Format

Our new binding experiment continued through the year, with mostly negative results.  Having a spine instead of staples made it harder for many people to read.  But it gave us a new opportunity to insert a secret message, one that was supposed to have taken two years to materialize, but which quick readers discovered by the end of the year.

It would have said "SURPRISED?" and it was probably for the best that it was uncovered early, as the new binding would be abandoned in 2008.

Also of note: the Summer issue was printed in a slightly smaller format by the printer, which led to even more internal tumult.

The contents had the following unique titles: Spring: "Tidbits"; Summer: "Morsels"; Autumn: "Smorgasbord"; and Winter: "Presentations".

Little messages continued to be found on Page 3, hidden in tiny print within the graphic section of the contents.  The messages were as follows:

Letters titles continued to be unique with each issue:

Covers

The Cover credit for the first three covers this year went to Dabu Ch'wald and Winter went to Exscotticus.

The 2007 covers were a collection of different photographic images, each telling their own unique story.

Inside

Apart from the struggles with the binding and other printing issues that took up most of the year, the format didn't change too much over that time.  The Staff section found a new home on Page 65.  The Puzzle section stayed on Page 64 and kept the name "Puzzle" for the first three issues.  It was discontinued for Winter and beyond.

The Staff section had credits for Editor-In-Chief, Layout and Design, Cover, Office Manager, Writers, Webmasters, Network Operations (except Autumn), Quality Degradation (Spring and Summer only), Broadcast Coordinators, IRC Admins, and Forum Admin (except Autumn).  Starting in Winter, an Associate Editor was added.  The Statement of Ownership was printed on Page 5 in the Autumn edition.  Prices remained unchanged.

The first words we printed in 2007 were: "Please believe us when we say that we don't intentionally set out to cause trouble and mayhem."  We really didn't mean to always land in the middle of all the turmoil.  But recently released internal documents revealed that both 2600 and the HOPE conference were of great concern to the NYPD during the Republican Convention of 2004.  Three years later, we found ourselves immersed in that story all over again.

And then we found out that Hotel Pennsylvania, the hotel where we had been holding our HOPE conferences since 1994, was slated to be demolished.  Worst of all, few in New York seemed to really care since they tended not to stay in hotels in the city they lived in.  But we knew this was an important issue to so many people from around the world who found it a convenient and cheap place to stay.  And so, "once more it appears that our community will have to step up and hopefully make a difference."  We started a publicity campaign to save it from destruction.  We were well acquainted with what it was like to fight for something as the underdog.  After all, "to this day it remains impossible that we could hold an event of this size in a city like New York and manage to keep it affordable.  But we do it anyway."  And we also were quite familiar with the fact that "being who you are at a particular place and point in time is sometimes all you need."  We started an online forum at talk.hope.net where people could converse about the conferences but also strategize on ways to save the hotel: "...we find ourselves yet again in a position where we have no choice but to take a stand and help start something that could have a profound effect on a lot of people."

As far as content covered this year, privacy and anonymity led the list.  There was ongoing concern over the protection of sources, something we always took seriously.  We assured readers that "we will do everything possible to protect your identity.  But you must also exhibit a good degree of caution if you want to preserve your anonymity."  At the same time, we realized that, for many, the technology was still too complex.  "We can say with assurance that the media lacks the skills to do much beyond resolving an IP found in the headers of your email.  If you really want to test your system, sending a threat to the White House or announcing the grand opening of a new al-Qaeda chapter would get far more talented people involved in the challenge."

We tackled issues attached to the use of encryption, specifically PGP, and we explained why we encouraged people not to encrypt articles if they weren't going to do it properly.  The trouble came from not designing an easy-to-use system.  "Until we build a system that everyone can use, we will continue to see most people use it improperly."  For those who were able to get articles to us successfully, we made it clear what our minimum requirements were: "Words that make sense when strung together.  Words that have something to do with hacking.  And words that haven't appeared elsewhere."  For those looking for a bit more meaning, we were able to describe that too.  "If anything were to sum up what every single one of our articles has had in common over all these years, it's that desire to find out just a little bit more, to modify the parameters in a unique way, to be the first to figure out how to achieve a completely different result."

