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HOPE is boasting quite an impressive lineup of folks this year. I hope they offer videos again for the folks who can't make it.

i agree whole heartidely with the parent. maximum pc is the greates computer magazine out there. period.
2600 takes a close second

Linux Journal (subscription)
Linux Magazine
Wax Poetics (subscription)
2600 meaning to get subscription
sysadmin (subscription)
Ready Made (subscription)
Wired (only purchased in airports)
Mother Jones (off the rack, when the cover grabs me)
Stay Free! (subscription)
Future Music almost every month

And I buy about a dozen random magazines a month, news, music making

InfraLynx builds various vehicles now being used by the Homeland Security dept and the military. They have mobile cell towers, satellite uplinks, and all kinds of communications equipment.

2600 took some pictures. they are here http://www.2600.com/offthehook/2003/1001files/

another link:
http://iwce-mrt.com/ar/radio_infralynx_hummer_deli vers/

and the google page: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=infr alynx&btnG=Google+Search

I also read DDJ and C/C++ users journal. But I've found DDJ hasn't had any meaty articles in ages. Mainly bought it for the cdrom full of backissues. What I'd really like is a mag with good algorithms and practices/approaches to solving problems. Either original code or analysis of existing GPL/free/etc code, what they are doing that works well, etc. There is a LOT of very advanced methods of problem solving out there but all I seem to see in these magazines are articles on things such as "string concatentation", a review of Windows XP SP2, and a lame "history" of jargon and acronyms (to cite a few sleepers). Anyone know any good magazines that fill this void?

I used to enjoy Boot which I think is now Maximum PC. Haven't read it in a long time. Is it still any good? I remember they started a Maximum Linux or something and made a handful of issues before canning it.

We also have (Portland, OR area) a free magazine that's been around for ages that rocks called Computer Bits. Mainly just good for finding good deals on computers and related equipment/services from local companies. BUT back in the day they had a large list of local BBS's which was a good reference! They also sometimes have good articles.

Rock and Ice

Climbing

vBouldering

American Rifleman

I think that's about it on a regular, "I read every issue", basis.

He did a great job with the keynote at H2K.

Listen here.

The thing I love about Biafra is that whether you agree with his ideas or not, you have to admit that he asks some interesting and important questions.

We just announced the addition of renowned computer security expert Bruce Schneier to our speaker schedule!

But you're right: our priority is on folks who are physically present. They are, after all, the ones who make the conferences happen. (And, they get to have the most fun.)

> Free Kevin!!!! someone had to say it

Well, obviously these days the term is Kevin Free, but still, it's kind of fun to go back and remember how effective that slogan was for getting the word out.

> Free Kevin!!!! someone had to say it

Well, obviously these days the term is Kevin Free, but still, it's kind of fun to go back and remember how effective that slogan was for getting the word out.

> Free Kevin!!!! someone had to say it

Well, obviously these days the term is Kevin Free, but still, it's kind of fun to go back and remember how effective that slogan was for getting the word out.

> Free Kevin!!!! someone had to say it

Well, obviously these days the term is Kevin Free, but still, it's kind of fun to go back and remember how effective that slogan was for getting the word out.

There is much more to a "hacker conference" then what the media portrays hacking as. Hacking in the true sense, and in the true 2600 sense is the quest for knowledge and questioning things that aren't fair. Yes many things will be spoken about the conference that will 'improve your 1337 hax0ring skillz' but there's really so much more.

I've been a 2600 goer, off the hook and off the wall listener for over two years now and through it made friends with a lot of great people (shout outs to the ma2600 crowd). At 2600 meetings, and the hope conferences (although I've never attended one) there are panels on everything from social engineering to Abuse of Authority to the patriot act. See a list of panels from the last conference here.

So before making a stupid comment like "I doubt he'd even want me to "improve my 1337 hax0ring skillz"." take a look at the site and reexamine your definition of hackers. There's a lot more then what the mass media labels people as. I will be in the process of moving during the conference so I will be unable to attend otherwise I think it'd be a great educational experience to hear really bright people speak.

