Format

The 2001 cover formats were all photographs with various degrees of manipulation attached to each.

The Autumn issue was again labeled as "Fall" in 2001.  The page length remained at 60 pages.  The contents had the following unique titles:

Little messages were no longer found on Page 3, with the exception of Fall, which read: "rebuild" (for the fallen World Trade Center as well as the spirits of many in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks).

Letters titles continued to be unique with each issue:

Covers

Each of this year's covers was unique in its own way with varying messages related to what was happening at the time.

Cover Concept and Photo credits were as follows:

With The Chopping Block, Inc. continuing to be credited for Cover Design for every issue but Fall.

Inside

The staff section had credits for Editor-In-Chief, Layout and Design, Cover Concept and Photo, Cover Design (merged into "Cover Concept, Photo, Design" for Fall), Office Manager, Writers, Webmaster, Web Assistance, Network Operations, Special Projects, Broadcast Coordinators, and IRC Admins.

An "Enforcement" credit was added for Winter.  The equivalent of an R.I.P. was listed under "What Was" for Douglas Adams and Joey Ramone in the Summer issue.

"What Wasn't" was a tribute to Shinjan Majumder, a 13-year-old kid who committed suicide after being accused of hacking in his school and suspended.

A special "RIP WTC" message was printed in the Fall issue along with the following: "Dedicated to the memory of Wau Holland (12/20/1951- 07/29/2001) and the thousands lost on September 11" as well as a special shout out to "those who continue to help us all get through a period of unimaginable darkness in NYC."

The staff section remained on Page 2 throughout the year.  The Statement of Ownership was printed on Page 47 in the Winter edition.

We continued to have fun with one remaining page number, a leftover from the "mayhem" that occurred after Y2K.

Page 33 became a new tradition, showing something different with every issue.  Spring had the season omitted, Summer was reverse type, Fall had letters offset by 13 resulting in "Snyy" for "Fall" and "Cntr" for "Page," and Winter simply had the number 33.

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

Spring:  "Why is it perfectly legal to post a diagram of how to build a bomb on the net, but you can't post a code that descrambles DVDs?" - The March 3, 2001 edition of The Boondocks, a daily comic strip written and drawn by Aaron McGruder and seen in newspapers all over the county.  It devoted three days to the DeCSS controversy and, unlike virtually all news reports, got the story right.  ("county" was a typo - it clearly should have been "country")

Summer:  "Handing over the digital spectrum, or for that matter the Internet, to private power - that's a huge blow against democracy.  In the case of the Internet, it's a particularly dramatic blow against democracy because this was paid for by the public.  How undemocratic can you get?  Here is a major instrument, developed by the public - first part of the Pentagon, and then universities and the National Science Foundation - handed over in some manner that nobody knows to private corporations who want to turn it into an instrument of control.  They want to turn it into a home shopping center.  You know, where it will help them convert you into the kind of person they want.  Namely, someone who is passive, apathetic, sees their life only as a matter of having more commodities that they don't want.  Why give them a powerful weapon to turn you into that kind of a person?  Especially after you paid for the weapon?  Well, that's what's happening right in front of our eyes." - (((Noam Chomsky))), linguist and "political dissident," from an interview with the Boston Phoenix in 1999.

Fall:  "We all have to fight against the hacker community." - Judy Elder of Microsoft Canada, as quoted by the CBC, July 31, 2001.

Winter:  "Publication that is deemed to be a threat to legitimate penological objectives." - State of Washington Department of Corrections, 2001.

2001 was yet another pivotal year, this time on a much more massive scale.

We started out feeling optimistic as our appeal in the DeCSS case drew closer.  We had some very positive developments.  Representative Rick Boucher from Virginia actually spoke out publicly against certain elements of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).  We believed these doubts weren't isolated: "We suspect that there are many others in Congress who feel the same unease but are hesitant to speak out against such powerful lobbies as the MPAA and the RIAA."

Meanwhile, cartoonist Aaron McGruder devoted three days of his comic strip The Boondocks to the DeCSS controversy - and got all the facts right.  The result was published in daily newspapers all across the country.