There were also signs of progress in the world around us.  "In recent months there has finally been attention given to the horribly unfair telephone rates forced on prisoners and their families."  And we tried to temper our critique with positive thoughts.  "We spend a lot of time pointing out the bad things around us so it's especially important to acknowledge the exceptions."

But, as always, there were also signs of regression.  Hackers continued to be denigrated at every opportunity, by lawmakers, mass media, and even average people, all convinced that we were somehow the threat.  "In the current day, we are security-obsessed without having gotten any better at being secure."  Everyone was being scared senseless by movie scripts and fantasies: "we literally obsess over scenarios that aren't playing out but which one day in a worst-case scenario might."  Meanwhile, we weren't being encouraged to think for ourselves or to come up with creative solutions to any of these potential problems.  "This is always going to be a problem if people rely on settings determined by other people who often have little idea what's going on."

Readers contributed all sorts of stories on insecurity, including one that told how incredibly easy it was to gain access to a customer account inside a store and how the customer's passcode was prominently displayed on a screen.  We focused on companies like Target, Virgin Mobile, Time Warner Cable, Gateway, and GoDaddy.  All of them had a common theme: "As long as there are human beings in the equation, security holes like this are going to exist in one form or another."  We ran articles on AT&T's wireless account security, Novell, PayPal, Facebook, even Brinks alarm systems.  We challenged the idea that security holes could only be exploited by those who understood the technology, arguing that "it's a lot harder to figure out how someone could think that you can only screw something up by having a good understanding of it.  If anything, the opposite is true."

There was always an interest in how various systems worked.  That's how we wound up examining Australia's "instant-runoff" voting system, as well as theorizing on how to exploit it.  We also ran an article on hacking elections in Canada.  We spent time dissecting the systems of everything from Clarion Hotels to LiveJournal.  We printed tutorials on such topics as building a "darknet," Beige Boxing, the RIAA and file sharing, web application security, lockpicking, RFID, and VoIP cellphones

We gave advice to new publishers.  And we continued to deal with the challenges of being publishers ourselves.  There was, of course, the ongoing issue of our new "spine" binding that our new printer mandated, which led to all kinds of complaints about the margins, the new inability to lay the magazine flat, and pages coming loose.  And, as if that wasn't enough, there was an issue with the ink from the Winter 2006-2007 cover rubbing off.  We promised to handle all of these challenges.  "We'll consider our options now that we've finally grown a spine after 20 years."  Things hit a low point with our Summer issue, which actually got printed in the wrong size, and the Autumn issue, which annoyed people even more with the quality of the binding and a new problem of pages falling out.  "We apologize to everyone for the Autumn issue which we consider to be below our standards."

There was a continuing problem with bookstores that weren't crediting us with sales properly or that had a policy of charging us for issues they couldn't account for.  Readers wrote in asking what the best method of buying the magazine was so that we'd actually be supported.

In the early part of the year, we sent out a survey to all of our subscribers and spent quite a bit of time going through the results.  In the Autumn issue, we had a special "Hacker Perspective" column that focused on responses to the reader survey.  We addressed those who disagreed with our opinions.  "Criticizing policy is a vital part of our society and if we quell that kind of discussion, we wind up with an even worse problem than what we were criticizing in the first place."  There were those who thought we should tone down our editorials when it came to criticizing policies.  "How we could ever agree to not address particular issues and express certain opinions in our own editorial is beyond us."  To those concerned with the issue of "politics" in our pages, we pointed out that political issues like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the USA PATRIOT Act, and the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) were all examples of politics affecting technology that we would do well not to ignore.  Most importantly, we vowed not to "change who we are in order to appeal to people who don't like who we are."

