I give it two thumbs up.
It links to `?page=writing.pho` rather than `.php`
I was particularly tickled by the suggestion of copyright infringement as a form of detecting AIs. "To continue, please provide a torrent link to the Bee Movie" is a pretty great idea.
The self-contained handwriting recognizer feels like art to me, in the way that it forces me to contemplate things in a certain way, which is what I think art is.
edit: oh, right, this isn't a Show HN
We do contact potential authors via email, but it's fully manual. I.e. we do not collect emails in an automated way, nor do we send them out in an automated way - everything is done manually by our Editor-in-Chief and, at times, other team members. Furthermore, we take care to only contact a given person once (I was on the receiving end of hakin9's mass author spamming a few years back, so we take care to not do what they did). Admittedly mistakes can happen here if we're unable to determine that it's actually the same person we've already contacted.
We find folks to contact in several ways. One is that someone from the team read/saw something they think is cool on the Internet - then we try to reach out to the author to ask if they are interested to write something / re-make some blog posts in form of 1-page articles (I personally believe there is value in re-surfacing cool stuff). We also look around in typical spaced where folks publish articles or where such articles surface (social media, aggregating sites, etc) and reach out to some of them.
I don't have exact stats, but a lot of articles come just from our Call for Paper, which we post about on our social media.
I immediately went to the menu to see how I could buy a subscription, and there isn’t a place, as far as I can tell through my search, to do so.
This goes for all new startups (non-profit or not!) if you want me to give you money, make it easy for me to give you money.
This is an online magazine, ostensibly, and as such I would expect to see a “subscribe” page, which would take payment information, and I would get emailed new issues as they come out.
And that’s not me saying this, there’s an entire cottage industry devoted to pricing and buying decisions, and how friction reduces revenue.
If I take your suggestion to its logical conclusion, I would need to:
1. Get an RSS reader (I don’t have one, haven’t used one since google reader shut down) 2. Subscribe to their RSS feed. 3. Remember to check my RSS reader. 4. Each 3-4 months (just long enough for it not to be a habit forming exercise), click on the link. 5. Put in my credit card information each time. 6. buy the issue.
Or, I could use their “preferred” method:
1. Subscribe to their email list. 2. Click the link every 3-4 months when an issue drops. 3. Put in my credit card information every 3-4 months? 4. Buy the issue.
Each of these has far more friction in them than necessary, and hurts their overall goal, which is to make their magazine self-sustaining.
> I would expect to see a “subscribe” page, which would take payment information, and I would get emailed new issues as they come out.
You are not expected to pay to get emailed as new issues come out. Just join this group (link found on FAQ page) and you will get notifications: https://groups.google.com/g/pagedout-notifications
Indeed - when you're in the right circles a free print copy of PagedOut will find its way to you.
https://pagedout.institute/?page=prints.php
https://www.lulu.com/search?contributor=Paged+Out%21+Institu...
I discovered it easily on desktop, idk about mobile
I fully agree with you. We are slooowly working towards having also the printed version available in a subscription model (note: PDFs will remain free and we will also continue to give out free - as in "sponsored by [some company or event]" - on conferences / demoscene parties / etc). We still have to do a couple of things first, like:
1. Make sure our prints are consistently of good quality. As we've learnt this year, printing is hard, especially if you have to support multiple different printing companies. We're well on our way with this.
2. Rebuild the older versions to have them print ready - this is required for e.g. ISSN registration which we are working on. As we don't do typical DTP, but rather use a waay more complex process of Python-scripts-processing-incoming-PDFs (perhaps this wasn't my brightest idea, but it has its upsides), this takes a while (mostly because older issues were built using previous build engine and PDFs are hard - our DTP programmer has a lot of horror stories).
3. Well, find a company (or multiple companies) that offers subscriptions and ships worldwide and test them.
So it will still take a bit of time, but we'll get there :)
As I said, this magazine is wonderful. One caution I have, taking what you said that you only intend to charge for prints, is that I don’t think it’s a great idea to self-devalue the PDF version by not charging for it as well.
1. Visit the site and get it free. 2. Subscribe, get the PDF delivered to your inbox and discount on printed version.
That way, you give folks an easy on-ramp to paying you while still giving out the free version.
I.e. our intention is to charge readers neither for PDF nor for print, to the extent that is possible. In case of print-on-demand or print-subscription that of course won't be possible, but at various events we're successfully bringing printed Paged Out! issues to distribute for free. The idea is rather for the zine to finance itself through ad sales, sponsorship editions, and special collector bundled editions. We have a couple of other more-typical ideas as well, like Pateron later on.
