Format

The 2004 cover formats started the tradition of themes that lasted for the entire year.

The Autumn issue was again labeled as "Fall" in 2004.  The page length remained at 60 pages.

The contents had the following unique titles:

Little messages were found on Page 3, hidden in tiny print within the contents.

The messages were as follows:

Letters titles continued to be unique with each issue:

Covers

Cover Design for all four issues was credited to Dabu Ch'wald.

The 2004 covers all had propaganda poster themes.  Each issue had an image with a jingoistic phrase printed on the bottom.  With the exception of Winter, each of these images was modified from an actual propaganda poster.

Inside

The staff section had credits for Editor-In-Chief, Layout and Design, Cover Design, Office Manager, Writers, Webmasters, Network Operations, Broadcast Coordinators, and IRC Admins.  The staff section remained on Page 2 throughout the year.  The Statement of Ownership was printed on Page 5 in the Fall edition.

We continued having fun with Page 33, as a remnant of our Y2K fun.  Spring had a reversed footer, though with an even-paged format.  Summer was normal, except in place of "Page 33" a pair of dice appeared that each had a three.  Fall just eliminated the page number altogether.  Winter signaled the end of this fun with only the tiny words "enough already" appearing on the right.  And for some reason, a tiny message was hidden on Page 43 of Fall, right above the text box containing an ad.  It simply said "there is nothing in this box."

Some page issues that were not intentional involved Pages 7 and 9 in the Summer issue, which were mislabeled as Spring 2004.  And this year, for the first time, we changed the traditional font on our footers.

2004 marked our 20th anniversary and we were as thrilled as we were shocked.  "Never in our wildest dreams did any of us think it would come this far."  We were keenly aware of how it could have gone very differently without the support of our readers and overall good luck over the years.  We remembered that "our first issue was Xeroxed after hours in an office we weren't even supposed to be in and sent out to about two dozen people who had heard about us on several BBSes."  The event filled us with sentimentality, even triggering a look back at our tenth anniversary in 1994.  And we reprinted our entire first page from 1984 in our Spring issue.  One thing we noticed during all of this was the continued enthusiasm our readers had, not only for the new material, but for the old.  "It's great to know that after 20 years these issues still cause a thrill.  Frightening too."

While reflecting on the history we had lived through, we had to acknowledge how serious we sometimes became.  "We often choose to focus on the negative developments, mostly because they pose an imminent risk to many of our readers and also because there seem to be so many of them."  Our goal was to point in a more positive direction, both because it was empowering, but also because we had a lot to feel good about.  "From the far-left to the far-right and just about everywhere in between, people seemed to get it, to appreciate what it was that 2600 stood for."  Throughout the years, we had developed good relationships in some unexpected places.  "People within many of the federal agencies we had seen as foes cheered us on with letters of encouragement or warm words at a conference."

We were happy to see that "the hacker ethic is still alive and well."  This gave us a strong resolve to move forward and tackle new projects.  But it was hugely important to maintain those ties between the past, present, and future because "for those who are new, knowing how things looked, sounded, or felt in the past is a key to understanding and affecting the future."

For the first time, we introduced a DVD that contained every episode of Off The Hook from 1988 through 2003.  A new HOPE conference (The Fifth HOPE) was announced for July with Kevin Mitnick as the keynote.  "For those who have been part of the community for years, HOPE serves as a reaffirmation of what we stand for and what we believe in."

It was also the tenth anniversary of our first conference, so there were plenty of milestones to mark.  Our 20th anniversary t-shirt was debuted and it read: "1984 was only the beginning."  On top of everything else, the Freedom Downtime DVD set was released with many extra features - and met with a lot of positive feedback.  In fact, by the end of the year, there was an Easter egg hunt due to all of the hidden things on the discs.