The Pacifica radio network (the older but less recognized brother of NPR) has a program focused on technology. The hosts of the program brought were responsible for some of the first DMCA criminal and civil cases to make it to court.

As is typical of Pacifica; the programming is legendary and edgy.

Check out:
http://www.2600.com/offthehook/

From www.2600.com/offthehook

Off The Hook airs every Wednesday night at 7:00 PM EST in New York City on listener supported WBAI 99.5 FM.

It is simulcast online via Streaming MP3 and over shortwave radio at WBCQ 7415khz.

Join #offthehook on irc.2600.net to chat during the show.

Very good stuff, well worth listening to, and they have their entire archive available on the ftp server, dating back to 1989.

try 2600. They keep archives of their show "Off the Hook."

NJOY

If the spammers are linking text like " " or "." to hide their activities, google will easily be able to identify those and block those sites but then spammers will start linking words.

How about we relink any spam we find from http://www.spamsite.com/ To: http://www.searchenginespammers.net/bb-spammer.cgi /http://wwww.spamsite.com/ After linking, 1) click the link (or better have a program visit it with the correct referrrer string or report the link via a web form on the cgi) and 2) move the link to your search engine accessible spam page. Actually, reporting via a web form is better than clicking the link if you are doing it manually because you don't increment the sites hit counters and you don't expose your computer to malware.

Of course, someone would need to register searchenginespammers.net and install a cgi there that would basically display a page describing the criminal practice of bulletin board/wiki spamming, and then lists all the referrer strings that have brought it to this particular page.

This will help search engines like google identify the wiki spammers and purge their sites from their search results. In the short term, searches for the keywords they tried to drive to their site would now take them to searchenginespammers.net and once the folks at google take action they can use it to activiate a filter mechanism. Other sites besides google can use the information. Someone could start a PICS or DNS based blacklist based on listings at searchenginespammers.net that people could use to prevent patronizing such sites. Email filters could use the list to help identify spam.

Like any site that lists spam URLs, there is the possibility that people will spam other peoples URLs to discredit them, so that needs to be taken into account.

Also, this thread is a reminder that when mentioning a company we dislike ( SCO, MPAA, RIAA , Macrovision , Microsoft, George W Bush, etc. should either not link their name or link their name to a site that describes their misconduct; we don't want to help them get better search engine rankings.

From

CNN:
"A draft of the new domestic security bill Ashcroft is seeking, published by a nonprofit government watchdog group in February, indicates that among other things, it would prohibit disclosure of information regarding people detained as terrorist suspects and prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from distributing "worst-case scenario" information to the public about a nearby private company's use of chemicals.
In addition, the measure would create a DNA database of "suspected terrorists;" force suspects to prove why they should be released on bail, rather than have the prosecution prove why they should be held; and allow the deportation of U.S. citizens who become members of or help terrorist groups."

The Patriot act, linked with the Homeland Security Act, has gutted the Freedom of Information Act.

From

Wired News Dec. 02, 2002
"One of the most egregious and potentially dangerous of these travesties is the Homeland Security Act's creation of new and very broad exemptions from the Freedom of Information Act. Businesses now have a new way to evade liability for safety violations, hazards to consumers and other abuses. They need merely report the information about their behavior -- even totally unclassified activities -- to the federal government, and claim it's related to homeland security. In the parlance of the Homeland Security Act, they declare the data to be "CII," or Critical Infrastructure Information."

In other News from the press: everything is classified now, and won't be released anytime soon. (See "Amendment To Executive Order No. 12958")
How much is this being used now?

Local News
"Federal agents sought 1,727 warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for electronic eavesdropping and physical searches last year, according to a Justice Department filing with Congress. Just four applications were rejected, and two of those were later revised and approved. The number of so-called FISA warrants jumped by 500 from 2002 and has almost doubled since 2001, when 934 applications were approved."
"By comparison, there were 1,442 wiretap petitions in federal and state courts for crimes like drugs and racketeering, according to a separate report from the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts."

