The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey

Twenty-four years of the hacker underground's own magazine, edited into one volume by the man who has run it since 1984.

Emmanuel Goldstein selected the articles from 2600: The Hacker Quarterly and arranged them by decade, from the 1984 monthlies through the 2000s. The 1980s section is payphones, blue and red boxes and the last years of the Bell system. The 1990s bring bulletin boards, CompuServe and the early commercial internet. The 2000s run to Unix, mobile networks and traffic control systems. Each section opens with a new introduction placing the pieces in the period that produced them, and the technical writing is reprinted as it was first printed, schematics and all. Also here are the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the insecurity of ordinary locks, the FBI raids of the early 1990s and the long Kevin Mitnick case.

Goldstein has edited and published 2600 since the first issue, hosts the weekly WBAI radio programme Off the Hook, and organises the HOPE conferences in New York. He was technical consultant on the 1995 film Hackers, has testified before Congress on hacking, and was the defendant in Universal City Studios v. Reimerdes, the 2000 case that asked whether linking to DeCSS was speech. The library holds the complete run of the magazine the book draws from.