We continued to piss off corporations worldwide with articles on "Hacking the Hilton" and a how-to on installing Debian on an Xbox.  We helped reveal the fact that both Target and CompUSA used very simple store passwords.  We provided an inside look at Clear Channel as well as the bus system of Milwaukee.  We dove into the secrets of AOL and discussed BitTorrent as being the possible future of the Internet.  The issue of music piracy was getting pretty hot and we had some strong opinions on the subject.  But we still advised a level of moderation and decorum: "...comparing the MPAA/RIAA to Al-Qaeda probably won't wind up being the most convincing method of getting people to see the wisdom of your opinion" was advice we gave to one reader.

We had our share of fun facts that managed to get revealed in our pages, such as the revelation that "2600 is the ZIP Code in the city of Parachinar in Peshawar (Pakistan)."  We saw quite a bit of feedback on an article about "The Hacker Diet."  And we received an avalanche of mail from people in the military who shared stories as to whether or not it was risky to receive 2600 while serving.

New services like Skype were discussed along with warnings on their potential downsides.  But we also delved into older forms of technology, like lockpicking.  Privacy remained key to everything we did and we encouraged people to protect theirs.  One method was to "muddy the water" by giving out fake personal info and all sorts of variations online.  Awareness of the fact that "all kinds of corporate and governmental entities seek to invade our privacy on a constant basis for reasons ranging from surveillance to marketing" was vital.

We also helped spread the word of anonymous web services that helped readers get around the blocks many institutions had installed to keep people from reaching our website.  And, speaking of our website, we had a bit of fun by having it emulate an Atari 2600 on April 1st.

The net was beginning to be deluged with people intent on intimidating everyone else in one way or another.  "People running around filing lawsuits against everything they don't like wind up poisoning the atmosphere for the rest of us."  But legal threats were only one problem.  The surveillance and threats of government crackdowns were really proving to be disturbing to a great number of us.  And they knew exactly what they were doing: "Intimidated citizens often do the work of oppressive regimes with nothing more than their own fear motivating them."  At least one reader expressed concern over the ease with which 2600 could be "deemed a terrorist organization" due to the PATRIOT Act.  But there were always beacons of light that managed to shine through: "The good news is that people are starting to wake up about the threats posed by the PATRIOT Act and other products of Bush and Ashcroft."

There were many reader examples of how "our personal information is not safe in the hands of others."  The threat of the PATRIOT Act continued to generate increasing concern.  There were serious questions raised as to why IDs were now needed to fly on planes.  We noted that "in the not so distant past it was completely normal to not have to show ID at all to get on a domestic flight."  But the world around us was experiencing quite a few disturbing changes.  Those of us who had been paying attention knew that "the changes were anything but sudden."  That led us to feel somewhat powerless and even a bit fatalistic: "...to those future historians we can only apologize for failing to stop the darkness."  But we couldn't let those feelings define who we were.

"We've witnessed some real changes in our society over the past two decades and the trend has most definitely been on the increasingly restrictive side."  We reported on the weird security practice of printing a row of S's on airline tickets of people who were going to be subjected to further scrutiny.  And we tried to comfort people concerned over being required to provide Social Security numbers to police when getting a traffic ticket: "You are not required to carry a Social Security card.  And last we checked, it wasn't a crime to forget your Social Security number.  The rest you can work out."

And it was really weird how the hacker world seemed to always be in the spotlight, this time as potential threats to the very security of our nations.  But hackers had never intended to be the center of attention.  "Events, however, have an odd way of changing one's focus and altering the path."  We were taken aback by how relevant all of those things we'd been involved in over the years had suddenly become.  "The things we see as important, the technology we find ourselves playing with and designing, the limits we constantly test and push, and the freedoms we instinctively stand up for - these are all being mirrored in the 'real' world on a daily basis."

There was increasing concern over voting machines and how they could be abused.  Our readers looked to hackers to reveal the truth.  And we were constantly reaching out.  In one instance, we received an offer of help from a telemarketer on the secrets of that intrusive trade.  And there were many other sources: "We all learn so much from those anonymous people inside government agencies, corporations, the military, and even schools who provide us with the information that sheds light on these worlds."  But we wanted to make sure our sources remained safe: "As with all of our company insiders, we recommend keeping a low profile and not revealing any information that could get back to you."