How much abuse has been identified?

Inspector general's report on Patriot act abuses:
( They *only* found 34 *credible* cases in the 272 complaints. But please remember, it's all secret and there is no public oversight.)
The ACLU issued a report on how the Patriot Act is actually being used. Link Here.
The Migration Policy Institute says:
'Moreover, among those detained (and of the 1,200, the MPI could only identify a third) were "persistent violations of due p

Remember how his largely untrue article about Kevin Mitnick led to a lucrative book-writing deal for himself. Watch the 2600 documentary "Freedom Downtime" to see their take on Markoff too. They interviewed him and tried to give him a chance, but it turns out he sucks.

Am I the only one who thinks that Steve Wozniak is a hacker in the meaning well beyond some defacements archiving script kiddies?

That's from the 2600 website.

First thing he did was accidently posting his root-pw in a irc channel with 2600 users. Damn fine password it was =)

on Off The Hook a while back. They were concerned because the name and address of the radio's website is WUSB.

If you go to 2600's website, you can get an mp3 of the last show here. Adrian Lamo was present and spoke about a few things. Also, check the archives, he was on the show previously.

They are illegal in the US and probably elsewhere. Listen to the latest episode of off the hook... something about interfering with others' right to communicate. Though it's all relative - you have to accept destructive interference with, say, most 2.4 GHz devices (cordless phones & non-wimax wi-fi) because they are unlicensed under a certain output power. But due the the licensed allocation of mobile phone bw, you're technically protected by the good ol' FCC.

For the SSN, there was an article in the latest 2600 about how to live w/o your ssn. Living in Chicago, i have the joy of being in a place where the County accessor's office is online(Where the blues bros ended up at the end of the movie, before jail), so you can see photos, and values of any property in the city. They were driving around in unmarked vans photographing your house!!! Worse than this, the cops have small laptops hooked to a centralized db w/ all available info on you(regardless of if you have commited a crime). So when you get pulled over, they know the color of your house, how much in taxes you pay, and your mother's eye color. ( They demonstrate these so often, it isnt even novel anymore ) But there are benefits, for instance, you can see how bad the crime is in an area before you move there. I believe a balance can be struck, it just requires thought, something that is in short supply.

Blinkenlights did the sme sort of thing: play a game on a giant screen from your phone. Of course, they didn't have the fancy color and high resolution of a Times Square billboard, but they did have open source code and the cool hack of turning windows into pixels. Plus, you could post your own animations and images, in addition to just playing games. 2600 used an image of big brother from blinkenlights as its Winter 2002 cover.

Blinkenlights did the sme sort of thing: play a game on a giant screen from your phone. Of course, they didn't have the fancy color and high resolution of a Times Square billboard, but they did have open source code and the cool hack of turning windows into pixels. Plus, you could post your own animations and images, in addition to just playing games. 2600 used an image of big brother from blinkenlights as its Winter 2002 cover.

The thing that really bugs me is that he's presenting this stuff like it's really new or unknown. Sure, it's unknown to some script-kiddie wannabe who thinks they are 1337 because they can bring up a DOS prompt in their WinXP...

It certainly is.

Windows XP = build 2600

Hmm.

For more info, you might check out 2600. They've been doing this for quite a while now, i think they own fordreallysucks.com . It's in court right now AFAIK. Donate to their lawyers if you care.

I thought usuing the name of a company to criticize said company was perfectly legal

Tell that to Ford or GM...

Other than trademark (pretending to be Jackson) and copyright. The "obscene" material was on the original hypthetical link, so I don't see how that would fall under this law.

Would having one porn site's mistyped address go to another porn site qualify?

Look at 2600 V. Ford Motors 2600 owned fuckgeneralmotors.com and pointed it to Ford. Ford claimed that people would think this was their doing and sued, and subsequencly lost.

