Format

The 2000 cover formats were a mix of artwork and photographs with the masthead remaining constant throughout.

The Autumn issue was again labeled as "Fall" in 2000.

The page length remained at 60 pages.

The contents had the following unique titles:

Little messages continued to be found on page 3, hidden somewhere in the Table of Contents.  These messages read as follows:

Covers

This year's covers had a wide assortment of themes and styles.

Gone were the "Free Kevin" references, as he was now free and there were new issues that eclipsed that long campaign.

Contributor credits were as follows:

Inside

The staff section had credits for Editor-In-Chief, Layout and Design, Cover Design, Office Manager, Writers, Webmaster, Network Operations, Video Production, Broadcast Coordinators, and IRC Admins.

The "Cover Concept and Photo" credit was added in the Fall.

"Video Production" was changed to "Still More Video Production" for Fall and "The Last (We Hope) of the Video Production" for Winter since Freedom Downtime still required more work after its H2K premiere.

The Winter staff section had asterisks after certain staff members' names, referring to "appeals pending" at the bottom of the page.  (This was in light of the disappointing results of various court cases this year.)

The staff section remained on page 4 for Spring and Summer and was moved to page 2 for the remaining issues.

The Statement of Ownership was printed on page 44 in the Winter edition.

In the wake of Y2K, we continued to have fun with our page numbers, particularly for the Spring issue.

Only pages 21 and 37 had the proper "Spring 2000" on them.  All the rest managed to convey the year in different ways.

Page 29 went with "Spring Two Thousand".  Others had varying methods of representing 0, including "Spring 0", "Spring 00", "Spring 000", and "Spring 0000".

We also had a couple that said "Spring 1900" to thoroughly replicate a Y2K error and "Spring 19100" for an even worse one.

Page 27 simply said "SPRING", while page 31 had "Spring XXXX", and page 57 just had everything crossed out.

Page 55 displayed "Spring 2600" instead.  Page 43 had the Roman Numeral representation of "Spring MM".

Then there was "Spring 02000000" (binary-coded decimal) and "Spring 002000000000" (octal-coded decimal).

We had "Spring 11111010000" (binary), "Spring 7D0" (hexadecimal), and "Spring 3720" (octal).

We even delved into other calendars with "Spring 4697" (the current Chinese year) and "Spring 5760" (the current Hebrew year).

All page numbers were fixed in time for the Summer issue, with the continuing exception of page 33, which displayed "19100" for Summer, "0" for Fall, and a big black rectangle for Winter.

Unique quotes continued to be printed in the staffbox of each issue:

Spring:  "If we have to file a thousand lawsuits a day, we'll do it." - Jack Valenti, head of the MPAA, referring to the steps they will take to silence those spreading the DeCSS source code.

Summer:  "Posting information about MPAA's anti-privacy operations and techniques will make that information easily available to those engaged in, or planning for, digital piracy of individual works." - MPAA's "Director of Anti-Piracy, Worldwide" Kenneth A. Jacobsen in a filing to the court to prevent the media and the public from learning what they are saying in pre-trial depositions.  He really did say "anti-privacy operations" in his filing.  Freudian slip?  You decide.

Fall:  "Anyone wishing to make lawful use of a particular movie may buy or rent a videotape, play it, and even copy all or part of it with readily available equipment." - Judge (((Lewis A. Kaplan's))) way of dealing with the fact that it's virtually impossible to do this with a DVD - his apparent solution is to just go back and use old technology that isn't subject to insane laws.

Winter:  "I think any time you expose vulnerabilities it's a good thing" - United States Attorney General Janet Reno, May 2000 in response to security breaches uncovered by federal agents.

With the end of the Kevin Mitnick saga scheduled for January, we thought things would finally calm down.  We were wrong.  "...it was with the precision of a soap opera that one crisis was immediately succeeded by the next.  On the very day before Kevin Mitnick's release, we at 2600 became the latest targets of a world gone mad with litigation and incarceration."  The Motion Picture Association of America decided that we were somehow responsible for a tool on the Internet known as DeCSS, which existed solely to bypass access controls on DVD technology and allow Linux machines to play DVDs.  (The mass media and plaintiffs would repeatedly confuse that with piracy.)  Our linking to the source code was enough for us to be labeled as the main offenders and, as hackers, we were seen as an easy opponent that the judge would have no sympathy for.  The irony was pretty biting.  "We don't even have a working DVD player and here they were accusing us of piracy."