Our letter writers sent us multiple examples of employees being punished for finding security holes.  They were far from isolated instances.  And it was the increasingly paranoid mood in the country that bore the responsibility.  "With this kind of attitude out there, it's no wonder we see students being suspended for reading our magazine, employees being threatened with dismissal for having a copy at their desk, bookstore clerks making snide remarks to people who dare to support us, and all the other little things that serve to make people afraid."  But we refused to allow ourselves to be intimidated and we encouraged our readers not to be either.  "We're here to tell you that anyone can make a difference and nothing is a certainty."  In response to critics, or even well-wishers who thought it would be best if we toned things down a bit, we tried to give some perspective: "There is probably not one article we've ever printed or a single presentation at one of our conferences that someone didn't disapprove of or believe to be a threat of some sort."

Piracy was a pretty big talking point, but we tried to analyze it via the bigger picture.  As one of our readers said: "If Apple and other content providers were actually interested in preventing piracy, they would stop creating a demand for it."  The overall sentiment was that we were dealing with dinosaurs who just didn't get it and probably never would.  "The simplistic, old-fashioned, and self-defeating practices engaged in by entities in the music industry will do them in without any help from us."  And, no matter how hard we tried to bridge the gap, we just never seemed to be speaking the same language.  Corporate America embraced a really broad overreach on what constituted crime and we strongly felt that "equating copying an image on a website with theft only minimizes what real thieves do."  It was tough to be lumped together with the worst of the worst.  But that's where lack of understanding of the hacker community led us.

As mentioned, we believed that privacy was a far more critical issue.  And it was clear to us that companies simply weren't doing enough to protect customers and users.  "If companies today don't care enough to secure their wireless connections, then they run the risk of having internal data compromised."  And when those compromises occurred, invariably hackers were blamed, even though security practices were so poor that almost anyone could have taken advantage of them.  In addition to being harmful, we thought their approach was hopelessly naive.  "Privacy cannot be protected through mere faith in the system.  It can only be protected by learning everything there is to know about the system, finding the weak spots, theorizing on how vulnerabilities could be exploited, and constantly communicating this information and knowledge."

As always, it was a challenge just getting our magazine out to people.  We continued to experience trouble being seen in certain bookstores, but we also got a whole lot of support in others.  While the consensus from our military readers seemed to be that getting issues there wouldn't be frowned upon, people who were in prisons weren't so lucky.  Ironically, the more we talked about people having difficulty there, the more problems they wound up having since prisons frowned on content that talked about prisons, leading us to tell people: "We wish you luck even though you most likely won't be allowed to read these words."

Empowerment continued to be the key for us.  We constantly were fighting against "the ability to convince people that they can't make a difference and that certain things are inevitable."  We knew through experience and the words of our readers that this simply wasn't true.  And we also were quite certain that "abandoning the fight only helps to ensure the outcome."  Despite all of the negativity in the air, we were constantly striving to keep it positive.  "Bleak as it may seem, the changes that have been taking place can be influenced by our voices and our actions."  It was an honor to fight for what we believed in and even more so to be the sounding board for so many individuals who were dealing with the same issues.  Whether we were coming up with new ideas for technology, discovering security holes, or listening to inaccurate stories from the media and the authorities, there was one fact that kept shining through: "Hacking has never been as relevant and as important as it is today."  Despite oeverything, the future looked bright.  "We look forward to the battles ahead."

Spring:  The Spring cover showed a soldier in the midst of a battle carrying a bluish box containing point detonating M46 fuzes.

The message at the bottom says "The Army needs more BLUEBOXES" which was a reference to the Blue Boxes of phone phreaks.

A soldier in the distance is carrying another "blue box" with the number 20 on the side, a reference to our 20th anniversary which was marked by this issue.

In the background, an American flag is being raised over a tattered Iraqi one, which was an allusion to the ongoing military actions the United States was involved in.

As with all of the covers this year, ultraviolet ink was used to convey an additional message.  In this case, the word HONOR is lightly printed on the soldier's helmet.
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