could work with, and reviews from attendees were stellar.
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Good thing, too. *2600* is, first and foremost, a magazine publisher, and these have been hard years for magazines. First there was the mass die-off of indie bookstores and newsracks (I used to sell *2600* when I was a bookseller, and in the years after, I always took the presence of *2600* on a store's newsrack as an unimpeachable mark of quality).
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Thankfully for *2600*, their audience is (unsurprisingly) a tech-savvy one, so they were able to substitute digital subscriptions for physical ones:
https://www.2600.com/Magazine/DigitalEditions
Of course, many of those subscriptions came through Amazon's Kindle, because nerds were early Amazon adopters, and because the Kindle magazine publishing platform offered DRM-free distribution to subscribers along with a fair payout to publishers.
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But then Amazon enshittified its magazine system. Having locked publishers to its platform, it rugged them and killed the monthly subscription fees that allowed publishers to plan for a steady output. Publishers were given a choice: leave Amazon (and all the readers locked inside its walled garden) or put your magazine into the #KindleUnlimited system:
https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/arp/B0BWPTCP4K?deviceType=A1FG5NAKX0MRJL
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Kindle Unlimited is an all-you-can-eat program for Kindle, which pays publishers and writers based on a system that is both opaque *and* easily gamed, with the lion's share of the money going to "publishers" who focus on figuring out how to cheat the algorithm. Revenues for 2600 - and all the other magazines that Amazon had sucked in and sucked dry - fell off a cliff.
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Which brings me to the present moment. After 40 years, *2600* is still at it, having survived the bookstorepocalypse, the lunacy of public radio management, the literal demolition of their physical home by an evil real-estate developer, *and* Amazon's crooked accounting.
This is *2600*, circa 2024, and 2024 a HOPE year:
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Once again, HOPE has been scheduled for its new digs in Queens, July 12-14. Last week, HOPE sent out an email blast to their subscribers telling them the news. They expected to sell 500 tickets in the first 24 hours. They didn't even come close:
https://www.2600.com/content/hope-ticket-sales-update
It turns out that Google and the other major mail providers don't like emails with the word "hacker" in them.
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The cartel that decides which email gets delivered, and which messages go to spam, or get blocked altogether, mass-blocked the HOPE 2024 announcement. Email may be the last federated, open platform we have, but mass concentration has created a system where it's nearly impossible to get your email delivered unless you're willing to play by Gmail's rules:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/10/dead-letters/
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For Emmanuel Goldstein, founder of *2600* and tireless toiler for this community, the deafening silence following from that initial email volley was terrifying: "like some kind of a "Twilight Zone" episode where everyone has disappeared."
The enshittification that keeps *2600*'s emails from being delivered to the people who asked to receive them is even worse on social media.
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Social media companies routinely defraud their users by letting them subscribe to feeds, then turning around to the people and organizations that run those feeds and saying, "You've got x thousand subscribers on this platform, but we won't put your posts in their feeds unless you pay us to 'boost' your content":
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/platforms-decay-lets-put-users-first
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The net’s long decline into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four” isn’t a mystery. Nor was it by any means a forgone conclusion. Instead, we got here through a series of conscious actions by big businesses and lawmakers that put antitrust law into a 40-year coma....
Enshittification has been coming at *2600* for decades. Like other forms of oddball media dedicated to challenging corporate power and government oppression, *2600* has always been a ten-years-ahead preview of the way the noose was gonna tighten on *all* of us. And now, they're on the ropes. HOPE can't sell tickets unless people know about HOPE, and neither email providers nor social media platforms have any interest in making that happen.