But we had a lot on our side, too.  The "Free Kevin" movement had helped train us in organization skills.  "Never before have we seen such awareness and education on the part of the hacker community."  A massive action in conjunction with 2600 meetings took place on February 4th.  We had the honor of introducing many to the evils of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, since we were the first people being prosecuted under it.  We were able to outline all of the things this law now made illegal for the first time and explain why it posed such a huge threat.  It all started with a lawsuit from the DVD Copy Control Association that was filed in December.  Since the court it was filed in had no jurisdiction over us, we didn't see it as anything but a bit of a joke.  But then the MPAA got involved and filed a lawsuit against us and three others on January 14th in a court that did have jurisdiction.  We were forced to remove code from our website and hundreds of other sites mirrored the code to support us.  The New York Times linked to our links in order to show their opposition to this motion.  We were in good company.  "It would be a big mistake to assume that the battle has ended with Mitnick's release.  Complacency will destroy us and freethinkers everywhere."

On the subject of Kevin Mitnick, we now found ourselves focusing on his reintegration into society and the various injustices he was being forced to endure in the three years of supervised release that were now ahead.  "Mitnick has not had a truly free day since 1988 and won't again until 2003."  Although we had so much to distract us, we couldn't forget to acknowledge all those who had helped in the fight for justice over the years: "Every ounce of support that people like you have shown over the years has helped Kevin get through this ordeal and helped make the transition back to society a smooth one."  And while relationships with organizations like the ACLU and EFF were improving due to our court battle, many expressed concern that they had been absent throughout Mitnick's case.  We knew that we had to do better on this front.

In our Spring issue, Kevin wrote an article "A Taste of Freedom" where he described what it was like to go to a 2600 meeting and meet some of our attendees: "What fun it must be to be so young, and to know that there are people all around the world who share your passion."  Shortly after this, Kevin found himself testifying before a Senate committee on the subject of computer security.  It was an incredible transformation in such a short period of time.  His article contained this statement: "Without the support of 2600 and you all, my case would likely have ended up differently.  The support of each and every one of you positively influenced media treatment of my case, which gave me the energy to fight the charges against me, which in turn influenced the government's treatment of me."

The feeling of the start of a new chapter was palpable.  "It's over.  And yet, it's just beginning."  One battle may have ended, but as long as we stood for what we believed in, we would always have very powerful enemies: "...people with power who fear losing control of it behave irrationally and will spare no effort or expense to neutralize the perceived threat."

There were many other things going on in the hacker world.  Hackers were blamed for a massive denial-of-service attack targeting big corporations, even without any evidence linking it to the hacker world.  When evidence of criminal behavior in any story was uncovered, we tried to be quick to condemn it, as we did to one unfortunate letter writer: "This moronic behavior of yours is what makes things difficult for the many thousands of non-malicious hackers out there."  We didn't go any easier on a market researcher who wrote in to try and justify his trade's intrusive behavior: "We trust you realize that you're the scum of the earth."

We had a great number of people writing in with horror stories from school after they were accused of being hackers.  We liked to think that publishing these stories was somewhat therapeutic for them.  And occasionally, there was a story of someone who was treated in an intelligent manner or who found a teacher that understood what it was they were saying or doing.

There were a good number of debates on all kinds of issues, including whether it was right to spread information on how to remove GeoCities ads when visiting one of their pages.  We argued that since visitors weren't necessarily their customers, this didn't constitute any violation of their terms.  We also got into debates over the hacked web page section of our own site.  We maintained: "Changing the message on a web site is a trivial act."  Others didn't agree that this was as harmless as we thought.

2600 meetings make an appearance in a Canadian cartoon called Kevin Spencer, which surprised and amazed us.  We received a great number of comments on perceived Y2K errors in our Winter 1999-2000 issue, as well as some in our 2000 issues.  And we surprised many with our announcement of punk rocker and social activist (((Jello Biafra))) as keynote speaker for our H2K conference in July.

For whatever reason, 2000 was the year of the lawsuit... particularly the year of the lawsuit against us.  We received a legal threat from Staples over an article that had appeared in a previous issue, which sought to advise us on finding the line where freedom of speech ends and corporate infringement begins.  We advised them that "...while we appreciate the suggestions on how to run our business, we feel your needs would best be suited if you simply minded yours."  When they demanded that we reveal the name of the author of the story, we made our position quite clear: "We will never reveal a source without that source's explicit permission.  And we won't cave in to threats of any sort."  We printed the whole thing in our letters section.  The writer of the story even wrote in to reemphasize our position.

And it continued.  A new company called Verizon threatened us for registering verizonreallysucks.com as a counter to their registering verizonsucks.com.  They actually accused us of cybersquatting!  "While we're pleased that we may be Verizon's very first lawsuit, we're annoyed at the utter waste of time these huge entities continue to waste."  We found that "the new massive company formed by the merger between Bell Atlantic and GTE" had registered no fewer than 706 domains, many of which were names critical of the company.  We printed them all.  Apparently, they thought taking control of these phrases would prevent people from criticizing them.  They had no idea what they were up against.

