2600 Magazine
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Stands for: 2600: The Hacker Quarterly
The Hacker Quarterly: the printed voice of hacker culture since 1984, and the origin of the HOPE conference and the Friday 2600 meetings.
Edited by Emmanuel Goldstein (Eric Corley) and named for the 2600 Hz phreaking tone, 2600 has published reader-submitted explorations of systems for four decades, fought landmark legal battles (notably the DeCSS case), and seeded a worldwide network of first-Friday meetups. Its HOPE conference (Hackers On Planet Earth) carries the same lineage - and the magazine's editor opened the very first YSTS in Sao Paulo, tying this entry to the Brazilian scene.
2600, named for the phreaking tone and edited by Emmanuel Goldstein, has published reader-submitted technical material continuously since 1984, in print, on paper, quarterly. It also organizes the physical meetings that happen in cities worldwide on the first Friday of the month.
Its significance is distribution before the internet made distribution trivial. A teenager in a small town with no local community could buy a magazine at a bookshop and find out that other people existed, what they were doing, and how. For a great many people who later became security professionals, that was the entry point, and the physical object mattered precisely because nothing else reached them.
It has been controversial throughout and has usually been on the receiving end of the legal action rather than the sending end, most prominently in the DeCSS case. What the magazine consistently argued is that publishing technical information is speech, and that a society which criminalizes explanation ends up with a population that cannot evaluate the systems governing it. That argument has aged well, and the magazine still arrives quarterly.
Also known as: 2600, 2600 magazine, the hacker quarterly, hope conference