Format
The 1994 cover format continued the previous year's style.
The price ($4) remained printed on the cover with the addition of a Canadian price in parentheses next to it, which was $5 up until Autumn, when it was raised to $5.50.
The page length remained at 48 pages with the page numbering scheme also remaining as it was in previous years.
The barcode was printed on the lower-left of each cover except for Autumn, when it was printed on the upper-right.
The table of contents titles remained on the back cover for Spring and Summer, then moved to Page 3 for Autumn and Winter.
Payphone photos (printed in color for the first time) moved to the back cover starting with the Autumn issue. We figured pictures of phones would look a whole lot better in color than would our table of contents. Why it took us so long to come to that conclusion is anyone's guess.
The contents had the following unique titles:
- Spring: documentation
- Summer: nutritional information
- Autumn: internal contents
- Winter: the guide
Little messages continued to be found on the back page in Spring and Summer.
These hidden messages then moved to Page 3 along with the table of contents starting with the Autumn issue where, instead of being tiny, they were masked into the dotted line that separated the contents from the mailing info.
These messages read as follows:
- Spring: "no one told you when to run" A line from the Pink Floyd song "Time" - the full verse being "And then one day you find; Ten years have got behind you; No one told you when to run; You missed the starting gun" - it happened to be our tenth anniversary, after all.
- Summer: "all in all is all we all are" A line from the Nirvana song "All Apologies" in tribute to Kurt Cobain who died in April.
- Autumn: "SOME THINGS WILL NEVER CHANGE" A reference to the secret message surviving a page change.
- Winter: "HACK THE PLANET" A preview of the catch phrase from the movie Hackers, which would be released the following September).
Covers
The first three covers of the year were drawn by Holly Kaufman Spruch and the last one was drawn by Affra Gibbs.
The mini-covers in the upper-right continued to appear on each cover.
Inside
The staff section had credits for Editor-In-Chief, Office Manager, Artwork, Writers, Technical Expertise, and Shout Outs.
Because the previous year's overdue Statement of Ownership (required by the post office) had to be crammed into the Spring issue, the staffbox was referred to as "Squished Staff" for that issue. It appeared on Page 3 for Spring and Summer, then moved to Page 2 after that when the payphone photos were moved from Page 2 to the back cover.
The Writer list ended with "everyone else who never seems to fit in" for Spring, "the walled in" for Summer, "the victims of TV" for Autumn, and "so many more" for Winter.
While there wasn't a staffbox quote in the Spring issue due to the box being squished, it began to appear each issue after that with a unique quote.
For Summer, the quote came from Kenneth Rosenblatt from a piece called "Deterring Computer Crime" as published in Prosecutor's Brief from Summer 1989: "Our experience has found that the best way to hurt a computer offender is to take away his toys. Computers are expensive items, and young offenders in particular may be unable to replace them. The seizure of the offender's computer by police also immediately and dramatically brings home the consequences of computer crime in a way that interjudicial proceedings cannot match. The knowledge that the seized computer system will be retained by law enforcement hastens the realization that the offender must change his lifestyle."
For the Autumn issue, the quote was a line that applied to the hacker community from the hit song "Secret Agent Man" by Johnny Rivers: "A pretty face can hide an evil mind. Be careful what you say - you'll give yourself away."
The Winter quote was a condemnation of editor Emmanuel Goldstein by the famous hacker prosecutor and leader of Operation Sundevil Gail Thackeray: "He's an absolutely appalling influence on young men who fall for the glamorization of crime he publishes."
Mailing info continued to be printed on Page 3 as required by the post office.
We stopped listing each year of available back issues as it was starting to get ridiculous and began referring to them as "1984-1993" instead.
Our fax number was changed to 516-474-2677 starting with the Summer issue. We neatened the section up a bit starting with Autumn as part of our layout changes.
There were so many milestones to mark in 1994. For one thing, it was our tenth anniversary. "A decade is a long time to be doing anything," we noted in our first issue of the year. We were amazed at how much things had changed in a single decade. We had started by literally sneaking around in alleyways and now we were being sold in chain stores nationwide. "One thing these years have not been is a waste of time," we said, and we went on to conclude that "the hacker world is such that you can spend a long time within it and never feel the kind of boredom that has become such an important part of the average American's life." That's probably how the time managed to pass so quickly.
