Emmanuel Goldstein
Published by Wiley Publishing, Inc.10475
Crosspoint Boulevard Indianapolis, IN 46256 www.wiley.com
Copyright © 2008 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, IndianaPublished simultaneously in Canada
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| The Best of 2600 - A Hacker Odyssey |
Emmanuel Goldstein (emmanuel@goldste.in) has been publishing 2600 Magazine, The
Hacker Quarterly, since 1984. He traces his hacker roots to his high school days in
the late ’70s, when he first played with a distant computer over high-speed, 300-baud
phone lines. It didn’t take long for him to get into trouble by figuring out how to
access something he wasn’t supposed to access. He continued playing with various
machines in his college days at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
This resulted in an FBI raid as he once again gained access to something he really shouldn’t
have. It was in the midst of all of this excitement that he cofounded 2600 Magazine,
an outlet for hacker stories and tutorials from all over the world. The rapid growth
and success of the magazine was both shocking and scary to Goldstein, who to this
day has never taken a course in computers. Since 1988, he has also hosted Off The
Hook, a hacker-themed technology talk show on WBAI 99.5 FM in New York City. In
addition to making the hacker documentary Freedom Downtime, Goldstein hosts the
Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE) conferences in New York City every two years,
drawing thousands of hackers from all over the world.
You can contact 2600 online at www.2600.com or by writing to 2600 Magazine, P.O.
Box 752, Middle Island, NY, 11953.
Introduction
The question we get asked more than any other at 2600 is how in the world did we
pull this off? Meaning, I suppose, how did we manage to not only put out a magazine
for nearly a quarter century that was written by hackers but also to get the mainstream
public to take an interest in our subject matter?
Well, it certainly wasn’t easy. I guess the first thing to make clear—and probably the
one fact that both those who love us and those who hate us can agree upon—is that it
was never supposed to get this big. When we first started out in 1984, we never envisioned
it going beyond a few dozen people tied together in a closely knit circle of conspiracy
and mischief. Those first issues were three sheets of paper with loose leaf holes
punched in the sides stuffed into envelopes. In late 1983, we sent messages to a bunch
of bulletin board systems (BBSes) that had hacker content on them. In these messages,
we invited people to send in self-addressed stamped envelopes and in return they
would get a free copy of the premiere edition of our new hacker magazine. I’ll never
forget the thrill I got from seeing the first responses come in the mail.
As for content, we had grown into an interesting group of storytellers and educators
by way of the BBSes. Basically, by logging onto one of these systems, we would be able
to find other people who seemed able to string together a sentence or two and either
tell an interesting tale of a hacker adventure or explain to someone exactly how a particular
computer or phone system worked. This is how the core staff developed. And
we always knew there would be more people out there to add to the mix.
For me, this was a natural expression of my various interests fueled by all sorts of
inspirations. Computers had fascinated me ever since I first encountered one in my
senior year of high school back in 1977. I never was a programmer, and to this day I
have never taken any sort of computer course. That would have taken all of the fun
out of it. No, for me the computer was the ultimate toy, a device that could spit back
all sorts of responses and which had almost endless potential. My main interests,
though, were writing and media. I came from a family of writers and my major in college
was English, plus I had worked in some capacity on every high school and college
publication I encountered. Then there was my involvement in radio. I was lucky
enough to stumble upon WUSB at Stony Brook University, a freeform noncommercial
radio station where I was encouraged to be creative and alternative in all sorts of different
ways. So when you added all of these elements together, the volatile mix that
was to become 2600 seemed almost inevitable.
When we mailed that first issue, we didn’t know what to expect. Arrest and imprisonment
was one possibility that crossed our minds. There was, after all, an investigation
underway into some of the people involved in the magazine before we had ever
published our first issue—something to do with logging onto computers that didn’t
belong to them using other people’s names. Back then, having a computer was something
reserved for very few people. There was no Internet to explore. Apart from the
BBSes, the only way to learn about real systems that actually did something was to figure
out a way to get connected to them and absorb as much as you could. It was never
about being malicious or destructive, although even then we had our hands full fighting
that misconception, which was fueled by the mass media. We were a diverse bunch
of curious folk, exploring a new universe and sharing our findings with anyone who
cared to listen. We were dangerous.
Strange things started to happen after we sent out the first 2600 in mid January of
1984. People started to send in checks for an entire year! Our magazine became the
talk of the BBS world and, we would later learn, numerous corporate boardrooms and
government agencies. It seemed such a simple idea and yet nobody else was doing it.
There had been a newsletter before 2600 known as TAP, which had started publishing
back in the ’70s with the help of Abbie Hoffman and a bunch of Yippies. It was a fun
publication but it came out sporadically and eventually stopped altogether in the early
’80s. What people saw in 2600 was something previously unheard of in this community:
consistency. Every month at the same time we released a new issue. And not only
was it consistent, but it actually looked somewhat professional, thanks to my recently
acquired job as a typesetter for an unsuspecting local newspaper. It really felt as if
everything had come together at just the right time for 2600 to be born.
After the first year, when people started to actually renew their subscriptions, we
knew we were on to something. The word continued to spread, more writers came out
of the woodwork, and the media followed our every move with rapt attention. While
technology was booming, it was still very early in the whole computer revolution. We
were seen as pioneers, and I quickly became a “computer expert” even though I had
never taken a course and wasn’t particularly technical. It didn’t seem to matter. Any
time something happened involving computers or telephones, it was assumed the staff
of 2600 knew all about it—that is, if we weren’t in fact accused of being responsible for
it in the first place!