If you consider 2600 a news outlet, then you'll be glad to know that Off the Hook spent quite some time last week talking about the incident.

after watching the kult rise (and fall?), and keeping into mind the exponential growth of the world's population, i'ld have to disagree with you. we created our own unique "kulture", and with it it's own traditions, manerisms, symbols, 'gods', and so on and so forth. being a mostly open society, we all took part in it to some extent or other...and while perhaps we are not nor will ever be an established culture to the extent that say, the romans or the british were... we were definitely on the way in that direction.

i'm sad that some cultures lose their grip on humanity and fade into the death... but the amount of 'culture' more potent, and deep than anything we've seen so far is actually _growing_, whether you believe it or not. how many ethnicities were there 100 years ago? today? cargo cults much? with every divergence of religion(see scientology), and state(see quebec) and stuff like 2600... new cultures begin to form. and with it _new_ poetry, new literature, new music, and so on. as the population grows, and is more able to feed itself(culture only really grows once people have time...you can't have much of a culture if your held in one razorwire lined Nike sweatshop at machine gun forced to work 20.5 hours a day. )...more cultures will really shine.

To clarify: Engressia was born with perfect pitch and realized that by whistling a 2600 cycle tone he could trick the switching system into giving him free phone calls. Draper, who was not born with the same ability, realized he could make the same tone using a toy whistle that came in a box of cereal.

Google-ing either name will bring up a pile of links on the history of phreaking.

Of course you could old-school it and pick up a copy of 2600 magazine at your local newstand.

Hey, I've seen this -exact scenario- happen in my high school and the school's treatment was equally stupid. Honestly, though, I think they just had no idea what to do.

A boy was playing with net send on the school machines. He showed a girl how to do it and with * she wound up sending to the entire domain (high school, middle school, elementary school, and bus garage, amounting to at least several hundred and maybe a thousand computers). The message sent contained his name: "[boyname spelled with l33t w0rds] is dumb".

This was sufficient reason for the school to kick the boy out of the computer lab for the rest of the year (while, because the girl's name didn't appear anywhere, she got off scot-free). They really didn't know what to do with these disruptive kids; luckily, they weren't as stupid and crazy as they could've been.

If you want to read amusing (bordering on depressing) accounts of whacked-out high school administrators, check the Letters section of any issue of 2600 (the print magazine). It's not exactly unbiased but it's very disturbing.

I hope the guy will still send the info to 2600.

And "Internet Protocol Address Verifier"? Woah! Sounds like a tool in the Uplink game. Never heard of it though. A quick search on Google didn't return anything relevant.

thats what a lot of phreaks say when "stealing" phone service, and since it doesnt cost ma'bell a damn red cent its any less stealing. I'll admit that when I got into this scene in the mid 90's I was ignorant enough to believe this mentality and its partly due to the fact that I was so young and uninformed, but trust me, after explaining to your mother at the age of 13 why you were arrested for breaking into a telephone interface box on the side of a building, or decieving the operator into believing that those tones you played her were actually coins, you'll understand that taking what you dont own is stealing.

ps: I download the weekly simpsons episodes online, but since I've paid for cable I dont feel bad about it, but none the less, I'm stealing.

sue me: 127.0.0.1

...

Weird part. My wife bought it for me!

Man, I married a good woman!

It's going to be even more disturbing when we all wake up and find that none of us have "root" access on our computers anymore. All our packets on the Internet are going to be authenticated and cryptographically "secured" (i.e. "secured" from US), and the content publishers and distributors will hold all the keys.

I don't know diddly about crypto... but what you've described is exactly why Hollywood wanted CSS.

If Xing had protected their key better, we might still be trying to crack DVDs. (I'm not really sure how strong CSS is.) But take note of the approach -- a combination of leveraged industrial power, tech, and legislation. I think we'll be seeing this hybrid approach more and more. Try to lock 'em out, and if(when) the hackers find a way in, make sure the path they took was an illegal one, and a federal case to boot.