"This biting political commentary accomplished in two sentences what virtually every major editorial page has so far failed to do."  All of this made us realize "we have allies in places we never even thought of."  Eventually, we lost our appeal to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, leading to a new vow: "We intend to take this case to the Supreme Court."

Fighting our battles was both gratifying and taxing.  It wasn't easy to always stay positive.  "It's imperative that we keep our sense of humor throughout, no matter how it all turns out."  The importance of the various fights we became engaged in wasn't lost on us.

"Destiny has put us in this position at this time in history and we have to continue to stand up for those things we believe in - free speech, free communication, free access to knowledge, and the ability to control and shape technology to suit our individual needs."  Throughout it all, we always felt that it was a privilege to be challenged and to have to stand up for our beliefs.  "We're very lucky to be where we are, despite the risks."

We got a fair amount of pushback for the "Vote Nader" tattoo that appeared on the Fall 2000 cover, particularly in light of the election results.  We were accused of endorsing the Green candidate and helping to screw up the entire thing.  We took it in stride.  "If printing two words on our cover upset the status quo this much, we must have done something right."  In fact, we had never endorsed anyone, but simply expressed a desire for people to think and to question, as hackers should always do.  "We don't care who you vote for and, as events have shown, it doesn't really matter anyway.  And that is what you should be focusing your anger towards."

We noticed some disturbing parallels between the hacker community and demonstrations in the street.  We noticed how certain types of demonstrators never seemed to be prosecuted while others almost always were.  We had seen this before in our world: "It's always the brightest ones who don't try to use their talents in a criminal manner who get the book thrown at them."

We gave lots of advice to students who were being harassed by their schools for various things - posting fliers about 2600 meetings, running an independent newspaper, finding security holes.  It was truly great to see so many kids getting involved and standing up to authority whenever possible.  We also had to contend with some really paranoid readers who believed we were checking them out in bookstores and printing parts of their Social Security numbers on our envelopes.  There were more than a few people who thought that simply buying our magazine anywhere would get them "blacklisted" by the government, whatever that meant.

We printed info on the benefits and dangers of anonymous proxies.  We had some unique advice on how to study the FBI's Carnivore system, designed to monitor email and electronic communications: "Perhaps the best way we can learn about such things as Carnivore is to trigger them more often."  We encouraged our own method of spying, such as eavesdropping on pagers that broadcast in the clear: "We hope to see a lot more pager monitoring in the future so people can see firsthand how public it is."

As always, we were faced with people bemoaning the loss of the magic from days past, leading us to advise that "What's happening right now will one day be described as the good old days.  It's up to all of us to see that the magical spirit that has been a part of the hacker world from the beginning is preserved and respected.  There will always be people who get it and as long as they exist, there's hope."

We had a new lawsuit to contend with as the Ford Motor Company decided to sue us without any warning over a domain we had registered.  Oddly, the domain was fu*kgeneralmotors.com.  Ford had become incensed when we pointed it at them.  We tried to understand how they thought this could hurt their brand, since someone would have had to have entered that disrespectful phrase, been redirected to Ford, and then somehow taken offense that Ford was apparently insulting General Motors, even though that's the phrase the user would had entered in the first place.  We saw it as a joke but also as an important battle that needed to be fought in order to ensure future rights involving freedom of speech, which is why we had registered such domain names in the first place.  "In some ways, it's an honor to be sued.  We're basically being told to put up or shut up, to prove our points, to actually stand up for what we believe in."  We led a caravan to Detroit to appear in court and uncovered an internal Ford memo warning of our appearance and the potential disruption we could cause.  By the end of the year, a federal court had ruled in our favor.

There was also the battle to clear our layout artist ShapeShifter's name after he was detained for a week during the previous year's RNC convention in Philadelphia.  The court ruled that they could keep $750 of his for "administrative costs" despite all charges being dropped.  "We know all about the eternal vigilance thing - we just didn't expect to be living it so literally."

We caught Fox News stealing an image from our site and using it to imply that Kevin Mitnick was somehow involved in the recent Microsoft DNS breakdown.  We heard warnings about the Digital Agenda Act in Australia, which was very similar to our own DMCA.  We saw a hacker named Zyklon released from prison after being sentenced simply for hacking a web page.  And we heard multiple reports of face scanning software being used at this year's Super Bowl, an ominous sign for the future.