We expanded from six pages (three double-sided sheets of paper) to eight pages
(two really big sheets folded in half) and kept that format until 1987 when we decided
to try something new entirely. We became a magazine in the true sense of the word
with a color cover and staples and a total of 24 pages. But the workload and expense
for this kind of a format quickly began to exceed our resources, so we switched to a
quarterly format in 1988 with 48 pages. Shortly after that final format change, we got
on the radar of magazine distributors and began to see 2600 show up at newsstands
and bookstores! That’s when I realized I must have been dreaming, because this was
never supposed to happen.
A good deal of the reaction and attention that has surrounded 2600 has occurred
because of the almost mystical aura surrounding the world of computer hacking. So
why all the fascination with hackers anyway? To understand this you simply have to
study the American spirit. Despite what much of the world may think today, Americans
cherish individuality and innovation and they simply adore a rebellious spirit. The
hacker world could not be defined more accurately than with these words. How many
movies have been made where the protagonist breaks the rules and fights a system that
doesn’t care and doesn’t understand? Are we not always cheering for the individual and
hoping that they find the truth and blow the whistle? We have only to look at some of
our greatest heroes—Benjamin Franklin, Nikola Tesla, Martin Luther King, Jr.—to see
that individual thought and a steadfastness of purpose are prized attributes that can
often lead to great things. There was a bit of a hacker in all of these great minds.
Of course, Alexander Graham Bell was another of those people that we all look up
to, both inside and outside the hacker community. The Bell system was one of the first
massive networks to capture the imagination of a type of hacker referred to as a phone
phreak. This was what people played with before computers came along, and I have to
admit, it’s always fascinated me more than most other things. Relatively few people
today even know what it used to be like when there was just one telephone network.
We were lucky with our timing of 2600 in that it started publishing at the precise time
when the Bell system was splitting apart. So we were there to explain how it all worked
and also explore all of the new systems that were coming into being at the time. And,
as those in charge seemed incapable of designing easy-to-understand methods of making
phone calls through alternative companies, we became by default the experts on
how to place a simple telephone call and, by extension, how to save money.
This ties in to something else the hacker community has always endorsed: free communications.
Back before my time, the early phone phreaks were going around
whistling a special frequency into the telephone. The long-distance phone network,
upon hearing that particular tone, would then enter a mode where the caller could
input all sorts of other tones and route phone calls all over the world. In addition to
regular phone numbers, the caller would then be able to access all sorts of internal
numbers as well, things that only operators should be able to do. The trick was that
the system assumed the caller was an operator, which basically opened an almost
unlimited number of doors. This was called blue boxing. Some people used it to avoid
expensive long distance charges. Others used it to map out the system and figure out
how it all tied together. And the special frequency that started this whole process?
Why, 2600 hertz of course!
I actually didn’t like the name “2600” at first. I wanted something stupid like
“American Technological Journal.” I’m forever indebted to those who worked hard to
change my mind. “2600” summed it all up. It was all about reaching out and grabbing
technology, making it do what you wanted to do, and communicating with people all
around the globe. Not to mention the fact that in any alphabetical list of publications,
we would always be first. It was a match made in heaven.
Of course, running the magazine itself has been anything but heaven. When you
deal with material that is—to put it mildly—controversial, you wind up with an im -
pressive number of powerful people who want to see you go down in flames. Our very
existence has embarrassed almost every major corporation at some point, resulted in
numerous emergency board meetings, and made some people’s jobs a bit harder. None
of that was our intent, although that’s little comfort to those affected. What we’ve
always been primarily interested in doing is simply getting the information out there
and watching it grow into something productive. Phone companies have learned not
to leave sensitive billing information on computers with default passwords that anyone
can access. Credit agencies now actually work to protect all of that data they keep
on every one of us. And the people who design secure systems, many of them our readers
and sometimes writers, know how to think like hackers, which makes their creations
innovative and flexible. I believe we’ve contributed quite a bit of good to the
world of technology and things are better now than they would have been had we
never come on the scene. Of course, that doesn’t mean there haven’t been numerous
attempts to put us out of other people’s misery. But when someone believes firmly in
freedom of speech and full disclosure, it’s kind of impossible to shut him up.
What has amazed me the most in the decades that followed is that the interest level
has never subsided. Over the years, more and more people have become entranced not
only with the technology itself but also with its social implications and overall importance
to the future of humanity. It may sound a bit heavy handed but all of this—the
development of the Internet, computers being used as printing presses, the prevalence
of low-cost or free telecommunications all around the world, the sharing of information
and resources—is having a profound impact on the human race in ways that no
one from our forefathers to Aristotle could ever have predicted. Somehow we wound
up right in the middle of all the turmoil. And just like it felt back in the early days
when everything just sort of came together at a particular moment, this feels like the
right people are in the right place at the right time to test the system, develop new
tools, and keep freedom of speech alive.
Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii
I The 1980s: In the Beginning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1 Stories and Adventures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2 The Last Days of Ma Bell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
3 New Toys to Play With . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
4 The Early Days of the Net. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
5 Corporate History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
6 Raids . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
7 The Hacker Philosophy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
II The 1990s: The World Discovers Hackers . . . . . . 231
8 Pop Culture and the Hacker World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
9 The Computer Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277
10 Learning to Hack Other Things. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313
11 More Hacker Stories and Adventures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 381
12 The Changing of the Telephone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 421
13 Hackers and the Law . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 491
III 2000 and Beyond: A Changing Landscape . . . . . . 571
14 The Lawsuits. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 573
15 Still More Hacker Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 601
16 A New Era of Telephony . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 651
17 Retail Hacking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 691
18 Toys of the 21st Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 731
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 835
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Product details
Price
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File Size
| 4,598 KB |
Pages
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889 p |
File Type
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PDF format |
ISBN
| 978-0-470-29419-2 (cloth) |
Copyright
| 2008 by Wiley Publishing, Inc |
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