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A handful of giant corporations now get to decide what we read, who we hear from, and whether and how we can get together in person to make friends, forge community, rabble-rouse and change the world. The idea that "it's not censorship unless the government does it" has always been wrong (not all censorship violates the First Amendment, and censorship can be real without being unconstitutional):
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/04/yes-its-censorship/
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What can you do about it? Well, for one thing, you can sign up for HOPE. It's gonna be *great*. They've got sub-$100 hotel rooms! In *New York City*!
https://store.2600.com/products/tickets-to-hope-xv
If you can't make it to HOPE, you can sign up for a virtual membership:
https://store.2600.com/products/tickets-to-hope-xv-virtual-attendee
You can submit a talk to HOPE:
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You can subscribe to *2600*, in print or electronically (I signed up for the lifetime print subscription and it was a *bargain* - I devour every issue the day it arrives):
https://store.2600.com/collections/subscriptions-renewals
*2600* is living a decade in the future of every other community you care about, weird hobby you enjoy, con you live for, and publication you read from cover to cover. If we can all pull together to save it, it'll be a beacon of hope (and HOPE).
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During (I think it was) the Snowden era, a politician said something about "the 26ers". I thought, it was a hint about this magazine and that the term "hackers" was meant by it. But I later learned, it has a different meaning there.
@radioactivecat @briankrebs @pluralistic @2600
We have a box of these too somewhere. :)
So entertaining is the story of the people who took over the PA system at Pacific Northwest Target clone Fred Meyer. Repeatedly.
Think David Letterman taking over the drive thru at Taco Bell but add excessive profanity, sexuality and insults.
2600 Hertz was the frequency of the tone that was used on AT&T long-distance trunks to signal an open line. By dialing a toll-free number, then broadcasting that tone on it, a new long-distance connection could be made without incurring charges.
@amiserabilist @pluralistic @2600
it was 2280 Hz in Britain and the Commonwealth, but there was a risk that sending it down the line set off a great big bell in the Telephone Exchange - and by the time I had access to telephone lines that weren't in my home or workplace legit phone calls were already dirt cheap.
You could apparently still blue box via Country Direct circuits, but I had ethical misgivings about targeting developing countries infrastructure when there wasn't any real need to
Believe it or not, I actually used some phone phreaking techniques back in the day when I was in sales to hack phone systems so I got to the person I wanted.
Love 2600. ❤️
I got "how did you find me?" On the daily, so yeah. It was fun as hell. I more often than not won the business by virtue of simple tenacity. And cleverness. ;)
@CassandraVert @pluralistic @2600
I was double breasted silk suit, red soled stilettos, hair in a bun corporate sales. Multi-million dollar biller in the early aughts. I outran everyone in my industry at the time because I used a wide variety of techniques. ;)
Headhunting. Austin. Semiconductors. ;)
@pluralistic @2600
Back in the early 2000s someone bought the domain name like fuckgeneralmotors.com and had it redirect the webpage for Ford. The @eff (I think) had an online fundraising campaign to raise money for the defendent.* For $250, I supported a landmark case for #FreeSpeech, got two #2600 t-shirts and a lifetime subscription #2600.
I still have every issue I ever received for my lifetime subscription.
UPDATE: Edited with the correct information. Thanks! @2600
@2600 @oliversampson @pluralistic In my opinion, lawyers who advocate for the "sue everyone all the time, even if it's obviously fair use, just in case" approach to trademark enforcement are a threat to both freedom of speech *and* the integrity of the trademark system, and need to be disbarred.
Any CxO advocating for this shit needs to be fired by the board for wasting company resources on petty, time-wasting lawsuits.
@pluralistic @2600 Coming from a PC background, phreaking was the weirdest and often coolest fucking thing to learn about.
I've recaptured a little of that feeling of discovery lately through learning about legacy mainframe development.
@Rose_On_Mars @pluralistic @2600
On the concept of phreaking as figuring things out:
I was working in a mainframe shop in the 80s. I used the MOVE command and lost my file.
I discovered that the command had been implemented, poorly, as a REXX script like this:
COPY A B
DELETE A
Before retyping my source code from a printout, I rewrote the script to
COPY A B
IF B EXISTS
DELETE A
ELSE
REPORT ERROR
END
I was promptly chastised for doing someone else's job. I didn't stay there long.
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