It was the year we finally got to see the film version of Takedown, the script of which had led us to protest outside Miramax headquarters back in 1998.  The film was released in France as Cybertraque and American DVD players were unable to play it, which somehow seemed fitting.  Our review was fairly brutal.  "This travesty could have been prevented if only a dialogue had been established.  Instead we have a film that actually makes region coding seem like a good idea."  As we had read the many versions of the script, we were able to share a secret about the unlit cigar in the film.  But there wasn't much we could find to praise.  "Bad storytelling has a way of not working out."

On the conference front, H2K2 was announced for July of 2002 with four times the space of H2K.  We began running ads for this year's HAL 2001 hacker camp in the Netherlands, which we were a sponsor of.  It turned out to be the hacker event of the year.  "For all too brief a period, we could forget the worries back home and take part in what may have been the best hacker conference so far, where people from all over the world built the equivalent of a small city in the fields of the Netherlands."

We appealed for help in reviving the Phrack electronic newsletter "Since it's important to have multiple voices in the hacker community."  There were so many of those voices that we heard from, sharing such thoughts as: "It is obvious that hacking really has very little to do with computers and is more about a certain free-thinking mindset which can be seen throughout history in those who have contributed greatly to humanity."  We agreed on the importance of explaining the issues to non-technical people.  When one reader questioned whether it was worthwhile for high school students to fight against mandatory ID cards, we responded: "We can't think of a better environment to question what's happening than a school."

Readers sent in their opinions and theories on better voting systems, a topic being discussed in many forums after the election drama of 2000.  There were ideas put forth on how to combat RadioShack's annoying habit of demanding your name and address whenever you bought something.  One suggestion was to use their own corporate office address when asked.  We warned of an "Internet business guide" scam that was making the rounds and billing companies close to a thousand dollars for nothing.  In response to a critique about accuracy in a particular article, we noted that "our info may not always be 100 percent but with some fine tuning and reader input, we can keep getting closer."  Collaboration was the key.

In April, all attention was on China where the United States found itself in an international dispute after one of its spy planes crashed into a Chinese Navy fighter jet and wound up having its crew detained by Chinese authorities.  We were deluged with emails encouraging us to strike at Chinese targets using our hacker skills.  Every last one of these requests was traced back to U.S. military addresses.  We told our readers that "We find it extremely telling that the authorities, the media, and apparently a whole lot of people in the military feel it's O.K. to vandalize sites if it's done for nationalistic purposes."  It represented a very real danger, to us and the entire hacker community.  "Now we see how our respective governments look at our abilities.  They believe hackers will be the soldiers of electronic warfare."  We promised to do everything we could to keep that from happening.

An offhanded reply to a letter where we said that reasonable people were sickened by the proliferation of guns in our society led to a real backlash from readers, one of whom countered that "other reasonable people are sickened by the proliferation of some of the information contained in 2600."  Despite what appeared to be almost unanimous (and surprising) opposition to our statement, we countered: "People who want to control information pose a far greater risk to a free society than those who want weapons to be handled responsibly.  And most free societies passionately agree."

The arrest of Dmitry Sklyarov, taken into custody after giving a talk on translating eBook files to PDF, represented the first time someone had actually seen the inside of a jail cell as a result of the DMCA.  "Ever since we became the first defendants to be charged with violating the DMCA last year with the DeCSS case, we knew that it would only be a matter of time before the arena changed from a civil court to a criminal court."  Fortunately, hackers were ready for this.  "The increasing activism of the hacker community over the years has put us in a position where we know what to do and can do it quicker and with more people than ever before."  Members of the community mobilized and got the word out instantly and the story made it into the news.  And even though Adobe was convinced by the public outrage to withdraw its complaint, the U.S. government, led by U.S. Attorney Robert S. Mueller, III, continued to prosecute Sklyarov and his Russian company ElcomSoft.  (As we went to press, Mueller became Director of the FBI.)