New domain registrars opened up that allowed people to register sites with certain offensive words in them, something that hadn't been allowed in the past.  (((NBC))) threatened us with a lawsuit after we registered fu*knbc.com and pointed it at them.  We also registered fu*kcbs.com and were happy when they didn't threaten us.  "We should point out that CBS has taken the existence of our site a lot better than NBC.  Of course, their parent company (Viacom) is already suing us for DeCSS."  But it didn't take long for (((CBS))) to join in the fun and threaten us for having the fu*kcbs.com site.  So we registered fu*kabcandfu*kfoxtoo.com to "see if one domain can generate threats from two different corporations."  While we managed to escape their wrath on that one, it definitely felt like something was in the air.  "Corporate America has gone mad with litigation and its obsession with the net.  Meanwhile, governments the world over are doing everything possible to close the Pandora's box of freedom the net has created.  It's getting pretty ugly out there."

In another form of perfect symmetry, our trial in the DeCSS case was scheduled for the day after H2K ended.  This meant that lots of conference attendees could actually stay in town and attend the trial!  "One thing the summer of 2000 will not be remembered for is dullness."

We didn't expect things to go well.  "There ought to be limits to freedom" was the George W. Bush quote that many powerful people wished would be applied to us.  And it wasn't too hard to see why we were suddenly Public Enemy Number One.  "It's safe to say that new developments in technology are scaring the corporate world to death.  What milestones like Napster represent to them is a potential loss of the control they've held for so long."

We fought back in whatever ways we could think of.  Our anti-MPAA t-shirts helped to raise funds for our legal defense and they conveyed a powerful message at the same time.  The front was a version of our Spring 2000 cover with slightly different wording (instead of "The Following Magazine Has Been Sued For Free Speech" text from the cover, we rephrased it and inserted a missing word, so it read: "2600 The Hacker Quarterly Has Been Sued For Exercising Free Speech").  The back of the shirt was a "scary caricature of MPAA chief Jack Valenti."

But in the end, we lost.  "It seemed obvious from the beginning that the court was sympathetic to the case of the MPAA and this was certainly borne out in the decision."  Despite having great representation and the full support of the (((Electronic Frontier Foundation))), we couldn't escape what everyone expected as a foregone conclusion.  "The judge bought into the notion that hackers are evil."

But, in a way, it was the best thing that could have happened to us because we felt fired up by the injustice of it all.  "Their victory will be more costly than our loss."  We redoubled our efforts to educate the public - and the politicians: "Every single elected official needs to be targeted aggressively so that they realize what a bad mistake the DMCA is."

Our Fall issue was filled with letters from readers outraged at the decision.  And again, we found that we had more energy to fight than ever before.  "One thing that seemed to come out of this summer's H2K conference was the sentiment that the time to sit back and take it is over."  It was almost like we had been set up to be the right people in the right place at the right time.  "What we've seen over the last few months as a direct result of this is the tremendous growth of activism in our community.  The Free Kevin movement started us in this direction and the DeCSS case gave us a real push."

Education was where we needed to apply our efforts while the appeal to our case was being worked on.  Most people got why the corporate logic of the MPAA was flawed and saw how it worked against the best interests of the individual.  "We don't believe in forcing people to buy an issue for every person who reads it, we don't believe in region coding to prevent those in other countries from reading our words, and we don't limit the reading of our words to 'authorized' people."

"We have complied with the injunctions against us but we doubt that will be enough to satisfy the MPAA or future cases that involve the DMCA."  We replaced our links with a list, in order to satisfy the injunctions and also to force the issue as to whether we would be ordered to not even speak the names of the sites hosting DeCSS.  EFF announced that they would appeal the case all the way to the Supreme Court.  The appeal was scheduled to be heard in the spring.

When we tallied it all up at one point, we found ourselves involved in two lawsuits and at least six lawsuit threats - all at the same time.  "We expected an increase in attacks on us because of a perceived weakened state.  But this is nothing compared to what will happen if we don't resist each and every time we're pushed."

Of course, it wasn't all about lawsuits this year.  We had the usual diverse collection of articles of all sorts, including topics like an intro to biometrics and talk of a concept car called the Cadillac Evoq.  There was fallout from the ILOVEYOU virus and an apparent inability of people to learn from the last year's Melissa virus.  We encouraged our readers from other countries to register domains for 2600 and to point them to us to get around many of the filters that were being put in place to keep people from getting to our site.

We had the usual correspondence with new readers who got into debates with our autoresponders and didn't appreciate our not answering their individual emails.  "Many people take it personally when we're impersonal."  Someone decided to insert the 2600 website into the subject line of a virus email, which led to all kinds of accusations and paranoia.  We declared war on spammers who insisted on emailing our letters department.  And, despite being sued by the entire motion picture industry, they still found time to ask our permission to use 2600 in a Warner Brothers movie.

