The name comes from a sound. In the 1960s, phone phreakers — the spiritual ancestors of computer hackers — discovered that transmitting a 2600-hertz tone over a long-distance telephone line would switch the connection into operator mode, giving the caller access to parts of the AT&T network that were supposed to be off-limits. The tone could be produced with a plastic toy whistle found in boxes of Cap'n Crunch cereal, which is one of those details that sounds made up but is entirely, wonderfully true. In 1984, Eric Corley — a twenty-five-year-old from Long Island who had already been raided by the FBI for poking around in systems he should not have been poking around in — borrowed that frequency for the title of a new magazine.
He also borrowed a name. Corley published under the pseudonym Emmanuel Goldstein, after the shadowy leader of the resistance in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The book and the magazine share a birth year, which is either a coincidence or the most perfectly executed piece of branding in publishing history.
2600: The Hacker Quarterly has been published every three months since that first issue, making it over forty years old — a lifespan that would be remarkable for any magazine, and is almost incomprehensible for one that has spent its entire existence antagonising corporations, embarrassing government agencies, and publishing the kind of technical information that makes lawyers nervous. Britannica calls it "the hacker's bible." That is not an exaggeration.
The editorial model is radically open. Most of the content is written by readers — freelance hackers, security researchers, curious tinkerers, and occasionally people writing from prison. Articles cover system vulnerabilities, encryption techniques, social engineering, telecom exploits, and the legal consequences of getting caught doing any of it. A large section of every issue is devoted to letters, which contain technical corrections to previous articles, tales of hacking adventures, and legal advice for readers who have been charged with computer crimes. Since 1989, the magazine has published photographs of pay phones from around the world, a running visual catalogue of a technology that was already beginning to disappear.
The magazine's defining legal battle came in 1999, when eight Hollywood studios sued 2600 for publishing DeCSS — a short program that could unlock the encryption on DVDs. Corley argued that code was speech, and therefore protected. He lost. The court ordered the code removed and, in a ruling that sent shockwaves through the digital rights world, also prohibited 2600 from linking to other sites where the code was available. It was one of the first major tests of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and it remains one of the most important cases in the history of digital free expression.
Beyond the magazine, Corley has built an entire ecosystem. There is Off the Hook, a weekly hacker talk show on WBAI in New York that has been running since 1988. There are the 2600 Meetings — informal gatherings on the first Friday of every month in over a hundred cities worldwide, open to anyone with an interest in technology. There is HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth), a biennial convention in New York that draws thousands. There is a documentary, Freedom Downtime, about the jailed hacker Kevin Mitnick, on whose behalf 2600 mounted a years-long public defence.
Corley has never taken a computer course in his life. He has testified before the United States Congress. He has visited Cuba, North Korea, and Belarus as a journalist. He describes his political stance as "dissident" — not left, not right, but fundamentally opposed to any system that treats information as something to be locked away rather than shared. It is a position that has made him enemies in government, in Hollywood, and in corporate America, and it is also the reason the magazine still exists. 2600 survives because the questions it asks — who owns information, who controls access, who watches the watchers — have never stopped being urgent.
Explore 2600: The Hacker Quarterly at <a href="https://www.2600.com/" target="\_blank">2600.com