And then came September 11th.  "It takes an event of great magnitude to really put things into perspective, to make us realize how insignificant our daily concerns can be.  At the same time, such an occurrence can trigger a chain of events that wind up magnifying these concerns."  That is what we saw happening from the beginning.  Lawmakers seemed way too eager to slash our rights in exchange for perceived security.  We warned that "we have to be extremely careful not to add additional loss of freedom to the loss of life that is the legacy of terrorism."  There were so many danger signs.  "A little noticed provision would actually categorize violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as 'federal terrorism offenses.'"  It was terrifying to see it all disintegrating at the hands of our own elected officials so quickly.  But it would hardly be the first time that had happened.  In our Winter issue, we published a string of letters that were sent to us from September 11th through the 25th.  One reader summed it up best: "Welcome to the end of the world as we know it."

We tried to keep our spirits up throughout all the doom.  Keeping people communicating and welcoming newcomers was our goal.  We encouraged patience when answering questions from those who might be unfamiliar with the hacker philosophy.  We discouraged using terms like "black hat" and "cracker" since they "perpetuate a stereotype that only benefits those with an agenda of greed or power."  We attempted to get people to think about what hacking was really all about - and what it wasn't about.  "Suffice to say that if the 'hackers' you know seem primarily interested in fashion, image, and putting down anyone who's new or of a certain age, it's quite possible they've simply latched onto a culture they themselves don't understand or appreciate."

We discovered that our subscription rate was the same as it was back in 1989.  There was a good deal of interest in translating 2600 into other languages, but we mostly encouraged people to start their own zines with their own unique touches.  We also encouraged the use of our official IRC channel (irc.2600.net): "While it's operated by 2600, we have no control over what is said on that channel or server, which is the way IRC should be."

The spirit of individuality prevailed in our readership.  We gave people as much encouragement as we could and were happy to see this reinforced in the community: "Don't expect being an individual to be easy since it tends to make so many others uneasy."  This spirit was matched by one of rebellion, which showed itself in so many different ways.  Challenging parents, teachers, schools, bosses, the government, and the status quo were all par for the course in our pages.  This was how change could be accomplished, change that could counter all of the negativity that had been growing: "All of the unpleasant things that have occurred in the last decade or two - mandatory drug testing, cops in schools, prisons sprouting up everywhere, the growing 'need' for surveillance - will all be so much harder, if not completely impossible, to turn back because we let ourselves get used to them."  Complacency was a real danger.  And we felt that simply applying a different outlook would be all that was needed for society to start thinking differently.  "If the day comes when the use and experimentation of software is encouraged as much as we encourage reading, we suspect there will be less piracy and more sales."

It was the year of the Code Red worm, affecting hundreds of thousands of computers running Microsoft's IIS web server.  And we heard multiple times that the final build of Microsoft's Windows XP would be known as 2600.  We were less than thrilled.  There was lots of talk about how do-not-call lists operated.  We published details on a tool known as "The Matrixx" that AT&T @Home technicians used.  Some of our readers accused us of having "radically fringe" views for defending WTO protesters and continuing to criticize gun culture.  We battled anti Kevin Mitnick propaganda that we found being taught in schools.  And we reported on multiple instances of Verizon being accused of vandalizing the DSL lines of competitors.  We had issues with a new and artificially cheap Internet cafe known as easyEverything who were blocking access to hacker sites, ours included.  And our documentary Freedom Downtime was finally on the verge of being released after a full year of getting music rights.

2001 was without a doubt one of the most turbulent years we had been through on so many levels.  And all it took to make us feel like it was worth the effort was a note from one of our readers saying something like "Without 2600 I would've been lost since I lived in a small town with very few like-minded individuals."  That kind of acknowledgment continued to be our fuel.  We were eager to see what came next.


Spring:  The Spring 2001 cover was almost completely unmodified.

It was a photo taken on Inauguration Day in 2001, the day George W. Bush was sworn in as U.S. President after a very contentious and drawn out election.  The streets were filled with protesters and the image of helmeted police with clubs drawn standing in front of the Supreme Court was more symbolic than the authorities must have realized.

The only addition, apart from touching up the colors, was the image of a "SAVE WBAI" sticker.

The radio station that broadcast Off The Hook was in the midst of what many called a coup and the future of the station would be in limbo for the entire year.
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