Format
The 1997 cover formats varied significantly from issue to issue in a number of ways.
The price remained at $4.50 per issue for the United States and $5.50 for Canada.
The masthead changed throughout the year in various ways for different reasons. The "2600" appeared in Times Roman in all issues except Summer, when the font from Wired Magazine was used as a parody. Other words in the masthead were of varying styles, sometimes in all caps and sometimes not, occasionally abbreviated but not always.
"The Hacker Quarterly" was left off the Spring cover by accident and the season was left off the covers of Summer, Autumn, and Winter deliberately.
The page length remained at 60 pages with the page numbering scheme remaining the same, but with font changes for Autumn and Winter.
The contents had the following unique titles:
- Spring: THE STUFF
- Summer: WTF
- Fall: DEPOSITIONS
- Winter: evidence
Little messages continued to be found on Page 3 masked into the dotted line that separated the contents from the mailing info. These messages read as follows:
In the middle of each issue, our first two letters pages continued to take the form of one giant double page with an envelope icon spanning the whole thing for the first two issues, a mailbox icon for Autumn, and no icon at all for Winter.
Letters titles continued to be unique:
- Spring: Letters That Don't Suck
- Summer: Lucky Letters
- Autumn: We Printed Your Letter!
- Winter: Letters To Captivate You
Covers
The covers continued to use photography instead of the illustrations of the past.
However, some liberal experimentation with imagery played a big part. Contributors varied for each issue.
Credits were as follows:
- Spring: D.A. Buchwald, Shawn West
- Summer: Joe630, Shawn West, and K. Harris
- Autumn: Zofia, The Chopping Block, Inc.
- Winter: Bob Hardy, The Chopping Block, Inc.
Inside
The staff section continued to have credits for Editor-In-Chief, Layout, Cover Design, Office Manager, Writers, Network Operations, Voice Mail, Webmaster, Inspirational Music, and Shout Outs.
Repair was added for Spring and Summer, Dog for Spring, Chief Organizer for Summer, Notwork Operations for Autumn (Notwork was our New York City hacker space), and Broadcast Coordinator was added for Winter.
The staff section remained on Page 2 and had a different style with each issue.
The listing for Inspirational Music in Spring was "CD player broke" and for Voice Mail in Summer was "Help Wanted."
Unique quotes continued to be printed in the staffbox of each issue:
Spring: "They have this myth that they are the cool guys and the cool guys always win over the suits. But the fact is that they are half-socialized, post-adolescents with serious ethical and moral boundary problems." - Mike Godwin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation commenting on hackers to the Associated Press, April 2, 1996.
Summer: "They're self-described nerds, using one word names like 'Mudge' or 'Dark Tangent' and dressing all in black." - The Associated Press in a July 12, 1997 report using their insight to describe hackers at the DEFCON conference.
Fall: "First and foremost, every White House person who has got access to classified information knows that you should not ever transmit any classified material either by cellular phone, non-protected phone, or by beeper. That is drilled into us fairly well. And as a general proposition, we are alerted to the sensitivity of all electronic communications - walkie-talkies, cellular phones, and beepers. And I think there are probably some staffers who now had a fairly painful reminder that these are indeed public transmissions. So their private matters are now more widely known. It probably will be a useful deterrent." - White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry commenting September 22, 1997 on the release by 2600 staffers of White House pager transmissions. He seems to agree with us that these are indeed "public transmissions." Maybe he can get the word to Louis Freeh.
Winter: "As a matter of policy, AT&T safeguards customer information from unauthorized access. It is also our policy to allow business customers to access their account-billing records to check the accuracy of their records and to request changes, as necessary, by using an automated system. Until now, questions such as yours have never come up, so we want to thank you very much for bringing your concerns to our attention." - An AT&T media relations representative responding to a member of The PRIVACY Forum's (www.vortex.com) revelation that their automated service intended to reveal the owner of a telephone number dialed on a customer's bill instead reveals anyone's number at anytime to anyone, listed or unlisted.
Mailing info continued to be printed on Page 3 as required by the post office. The Statement of Ownership was printed on Page 5 in the Autumn edition.