To wit: "Content providers" believe that when you skip commercials in TiVo, you're "stealing" from the networks. New TiVo's don't have this feature. (Or maybe it's ReplayTV, I'm a bit ignorant since I barely watch TV.) When you decipher Adobe's eBook, you go to jail for a few months -- the Sklyarov case being the equivalent of the Feds dipping their toes in the hot tub. Linking is looking less and less like protected speech. Jon Johansen gets retried for DeCSS. Microsoft rams Product Activation down our throat, and Windows XP loves to phone home.

While everyone's caught up looking at the trees, here's what's happening in the forest: We're inching ever towards limiting the common man's access to "intellectual property" (whatever that is). In doing so we're walking away from the past five hundred years of intellectual freedom brought about by Johannes Gutenberg and Martin Luther.

This is a huge, gigantic assault on the philosophy of the Enlightenment, on which (to some extent) our country was founded and our Constitution based. Yet my impression is that most comptuer geeks only see the tip of the iceberg --e.g. "I can't legally play my DVDs on Linux" or "ROT13! WTF J00 AD0B3 LAM3RZ!" The strongest fight is coming from librarians. I think librarians are the only ones to realize that, were libraries to be invented today, they would promptly be sued out of existence by the RIAA for illegal filesharing.

Though I think the librarians missed the obvious solutions when faced with CIPA and COPA: Deny Internet access to minors, and let adults surf unfettered. Let's see how Mommy and Daddy respond to that.

This guy has probably done more than he is accused for

You mean more than owning something that "looked like explosives" and some crystals? (At least, this is according to the documentry Freedom Downtime ).

From the CallSmart site: "Make sure your caller ID is unblocked. We use your caller ID to authenticate your account when you call." Has anyone else not heard of spoofing caller id?

If you are selling something and I decide I don't like your price so I just take it, what would that be called? Even if I just took it because I didn't like your business model?

Wrong. Your business model is NOT selling something to websurfers for a price. Your business model is to GIVE WEB CONTENT AWAY FOR FREE and to get advertizers to pay you to stuff extra stuff in with the free material. You have willingly chosen to give it away for free to anyone who comes to your webpage. Websurfers have absolutely NO OBLIGATION TO YOU AT ALL.

You are under the same delusion as the Turner CEO: "Because of the ad skips.... It's theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn't get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you're actually stealing the programming." When asked if he considers people who go to the bathroom during a commercial to be thieves, he responded: "I guess there's a certain amount of tolerance for going to the bathroom."

Sorry, but there is no contract, and viewers have no obligation to you. When I get a newspaper I have every right to shake it over the garbage and let the advertizing leaftlets fall into the trash unseen, and I have the same right to do the same with a website I view.

Of course you are under absolutely no obligation to provide your website (and it's content) for free, but just because you choose to do so does not impose any obligation on anyone else.

The fact that people dumping your ads screws up your business model does not make it wrong to dump ads. There is no "right" for a business model to work. You are under no obligation to provide web content, and websurfers are under no obligation to provide you with a living. To whever extent it works and you make money and I get free websites, great! But if you are not happy with the money you are getting then either change your business model or find another job.

-

there are plenty of people who's rational, critical, and creative thinking offer greatness , specifically on radio... and i really don't know anyone who still watches cnn or any of the other 'trusted' media sources. when you don't have 9/10 radio station's owned by one company, the idea that npr is way to far to the right doesn't sound that outrageous. here, there is some 3 entities that compete for our fm radio, plus we have a community radio station here. plus there's always rantradio. i bet most of the people who listen to wbai, cjtr,rantradio, and a host of other radio networks out there also have grown past the 'seeing cnn as worth watching' stage.

We at 2600 actually called the White House and did a bit of resource. The article detailing our findings is online.

Yeah, I was trying to figure out if this was Slashdot in 2003 or 2600 in 1994. Damn daylight savings time, what with the screwing up of the time and the glaven