There was lots of talk about ID badges in schools and how students were being forced to wear them, raising all kinds of privacy issues.  We also saw concern over the status of people's credit reports.  One reader who worked in the financial industry found it "amazing that so much private information is held by the credit bureaus and financial institutions."  Another theorized on the coolness factor of having a car computer: "It would be neat to have a computer in your car.  You could use it to play MP3s, hack, or as a really complex red box."

Throughout it all, keeping control of the Internet out of the hands of the powerful was paramount.  We were very concerned over "the risk involved when we hand over our Internet access to major corporations who dominate the industry."  The threat was obvious to the hacker community.  "It's not going to be easy and it's not going to be pleasant.  But if we let these powerful entities dictate how we express ourselves, we will have lost the most powerful voice we've ever had."  We saw a very definite threat of corporate mergers on free expression.  We tried to save the whoownswhat.net project, which was designed to show the extent of such mergers and takeovers.  But we were completely overwhelmed with the number of projects and court appearances we found ourselves a part of in 2000.

We had a successful conference (H2K) in July and announced that our next one would be taking place only two years later, instead of having a three year gap that our first three conferences had.  By the end of the year, H2K videos were available on VHS.  We hosted a premiere of our documentary Freedom Downtime at H2K, but found that it needed more work, so it wasn't officially finished until December.

Just when we thought things might be calming down a little, we found ourselves thrust back into the spotlight in August when our layout artist was arrested while walking down a street in Philadelphia during the Republican National Convention.  The act of talking on a cell phone was enough for the authorities to lock him up for several days on suspicion of planning a demonstration.  (He was, in fact, talking to one of us at 2600 and was eventually exonerated after a lengthy court battle.)  It was precisely this kind of thing that pushed us further towards collaboration with independent media.  By the end of the year, we had helped the Indymedia Center "form a base in New York" by donating office space.

We focused on issues like the battle against Low-Power FM that was being led by National Public Radio and the National Association of Broadcasters for their own selfish purposes.  We witnessed ominous developments: "...the power of the DMCA was extended in October to encompass creation - in addition to distribution - of 'circumvention tools.'"  And we issued warnings against the dangers of the encroaching surveillance state: "An open society has no reason to fear its citizens.  A closed and oppressive society, such as most prisons, some schools, and all dictatorships, feels the need to constantly monitor the people under its control and to do anything possible to quell rebelliousness and feelings of individuality."

In the wake of the historic 2000 presidential election, we issued a call for ideas for better voting systems, as it became clear there were so many problems with the technology currently in use.

As always, we were challenged for printing the kind of material we specialized in.  "If we start agonizing over what people might do with the information we print, we will very quickly run out of topics that won't have some potentially adverse affect [sic] somewhere."  We made it quite clear that our content wasn't published to put forward one agenda over another: "...we don't print information for the purpose of revenge.  We print information, period."  We drew the usual condemnation from various types against us and the people we were standing up for.  It didn't really bother us.  "It always makes us feel like we're doing the right thing when those who oppose us consistently turn out to be such morons."  We vowed never to yield to pressure from those in power when it came to deciding what to print.  "The most irresponsible use of information is to withhold it out of fear."

In the end, the year 2000 proved to be quite historic in both challenging those in power and defending ourselves from them.  "While many have suggested everything from leaving the country to operating our web site off an oil rig in international waters, we think the best move is to stay right where we are and fight."  For the first time, the arena of the battles we fought greatly expanded to include hugely popular items in the mainstream like DVDs and MP3s.  The attack on us by the MPAA inspired us to get involved in these technologies, far more than we had in the past: "Artificial barriers and controls are on the brink of extinction, thanks to innovative and intelligent applications of technology."  We learned that we had much in common with consumers fighting for their rights and the hacker world had much to offer them through technical knowledge.  "In 2000, individuals stood up to unlikely corporate stooges with names like Metallica and reminded them that consumers are the ultimate authority on how an industry will function - once they get it together enough to take control."


Spring:  The Spring 2000 cover reflected what had just happened to us: a lawsuit was filed against 2600 on behalf of the Motion Picture Association of America.

So we modified the text of an R-rated movie preview to reflect this event, and added some of our favorite movie characters: Mickey Mouse, Darth Vader, and Bugs Bunny, representing Disney, Lucasfilm, and Warner Brothers.

The picture was presented on a screen attached to a DVD player.

The eject button on the left was altered to read "REJECT" and the player's logo was changed to say "DVD TYRANNY".

The volume, channel, and power controls were made to read: "AWARENESS + UNITY = POWER".

Finally, the copyright symbol on the "preview" was reversed to be the Copyleft symbol.
Return to $2600 Index