We hit the ground running in 1997 by plunging into the details of the Kevin Mitnick story. "Enough is Enough" was the title of our Spring editorial and it summed up how we felt, along with a growing number of others, concerning the lack of progress - or of information - in the Mitnick case. "Four books have come out and Mitnick still hasn't had a trial or a summation of crimes," we reported. We were frustrated with what amounted to little more than lip service from people in the community: "mere concern doesn't really amount to much." We were fed up with all of the news reports that didn't contain any actual facts. We stressed that whatever Mitnick's crimes were, they "didn't involve theft, personal profit, or damage to any computer system." In what seemed to almost be a farce, Mitnick was again put into solitary confinement, "... considered a 'threat' to the institution because prison authorities somehow reached the conclusion that he was going to modify a Walkman, turn it into an FM transmitter, and then proceed to bug the prison offices." This was the kind of thing we were dealing with on a daily basis. And it was frustrating to not have it challenged by the media. "Done enough times, this kind of garbage eventually turns into reality and the inevitable reaction against the 'crisis' is accepted as necessary." It had been two years since Mitnick's arrest and we knew little more than we did then. "Mitnick has never been charged with any recognizable crime and we doubt that he ever will be." We started an online mailing list for people to stay updated and begin organizing. "Education is the key to stopping this injustice and many of us have the ability to make a real difference."
We printed an article on hacking LED signs in the Spring issue, and the methods described there would wind up being used to create the Autumn cover consisting of hacked LED signs. In fact, those same signs had already been "reprogrammed" to publicize 2600 meetings to everyone passing through the subway station adjacent to the Citicorp Center in New York City where the meetings were held.
As penalties for hacking infractions grew more serious, we did our part in warning people about the potential consequences, such as the ones faced when hacking .gov and .mil sites. We also had a rash of stories about how parents dealt with their kids reading our magazine. More than one of these perspectives came from the parents themselves and most of those were quite supportive of what we were doing. In fact, we even encouraged our younger readers to bring their parents to their local 2600 meetings, which numbered 78 by the end of the year.
"Our subscribers haven't had a price increase since 1990!" We were quite proud of this fact and, even after suffering a devastating financial loss later in the year, we managed to keep our prices from going up.
We continued to have fun exposing all kinds of corporate shenanigans. For instance, RadioShack began selling a "Caller ID Blocker" for $31.95 that did nothing more than dial *67 before a call. And lots of people were having problems with expensive phone calls being billed directly to their land lines. The phone companies would tell them that it simply wasn't possible for anyone other than them to make these calls, but we were more than happy to explain just exactly how that wasn't true. And, of course, there was the increasing problem of spammers clogging up people's email accounts. As hackers, we encouraged the use of the "power of the net" to deal with these nuisances rather than support more regulations, which almost always caused more harm than good.
We also participated in our share of corporate mischief. A number of letters shared information on how to hack customer terminals in Barnes & Noble bookstores, the very stores that 2600 was sold in. We actually wound up getting feedback from the Barnes & Noble support desk and the person who wrote their inventory control system. They filled in some details and corrected our mistakes! They had the right attitude.
We were very proud of the fact that we somehow had managed to get a telephone that the phone company itself didn't know the location of. "NYNEX records do not show, in your case, where your telephone is located" read a letter that we subsequently printed.
It was a different time, when altavista.com was recommended as a good search engine and where hacking web pages was a brand new way of expressing oneself. We were all in favor of it, especially since we were unable to get our message out through the mainstream media. "We believe the web hacks are an imaginative and mostly harmless way of communicating dissent."
The hacker community itself was in a state of flux on a number of levels. We received a letter from one of the people who had become an informant - Justin Petersen (Agent Steal) - who officially apologized for helping the FBI. He went on to write an extremely detailed article on getting busted which appeared in the Autumn issue. But it remained a time where it was extremely difficult to know who could be trusted.
We had no shortage of complaints concerning the way newcomers were treated, especially in places like IRC, where people tended to be overly dismissive, particularly of those who came from AOL addresses. It even inspired an article entitled "How to Be a Real Dick on IRC." We had become rather fed up with some of the attitudes ourselves. We explained to our readers why we had printed an article the previous year entitled "How to Steal Things" which was little more than a guide on how to commit tangible fraud. We wanted to make sure the message was being heard and "... instead of us devoting another page to an editorial explaining why hackers are not criminals, we gave our readers something they couldn't keep quiet about. They didn't let us down." And, whenever possible, we tried to correct people who had strayed from the path and attempted to include us in their criminal plans with such retorts as: "The only thing we have in common with you is that we are both, as you say, 'dope' except you should have a capital D and write it on your mailbox." Our advice to kids was pretty simple: "What you do behind a keyboard should be a reflection of the values you believe in already."