It was also the year that we finally managed to do what we were thinking of doing for years: putting on a conference. "Enthusiasm here began to spread like an infectious disease." The very first Hackers On Planet Earth conference would be held in August after not even being officially announced until the Summer issue came out. It was billed as "the first-ever global hacker event to take place in this country" and we vowed to "give many people their first taste of the net." We made a concerted effort to reach people who were in the mainstream and have them see the world of technology through our eyes. "We've got the means to see things in different, non-traditional ways and, most importantly, share these perceptions with each other." We decided to take that one step further and share it with outsiders. After all, it was one thing to meet amongst ourselves every month at the blossoming 2600 meetings that were being held worldwide. But getting to the general public was something else entirely.
That first HOPE conference turned out to be the biggest-ever gathering of hackers in this country at the time and it wound up changing the landscape forever. Sure, registration was an absolute farce and we learned an awful lot about the failings of technology in the process. But we managed to change the dialogue, at least for a while, from hackers being caught breaking the law to hackers designing the future of the Internet and of the digital world in general. "Things are different now and it's up to us to hold onto the ground that we've gained."
We had fun comparing our event with the Woodstock anniversary disaster that was taking place upstate on the same weekend. The original Woodstock was a "counter-cultural" Mecca while this event was crass commercialization with a plethora of rules and regulations. The Hotel Pennsylvania would prove to be much more of a true Woodstock for this community in the summer of 1994.
Of course, such an event came with a high cost. Not only a financial one, but in terms of time. Our Autumn issue was very late and it took quite a while for us to recover. We made it very clear that we had no idea when the next HOPE conference would happen, if ever. But we were thrilled that such events were starting to take hold.
Argentina was the site of another global hacker gathering later in the year. We saw real promise in the hacker community there and we tried to emphasize to them the importance of getting connected, especially considering the fairly recent history of oppression in that nation. "It's rather difficult to keep people in check when they can easily assemble electronically or instantly communicate with people on the other side of the globe." These advancements in the technology clearly had the potential to change everything.
But growth wasn't always seen as our friend. There was more than a little worry over the growing popularity of hackers in the mainstream culture. We were concerned over our world being dumbed down and made to fit into the mass media's distorted perception. With every book, TV show, and movie that came out about hackers, the problem got worse. And it certainly wasn't helped by misguided hacker groups that seemed to care more about bravado and image than about what the hacker world really needed. We warned that "we have to be on the alert for destructiveness from within that could unravel our accomplishments with far more effectiveness than any outside enemy." The importance of the information we communicated wasn't lost on any of us. "People who understand technology and are willing to shape it to further individual liberty will always be near the top of the enemy list of a repressive regime." And we believed that things would change in the future: "We hope to see a group come along one of these days that recognizes the importance of free speech and individual power."
We saw disturbing moves by the government with regards to encryption in the form of the Clipper Chip, a secretive encryption chipset developed by the NSA for the purpose of spying on our voice transmissions. Along with many others, we condemned this development along with the implication that other forms of encryption would be forbidden. "The Clinton Administration is becoming obsessed with monitoring citizens." It underlined our basic distrust of any government when it came to privacy issues. But it helped tools like PGP become extremely popular in our community. And speaking of government, the president@whitehouse.gov email address was announced to the world as the White House entered the digital age.
Privacy was becoming more and more of an issue as technology developed. We warned readers against using voicemail systems operated by their local phone companies as their security was unproven and it was a form of losing control of something personal.
On the amusing side, we were threatened with a lawsuit for printing a toll-free "commercial caller identification" number that we never even printed. The company that owned the number apparently thought we were responsible for anything that happened online, which is apparently where the number showed up. (Since their legal threat - which we printed as was now our tradition - contained the phone number in question, we actually wound up protecting them by covering up some of the digits.)
We published an article on yet another way to generate Red Box tones and make free phone calls from a payphone - by using Hallmark Cards that recorded sound. (We also learned that RadioShack was discontinuing its tone dialers after our revelation of how they could be modified into Red Boxes and the ensuing mayhem that caused.)
