2600 Magazine: The Hacker Quarterly - Winter 2017-2018

What's super interesting about 2600 (which is a long-running magazine for l33t h4x0rs) is how much it looks and smells and sounds like a punk magazine. Wow, is the aesthetic the same. The posturing ego, the slightly obnoxious tone, the idealism, the rebelliousness. See one of my fave Portlandia skits.

Anyway, this was fun and got me suitably paranoid about WHOIS info (aaagh) and suitably inspired about maybe setting up some sort of antennae to emit destructive interference to my neighbors' WiFi signals JUST BECAUSE I CAN. Actually, okay, I don't know if you can do that. Wouldn't that eff up the 2.4GHz spectrum around you for everything? And it's probably illegal (“probably illegal” being an important slogan of the scene).

I liked the article about the guy checking a Linux OS's command hashes both upstream (from the OS he forked from, I guess) to downstream (the OS he was the main builder of), since people were spreading rumors that using that command secretly sent secret info stuff to The Man (which is such a a Mr. Robot idea in and of itself). The guy checks the SHA-1s of the command as it was downloaded and as it's deployed are identical - i.e. no one futzed with that command. I didn't know commands even HAD SHA-1s, but that makes sense and WOW THAT'S COOL.