Privacy was an increasing concern in 1997. "We've always maintained that the real threat to privacy doesn't come from hackers getting into large databases, but rather the people within who have 'legitimate' access to those databases and don't trigger alarms when they access them. Hackers gaining access are the best shot the average person has of ever finding out that these databases even exist." We were particularly worried about the Clinton administration, which had gotten a handle on technology and was trying everything within its power to try and control it. Meanwhile, elected officials failed to stand up to the restrictive Communications Decency Act, which, fortunately, was struck down over the summer by the Supreme Court. "Not the House, not the Senate, not the President. And certainly not the media." Almost nobody in power seemed to have the will to challenge the status quo.
It was the year of our long-awaited second conference: Beyond HOPE, the sequel to the Hackers On Planet Earth conference of 1994. This time, we would have a full T1 connection to the Internet, as opposed to the 28.8 kbps link at the previous conference. Beyond HOPE was taking place at the same time as the Hacking in Progress (HIP) conference in the Netherlands and we intended to provide a live video link, which was totally new ground for many of us. We actually lowered the price of admission from 1994 and offered free tickets to anyone coming from overseas. We introduced some new 2600 shirts, CD-ROMs of our radio show Off The Hook, and finally released the videos from the previous conference in time for the next one. We even attempted to change the colors of the Empire State Building lights to blue and white to match those of the conference! We came incredibly close but it ultimately didn't work.
While the conference itself was a success, it wound up losing money. This in itself wouldn't have been so bad except that it happened at the same time as something far more devastating: the bankruptcy of our main distributor (Fine Print of Austin, Texas). This left us basically without a substantial source of income for nearly an entire year. As a result, the Autumn issue came out extremely late and our whole schedule was thrown off significantly. While we initially had said that we didn't harbor any bad feelings towards the distributor, we found out later in the year that they had pilfered funds in advance of their closing down which led us to call for criminal charges to be filed against them. We wound up receiving $150 for the $100,000 they owed us.
We were determined to not be sunk by this disastrous turn of events. We told our readers "... there's one thing we have that most businesses and corporations lack. That is a spirit and a knack for survival." And we intended to survive no matter what. We promised that "... no matter how bad things get, we won't declare bankruptcy and absolve ourselves of responsibility to our debtors and our readers. We know how that feels and we won't continue the cycle." We actually dropped prices on our merchandise so people could help out by buying more of the things we had already paid for. We opted to stop printing the name of the season on our cover so that the issues would stay on the stands longer, especially if they were months late. The goal was to get back on track within a year, despite the painful sacrifices that would entail. "It will take a great deal more than financial disaster to stop hacker progress."
As mentioned earlier, we now had our radio show on CD-ROM and we had also expanded its availability so that people could, for the first time, listen regularly via our website and FTP in the new RealAudio format. We were at the forefront of a communications revolution. Programs like Net2Phone were making it possible to communicate with people throughout the world by voice over the Internet in ways we had only dreamed of years earlier. GSM phones had finally arrived in the States and we dove into that technology as well. A company called Omnipoint was the first GSM provider in the country and we had plenty of info to share about them, including a full list of their transmitters in the New York City region. We also discovered a way to defeat Caller ID blocking through Omnipoint that was actually a real threat to privacy.
At every turn, we met challenges from the people who just didn't get it or who thought that hackers were the biggest threat to the civilized world. "Ridiculous as it may appear, the hysterical braying that surrounds us is actually believed by a great many people, including those people with the power to change things." And in all the hysteria, the actual promise of the new technology was being lost. "They seemed to focus more on the potential misuses of the net and how to punish offenders rather than recognize it as the single most powerful tool of communication and free speech that has ever been known to humanity."
There was harassment at the Atlanta 2600 meeting by security guards. There were crackdowns against Internet freedom in China and Germany. We saw a student expelled for having the ResEdit application installed on a Mac. We regularly received letters that said things like "You all deserved to be arrested and imprisoned for treason." None of that dissuaded us from embracing the challenges ahead. "Authorities of all sorts have a tendency to panic when a group of hackers are around. Which is exactly why we must continue."
Even then, we knew that preserving the history was key. A reader wrote in with a retrospective on the very first 2600 meeting ten years earlier and how it had changed his life. We made a commitment to preserving hacked web pages, but not drawing attention to those with pornography or hate speech which threatened to overshadow the actual messages that were being conveyed. There was an ongoing debate on whether or not the quality of 2600 was declining and discussion on ways to remain relevant.
Throughout the year, we kept checking in on the progress of the Mitnick case. We learned of the incredibly restrictive conditions of his supervised release for whenever he finally got released. He would be forbidden from working with computers or wireless communications, not be allowed to use encryption, and not be allowed to have an alias. He even would be barred from having a television! It was hard to remain positive with this kind of news.
