The art is evocative of even earlier science fiction covers, with the cheekiness of 2600 and early Wired, and a touch of Byte and Dr. Dobbs on content.
There's a typo in the URL here:
> If you have a topic in mind but are not sure if it is suitable for Paged Out!, check out the Writing Articles page or contact us
It links to `?page=writing.pho` rather than `.php`
Thumbing through it, #7 has some good stuff in it. Thanks for sharing!
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.
I wrote the AI detection with copyright one :) Happy you liked it!
I found out a bit after publishing that a comic called SMBC had a similar idea a few months before me, and their approach is really funny too http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/security
They were handing out printed version of the previous issue on this year’s Xenium demoscene party in Poland. Amazing stuff. Feels good, like good old demoscene zines.
to settle a convo w/ a friend, how did y'all go about blasting emails inviting writing submissions? they suspect automated (naturally), i suspected possibly automated + "have had blogs hit hn front page", idk
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.
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 :)
>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.
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
If your question is about "was the cover / zine made by AI", the answer is no, but there might be articles about AI or articles polished by AI. The cover is never made by AI - always by human artists.
Here at Paged Out!, we are aware of the growing popularity and use of AI. Thus, here is our stance regarding articles prepared using various kinds of AI.
What's allowed and accepted:
- use of AI when polishing the language or deciding how to rewrite or formulate individual sentences;
- use of AI output in articles about AIs which generated said output or which generate similar output.
What's not allowed and won't be accepted:
- articles that have been partially or fully written or more aptly generated using prompts in AI (like ChatGPT/Bard);
- images generated by AI other than what's mentioned in the "allowed" section.
Cases not covered and borderline cases will be decided on on a case-by-case basis. When in doubt – e-mail us.
Is it ironic that they publish it as a PDF? I get that it's the easiest way to control the print layout and also nicely self-contained... but how many of us are opening it in a sandbox as we should?
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 ;)
I ordered the print version, but I have to tell you that print-on-demand provider has an incredibly convoluted purchase cycle. I came close to stopping at least 3 times.
* 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.
Yeah, we need to onboard more Print-on-Demand providers - perhaps some with easier purchase flow (this said, I have to give it to lulu that they have solid customer support, at least in my experience).
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 :)
This is so great, a breath of fresh air in the world convoluted with AI content. Reading it gives some peace to my mind for some reason, having enough trust in a source to give you high-quality packed content in an artistic form feels good.
Thank you, I hope this survives for long.
If you're looking for recommendations for other zines, here are two (though both TXT format):
- 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)
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)
42 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 85.7 ms ] threadI 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.
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 :)
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
;-)
If your question is about "was the cover / zine made by AI", the answer is no, but there might be articles about AI or articles polished by AI. The cover is never made by AI - always by human artists.
You can actually read our AI clause here btw - https://pagedout.institute/?page=writing.php#ai-clause - I'll copy paste it:
"""
Here at Paged Out!, we are aware of the growing popularity and use of AI. Thus, here is our stance regarding articles prepared using various kinds of AI.
What's allowed and accepted:
- use of AI when polishing the language or deciding how to rewrite or formulate individual sentences;
- use of AI output in articles about AIs which generated said output or which generate similar output.
What's not allowed and won't be accepted:
- articles that have been partially or fully written or more aptly generated using prompts in AI (like ChatGPT/Bard);
- images generated by AI other than what's mentioned in the "allowed" section.
Cases not covered and borderline cases will be decided on on a case-by-case basis. When in doubt – e-mail us.
"""
I can order prints.
https://www.lulu.com/spotlight/pagedout
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.
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)
As a security engineer/reverse engineer I'm absolutely subscribing to this and sharing among colleagues.