The "Techno-Exegesis" column from 2006 was discontinued and replaced with a new column called "Transmissions" starting in the Summer issue.  And, for the first time ever, we had pictures of North Korean payphones from two different sources.

One of the biggest threats to the hacker culture at the time was the mass media with their overwhelmingly negative portrayals.  "If it has anything to do with computers, phones, credit cards, or technology in any sense, hackers will be the ones seen as the threat."  These false perceptions had a real chilling effect on so many of us, and it made us wonder how many people were being silenced before ever having gotten to express themselves.  "Were we to have started publishing in 2008 rather than in 1984, we likely would have been quickly branded as potential terrorists before ever being able to establish a foothold in our culture that enabled us to be seen as a revealing and even necessary voice."

Spam was another subject that we spent time analyzing, as that negative part of the technological revolution continued to evolve.  "The old style spam of simply trying to con people out of their money may well evolve into outright threats and intimidation tactics to extort people."  And this was all connected to the overall evolution we were witnessing in our world.  "Hopping on the net and communicating worldwide is something practically everyone takes for granted these days."  This required a whole new way of thinking in order to not fall victim to scam artists and malicious software.  "Instead of trying to figure out ways to penetrate a system, the task now is to keep from being victimized by our collective naivete and the poor security that pervades the computers running our society."

We recalled fondly the old days of hacking.  "People used to get involved in hacking back when the world of computer and telephone technology was just beginning to open up because for many of us it was the only way in."  And, as always, we had to fight the negative thinking that always seemed to follow us: "to say the hacker world is dead because there's nothing left to hack shows a profound lack of understanding as to what hacking actually is."  We chose to continue focusing on the positive and those who really seemed to get it: "I have been a hacker for over 20 years.  I just never knew that there was this culture of individuals that thought and felt the same way about technology."  Words like that were what inspired us to keep moving forward.  "We will remain relevant as long as we keep thinking and developing as individuals."

Unbelievable as it seemed, we noted that our 25th anniversary was coming up.  We realized that "the world has become a very different place since 1984" and that "we would be remiss not to point out the differences, the trends, the dangers."  And we marveled at just how far we had come in this period of time and were thankful to those who had helped get us all there.  "Of course, there were those who were always pushing to go faster and get more.  It was this incessant need for expansion and improvement that got us where we are today."  There was even early talk of a book that might encompass some of the best articles in 2600 over the years.

We continued to discourage readers from doing the bidding of any military, as many seemed to think hackers were obligated to do.  After all, "it's not up to us to impose 'justice' on the net any more than it's up to anyone else with no legal authority."

We answered questions about our own bar code and exposed a URL for an AOL redirect.  We explored some of the fun that could be had with custom Caller ID capabilities.  We revealed some methods of identifying blocked calls and marveled at the specter of people who actually spoke their PINs out loud.  "Stupidity and bad security practices have an amazing resiliency."

But the most important message we tried to send throughout the year was that of sticking together as a community.  "There is growing and then there is growing apart."  The work remained hard and often filled with defeats.  "It's a frustrating battle to be sure, but it's most certainly not a lost cause."  What mattered the most was remaining engaged in the dialogue in what was proving to be a most pivotal time.  "What we really can't afford at this point is silence."  And we certainly couldn't afford to be intimidated by the authorities or by unjust laws and attitudes.  "Bullies only go away when people stand up to them."

Throughout everything, we tried never to lose sight of the magic contained within the world that we chose to focus upon.  That is, after all, why we took an interest in the first place.  "There is so much more to technology than the actual technology."

Spring:  The Spring 2007 cover is a simple image of a dog looking straight at us and seemingly getting zapped by a handheld metallic device (which was actually a cell phone jammer).

The device has an image of a character from Aqua Teen Hunger Force imprinted on it and giving us the middle finger.  This was actually a reference to an event known as the 2007 Boston Mooninite panic where this same image appeared on battery-powered LED placards throughout the city, which were mistakenly (and absurdly) thought of as potential bombs.
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