We also had fun replying to a condescending letter from the National Cable Television Association lecturing us on the "crime" of unauthorized descrambling. We told them there was a secret message hidden on the page that had their reply (letters comprising the message were bold and underlined) and that only people who had paid the fee were authorized to read it. The message read:
We had a fun multi-page ad gimmick telling of changes to the voice BBS, publicizing the 2600 IRC meetings (held on the 26th of each month in channel #2600), and announcing the alt.2600 USENET newsgroup. Our fax number was now 516-474-2677 (which disturbingly spelled 474-COPS) and our voice BBS could be reached directly at 516-473-2626. It was revealed that our old voice BBS number had been 516-751-6339 which had only been reachable through the AT&T EasyReach service. We decided to stop using that service for a few reasons. There was no need for us to mask our number any longer (previously we had moved our voice BBS around from one line to another depending on our needs, but now we had a dedicated line for it), AT&T was planning on moving EasyReach to the new 500 area code from the 700 area code (they had been bragging about how this great programmable service would mean you'd never have to change your phone number again and here they were changing everyone's numbers so soon after launching the service), and the five-digit Carrier Access Codes were now going to be seven-digits.
This meant that a non-AT&T subscriber would have to dial 1010288-0700-751-2600 to get to our voice bulletin board. That was just asking too much. However, we did hold onto that EasyReach number for a while and programmed it to forward to the most expensive location on Earth to call: Inmarsat Atlantic West (country code 874) where satellite phones could be reached. The cost? $30 for the first three minutes, and an additional dollar for every six seconds after. But callers were warned first with a recording naming the "country" and advising of the rates, so it was mostly a way for people to call and hear a funny recording telling them what some outrageous charges could potentially be.
Area codes were beginning to go a little nuts too. Word got to us that three new area codes would be introduced in 1995: 334 (Alabama), 360 (Washington), and 520 (Arizona). This was significant in that they would be the first area codes not to have a one or a zero as the middle digit. Area codes would soon no longer look like area codes. And there were many more to come. Our 516 area code had been one of the last not to require a one to be dialed before calling another area code. In 1994, we were forced to conform with the rest of the country. There were also reports that the 555 exchange might be used for something other than directory assistance. And new rules were put into place defining what fictitious 555 phone numbers could be used in movies and TV shows (all such numbers would now have to be in the 555-01XX format).
Caller ID was beginning to pop up everywhere, along with controversy and discoveries. A company called Wiltel was found to be passing Caller ID data across state lines, something that hadn't been done before and which they were doing rather quietly until we started telling everybody. We discovered that it was possible to get ANI data (phone line info of the caller that was sent to owners of toll-free numbers) transmitted through a Caller ID box. These were two different technologies so this was an interesting find. And a small fight to preserve a bit of privacy was won: NYNEX changed the confusing method of blocking your number when making a call. Previously, you dialed *67 to either turn it on or off. But this toggle feature required that you already knew if it was on or off to start with. After a lot of criticism, they added *82 to unblock and made *67 the code to block. The ability to block *69 (Call Return) was also added after people objected to being able to get called back even if their Caller ID was blocked. These all seemed like common sense features to us, but sometimes it took corporate America a little while to catch up with logic.
Speaking of corporate America, we certainly had our fun. CompUSA decided to "permanently remove 2600 from their stores" after some high-ranking executive apparently discovered we were being sold there. We had a very keen interest (as did our readers) in how corporate leaks were detected and that knowledge was shared in our pages. Late in the year, a massive leak of information at British Telecom was revealed. We printed an extensive list of "potentially compromised" Internet hosts. We also printed this one sentence in a text box: "Recent reports indicate that Netcom's credit file, stored online and containing information on all their customers, has been compromised." That would turn into a critical bit of information in a major hacking case that wouldn't become apparent for another year. We exposed the "House of Windsor Catalog Scandal." Using a service known as AT&T's InfoWorks, the address of almost any phone number entered, even unlisted numbers, was given out to people calling them to have a catalog sent. It was proof of how little the telcos actually cared about subscriber privacy. And finally, clear evidence was found of district attorneys in California referring to hacker prosecutions as fun and profitable for law enforcement. Nobody was really surprised.
Our readers were particularly interested in everything from cable TV hacking to FOIA to compromising Novell Networks. A new device known as a "Chrome Box" could change traffic lights to green and was the source of much discussion. Also in the realm of traffic, we published a list of where secret red light cameras in New York City were installed. Months later, the New York Post published the same list and got all the credit for finding it.
Throughout each issue, we printed all sorts of phone numbers sent in from our readers - everything from weird tones to strange services. We discovered that only two phone lines went to Cuba from the United States - and they went via Italy!