Admittedly, so far we're in the red (not terribly though), but that's OK. There are still certain things we need to roll out before being able to evaluate whether we need to change the base operating model. If we do have to change it, it's not unlikely to start with ideas like the one you proposed - they do make sense.
Man, as far as I know this is not some wanna be unicorn startup, this is curiosity-driven, for-hackers content managed by people who were top at competitive security for many years
https://pagedout.institute/?page=/etc/passwd
;-)
I can order prints.
So I wouldn't be that worried about opening a random PDF in a browser. But I would be maybe worried about opening one in a desktop app written in an unsafe language.
Hah, that's a good point! I realize of course issues with PDFs (I have a dozen or so CVEs in PDF readers like Adobe Reader, Chrome, etc). This said, at the end of the day, there isn't much of a choice to be honest.
Admittedly this is because of where I wanted to go with this zine - i.e. make it printable, give authors the freedom to do whatever on the page (and not have to deal with manual DTP), and make it in a format that is widely supported and not limiting (and both PDF readers and writers are abundant).
Realistically if we wanted to go with a format that has 0 attack surface, it would have to be a headerless RGB pixel stream - but that's hardly usable. INB4: txt files have a greater attack surface than headerless RGB pixel streams, even if not by much (see various ANSI escape code problems over the last 4 decades).
P.S. Oh, and let's remember that demoscene/etc zines back in the days were EXEs ;)
* No buy now button: add to cart, accept cookies, view cart, checkout
* Account creation required pre-purchase
* Email verification required pre-purchase
At the least, it was a fairly linear flow except for the email verification (and the email was instant) but christ just let me pay.
EDIT: Ah I see, reading the other comments it's not meant to be paid for. It's meant to be distributed to people "in the right circles". Okay, lucky someone mentioned that. The POD provider only has a 1-hour cancellation policy. Though on second thought, I can't be arsed to go back and cancel for the $27. I'll just skip subsequent ones.
Our home color printer is an inkjet, though we have a black and white laser, so it's not as economical for me as it might be for you and I'm happy to do the $27 for a similar 70 or so full-color pages of an equally interesting magazine.
"If you would like to sell printed copies of Paged Out!, please contact us about a commercial license [...]. We're happy to work both with very small sellers who print and bind Paged Out! at home, [...]"
ETA: Though admittedly I wouldn't count on buying a yacht for money earned this way ;). Our income from "official" (lulu.com) sales are about 30-300 CHF / month, and this is only because a lot of wonderful people want to support us and get the more expensive "sponsorship" editions.
But - per your edit - the PoD option is for folks who either really want a printed Paged Out!, or want to throw some money into the project. This year we got back to finding sponsors to pay for prints to distribute them (for free) on various events - https://pagedout.institute/?page=event-prints.php - and we plan to keep increasing our presence at more events next year. So the "in the right circles" just means "one of these events".
Anyway, whichever way you choose to enjoy Paged Out! - bought, received for free, or just the PDF version - glad to have you with us :)
I will be throwing money at these people. This magazine needs to live and spread its wings.
Any other recommendations for such good sources?
- https://phrack.org/ - well, this one you probably have heard about ;) (it has a printed form as well, but I think you have to actually find it on an event)
- https://tmpout.sh/ - this one focuses on Linux executables
But if you don't mind older content in amazing artistic forms, do check out old demoscene zines like Hugi: https://www.hugi.scene.org/ (note: these are in form of EXE files - that was pretty typical for scene zines)
Unredacted - Privacy/OSINT related. Only past issues are free. https://inteltechniques.com/magazine.html
N-O-D-E - Hardware/DIY https://n-o-d-e.net/zine/
As a security engineer/reverse engineer I'm absolutely subscribing to this and sharing among colleagues.
Do you mean https://increment.com/programming-languages/? Huh, I never heard about it before - thanks for mentioning it! :)
Between the two of them, they kinda/sorta make up for my lapsed 2600 subscription...
Foxboron•2mo ago
lalithaar•2mo ago
gynvael•2mo ago
mte90•2mo ago
lawn•2mo ago
Maybe joining the discord is a suitable first step...
gynvael•2mo ago
But if you feel worried, our Discord is open, and you can also just email us with an article topic idea and we'll give you feedback on it.