But we tried to do just that in the new (and old) technology we shared stories about. There was info on how to hack fast food drive-up windows as well as details on the military's AUTOVON phone system. We had an explosion of weird phone numbers sent in to us by readers, an in-depth article on the new MetroCards being rolled out in New York City, and a detailed how-to on "social engineering your way out of boot camp." We also had fun uncovering things like an FBI spy hotline that used a hackable answering machine. We printed specific virus information and were both condemned and thanked for it. "We don't think about what political slant we take when we spread information. We just spread information and try to wake people up." We looked forward to the introduction of new top level domains in the not-too-distant future and wondered what else might be possible: "We're surprised we haven't seen .xxx suggested as a potential domain for, gosh, who knows?" International toll-free numbers with 800 as the country code were introduced. E-ZPass debuted in the New York region for automobile toll collection and there were quickly reports of secret detectors being installed that could generate speeding tickets. The Baby Bells were merging: Bell Atlantic and NYNEX, Southwestern Bell, and Pacific Telesis. 311 was proposed by President Clinton as a number for non-emergency police calls. And in the competition for cluelessness, San Francisco removed payphones being used by drug dealers in order to protect people with a legitimate need for payphones while Congressman Edward Markey made it his mission to greatly expand prohibited frequencies on scanners. Not to be upstaged, the FCC made a really bad decision, requiring long distance companies to give payphone companies 28.4 cents for every call to a toll-free number, which kind of defeated the whole purpose of a toll-free number. And America Online made a big deal out of banning serial killers from having web pages, which apparently was a thing.
As a response to those who wanted to restrict technology even further and go so far as to make listening to certain frequencies illegal, we leaked some publicly accessible pager traffic from the White House "to demonstrate how absurd and unenforceable such laws are." Surprisingly, the White House themselves agreed with our assessment that these were public frequencies and took responsibility for the security breach without blaming hackers at all.
We received a mysterious challenge from a reader named Clive to find him with cryptic info he provided. There was discussion on the correct way to pronounce 2600. We printed our first in-depth guide to TCP/IP. There were articles on hacking Juno, "How to get away with things on Geocities," and a new service known as Mobil Speedpass. We printed an internal blacklist from Sun, as well as a look at a thousand search strings from random Yahoo! users. A reader suggested sending a worm program out to fix the upcoming millennium bug that was scheduled to hit in 2000. Another reported that Caller ID was being transmitted from overseas for the very first time. Seven-digit carrier access codes were set to begin being used in January, an expansion to the current five-digit ones. We printed what data we had on the GETS system in the mysterious 710 area code, suggested people use www.anonymizer.com to avoid having info about them given to websites, and discovered that an anti-hacker security consulting firm was pilfering material from 2600.
Our Winter issue came out extremely late, so we had already passed the third anniversary of Kevin Mitnick's arrest in February 1995. We learned that his trial was now scheduled for April of 1998. While we received plenty of criticism for defending Mitnick in the first place, as time went on, even the critics began to think the punishment was excessive. "When explained to people outside the hacker community, we find overwhelming interest and strong support for the simple goal of releasing Mitnick immediately and putting an end to this torture." We were also frustrated with the lack of progress within the community after all of the publicity we had fought for. A defense fund in his name only had $200 in it. Nothing could be worse than people not taking this seriously. What happened in the Mitnick case would become precedent if we allowed it to. "One way or another, this case will decide the future for many of us."
We had our work cut out for us.
Spring: Spring 1997 was an image within a browser.
The title of the "web page" was "Browse This!" with the masthead info directly below where a menu bar would normally be if this were actually a web browser.
Somehow our slogan ("The Hacker Quarterly") was left out.
To the right, where a browser graphic would normally be found, was a small image of the recurring hacker that had been seen in various other past covers.
The main image of the page shows a view of the Puck Building in downtown New York City, the site of the upcoming Beyond HOPE conference. However, a few liberties were taken with the image.
For one thing, the words "THIS PAGE HAS BEEN HACKED!" are scrawled across it, a reference to the many web page hacks that were going on at the time.
The statue of Shakespeare's Puck - a staple of the building - was altered to have him wearing a 2600 shirt, holding a copy of the Spring 1996 issue, and grasping a flag that says "PCS." (PCS phones were making their debut in the States at around this time, using both CDMA and GSM technology.)
At street level, Mulberry Street was relabeled as "Heavens Gate Way," a reference to the Heaven's Gate cult, a group of web developers who had recently committed mass suicide in anticipation of the arrival of the Hale-Bopp comet.
At the very bottom of the page (below the modified "Don't Walk" sign that was made to say "Don't Hack"), some pictography can be found using tiny icons to say that the combination of computers, a comet, and pills will lead to a casket.