We had an ongoing conversation about the role that software pirates played in the community and some interesting parallels were put forth. We warned of the danger of having transactional information monitored, which is what the authorities always seemed to want to do. We decried the passing of the Digital Telephony Bill which made remote surveillance capabilities mandatory in phone systems. There was widespread criticism of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) at the time for not opposing the bill and also suspicion of their motives when it was revealed how much they received in donations from phone companies and other corporate giants. This was definitely the low point in the relationship between EFF and the hacker community. We remained defiant in the face of privacy intrusions and what we saw as our right and duty to hack them. "We believe that manipulating any kind of surveillance or tracking device is not only acceptable but necessary." In addition, we continued to encourage people to use the Internet, as this was our greatest hope in being able to reach people everywhere without interference or censorship. (We also encouraged people to use Linux as much as possible.)
The year ended with us having 39 monthly 2600 meetings worldwide. For the first time, every issue published that year had an editorial on Page 4. (This had actually begun with the Autumn 1993 issue.) A new hacker-made documentary called Unauthorized Access showed great promise, not only in telling our story, but in showing how we could gain access to the world of film making. Our friends at Hack-Tic in Holland sadly decided to stop publishing, leaving the world with one less hacker magazine. We printed the farewell letter from publisher Rop Gonggrijp in our Winter issue. But something new was on the horizon: "2600.com will soon be in operation on the Internet."
Spring: Spring 1993 was a particularly busy image.
Much of it centered on a bit of history that was taking place in January: the first-ever online 2600 meeting in channel #2600 on IRC.
The room appears to be part of a disco, with data being spread from the ceiling where a disco globe would be.
On our IRC channel, we had two "bots" known as databot and entrybot. The entrybot would greet anyone who entered the channel while the databot was helpful in giving out information to anyone requesting it.
The databot, as mentioned, took the form of a disco globe, while the entrybot looked like a spaceman standing by the entrance - or at least a spacesuit.
All of this was also an allusion to the debut of a new science fiction program called Babylon 5.
The spacesuit was a pretty direct reference, while "bots" also played a big part in maintaining the space station on this new show.
To really hammer the point home, we had a road sign indicating a distance of five miles to Babylon (a village on Long Island not far from where 2600 was headquartered) and 26 miles to Middle Island (the village of our mailing address). (And yes, there is actually a point where you can be five miles from Babylon and 26 miles from Middle Island at the same time.)
A trashman with a helmet and a weird face on his shirt is dumping garbage onto our barcode and is presumably the source of all of the paper flying around labeled "PASSWORDS."
A cake with ten candles is in the front of the room. This marked the beginning of our tenth anniversary. The candles turned upside down are exclamation points, which covers the tradition of each year's first issue having at least one of those.
Doors that look suspiciously like bathrooms are labeled "Trojans" and "Daemons," which appear to be a way of saying male and female, but carry some meaningful terms for computer enthusiasts.
The traffic light hanging from the ceiling indicates a level of control for all of this digital traffic, whether necessary or a potential threat.
The large "17" sign on the wall is a nod to the band Negativland and their apparent obsession with that number.
What looks like a phone number is written on a piece of paper hanging on a wall: 9X10555-91755-599-41
The 9X was an allusion to our local phone company called NYNEX. 10555 was a Carrier Access Code for Wiltel, which in this issue was revealed to be secretly passing Caller ID data over state lines, something that had never been previously possible. The 917 area code was a fairly new one in New York City and of particular interest to hackers as it only served cellular phones, pagers, and other such devices. The 555 exchange was used for directory assistance and there was talk about possibly using it for more than that in the future. 9941 was one of the mysterious phone company test suffixes beginning with 99 that did all sorts of weird things.
But all of that meaning pales in comparison to what happens if you perform arithmetic on this string: 9 times 10555 minus 91755 minus 599 minus 41 equals 2600! We were quite proud of that one.
9 * 10555 = 94995 94995 - 91755 = 3240 3240 - 599 = 2641 2641 - 41 = 2600On top of everything else, this cover was part one of what was apparently a two-part cover.
On the bottom-right, we see the words "part one" being peeled back to reveal "part two" with a completely different background.
And finally, there is a headband curving around the top of the image. This was a tribute to hacker Phiber Optik, known for wearing such headbands, who had just been sent to prison.
The mini-cover for this issue was a logo for New York City's brand new MetroCard service, which was in the process of being launched and widely thought to be insecure and potentially intrusive.