SOME NOTES ON THE SPRING 2018 ISSUE

Thanks to everyone expressing concern over the latest issue of 2600 not being in every Barnes and Noble like it's supposed to be. Apparently, their internal distribution system has changed, resulting in delays to some parts of the country. We're told that issues should be in all stores by now or, at the very latest, by April 30. Please let us know if you notice that it's not. Also, one of our oldest distributors closed its doors recently, resulting in some places local to New York no longer receiving issues. If you're familiar with such a place, please let us know its name and we will contact them to arrange an alternative system. Better yet, if you can ask them which distributors they use, we can contact them.

To our great horror, we discovered a couple of errors in our latest issue. One affects only the Kindle edition and is easily remedied. In the fifth letter to the editor, written by D1vr0c, look for the line that reads:

>var x = 99;

shouldn't have the >.

The other error affects everything except the Kindle edition and appears in the article entitled "Breaking Standards." We were mortified to discover that this article cut off before it was finished. These are the last lines:

To retrieve the password, you proceed with a reverse approach:

$ head -c 10 COLOURB.PI9 | xxd -p | sed ‘s/\(.\)\(.

/\2\1/g’ | xxd -r -p

2600@rules

Using simple steganography techniques like this one, I recommend that you learn the commands by heart and clear your shell history to leave no visible clue of your manipulation. Of course, you need to properly delete your temporary files too.

I think you get the main idea: breaking the norm and standards, or using exotic or long forgotten ones, can conceal our intention and make the reconnaissance phase far more difficult for potential malevolent people.

The key is to think out of the box. After all, many hacks are based on the assumption that 99 percent of us are using the same predictable tools.

As I’m writing this article, I’m receiving more and more corporate emails assessing the potential impacts of the Meltdown and Spectre security holes on the infrastructures of our customers. To make it simple, every modern computer with a superscalar microprocessor architecture is potentially involved, so hiding sensible data on simpler (emulated) computers might well be a safer choice after all.

All you need is to simply accept that you will get your hands a bit dirty, and learn some strange operating systems or applications you may have never heard of before. But that’s part of the fun, don’t you think?

https://www.warhol.org/exhibition/warhol-and-the-amiga/

https://tika.apache.org/

https://github.com/mist-devel/mist-board/wiki

https://aranym.github.io/

https://www.amigaforever.com/

https://marutan.net/rpcemu/

https://www.dosbox.com/

http://pico-8.wikia.com/wiki/P8PNGFileFormat

http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/Extended_DEGAS_image

http://recoil.sourceforge.net/html5recoil.html