A couple of weeks ago, on an errand to fetch the bread and milk ahead of the winter storm expected to wallop New York, I sidestepped into the neighborhood Barnes & Noble to see if they had the latest issue of 2600, The Hacker Quarterly in print. They didn’t, but they did have the autumn 2025 issue, so I bought that instead. I love it.

I have been peripherally aware of 2600 for a long time. I think I bought one issue as a PDF a year ago, as part of a personal push to read more professionally edited, socially conscious technology magazines, but I didn’t actually read it. But I did end up on the magazine’s mailing list, so I got reminded four times a year that it existed, and I suppose it took four reminders to finally break through.

The full-color covers of this little magazine belie the content, which is page after page of nuthin-but-text, one article after another by a variety of writers, and each one torturously typeset so that the text is either crammed to fit two pages or spread to stretch across one, with little consistency in kerning or leading. In the middle is a letter-column that goes on and on longer than you’d think, where the editors seem happy respond to practically all the mail the magazine gets. The whole vibe reminds me of the years I spent working on the student paper at UMaine. There is such a scrappy joy to all of it, and it’s all real, and current.

My favorite article of this issue is a two-pager by Micah Silverman titled “How I Became a Repo Man for a Day”, where the author, a seasoned security professional, is hired to help someone legally stop paying the insurance on a car co-owned by their ex-boyfriend, who was ghosting them. Creative solutions ensue. And there’s articles on AI, and articles on the current state of digital privacy rights, and retrospectives on phone phreaking, and so on. It’s all pretty great.

The magazine’s website is a wonderful mess and I can’t quickly figure out how to subscribe to a print edition. Maybe it’s not possible, but I hope it is. I will bring my own hacker spirit to this one and figure it out.