Congrats and thank you for this. If you’d asked me when I was a young h4x0r just starting out, what sorts of links I should find on a site called Hacker News, I’d have said something like this one. Looking to get lost in these issues during the holidays. You made my day!
Good news is that we're already chatting with two print houses about printing around 1k copies (test print basically). The plan is to give these away on various events / conferences, or to local communities.
Bad news is that we'll be able to only send these to EU, and only in large batches (like 100 copies to one place), and not individually.
Good news is that we'll make the printer-house-friendly PDFs available for anyone who wants to print a batch and given them away (or sell them for the cost of making).
And I also have this idea to chat with various companies for them to make a sponsor-batch of zines to print and give away, e.g. on events they sponsor. Not sure how much interest there will be.
We also plan to make a nice "collector's" high-quality print of a bundle edition (e.g. 4 issues in one "book") to help get some money into the project. Same as PoC||GTFO did (shoutout to these folks), though we'll probably go with a kickstarter or sth.
Now, the elephant in the room: selling individual issues in a consistent always-available way ← that's something we're discussing from time to time. At this moment we're not there yet, as the logistics and accounting stuff of this operation would be pretty huge. I'm also thinking of approaching some local magazine publishers in some countries with a deal like "hey, we have PDFs, wanna print and sell these for a %?".
It would be very cool if each issue had its unique "website", and each article it's own unique page (different colors or layout, but consistent with that issue's overall theme).
Some blogs used to do this back in the day, where each post had its own unique design.
Something like mkdocs with material theme, or Hugo could do the trick. Or, you know, plain old hand crafted html and css and a script to generate the pdfs (with headless chrome for maximum compatibility).
More info about the 4 year delay, changes to the management/publication structure, and more are on the blog, which perhaps the post should link to instead:
Glad to see it back! I contributed a few to #2, including the only "landscape mode" article, which was probably a bit of a pain in the ass for the team ;)
First two words in my head when I read the headline: "Holy fuck!".
I've been waiting years for this.
This is why you come to hacker news; you want to learn interesting hacker shit? Well here it is.
And bullshit is against the law here! Everything is limited to one page, get to the point or get out. :D
I could really write a 10 page rant about how much I love this damn magazine and how I went and found gynvael on irc a year or two ago to ask if there was any hope #3 would ever see the light of day. I checked back once a month for the first 18 months or so after issue 2.
I'd definitely like to read the zine but I'm not going to download a pdf, especially when the subject of the zine is 'Hacking' and 'Security'. Any chance we can get a web page view?
That said... you do realize, that web view (browser) has equally huge attack surface as PDFs do, right? And a lot of PDF viewers are either sandboxed (Chrome PDF viewer, Adobe Reader) or even written in JS (Firefox).
If you're worried about this though, there are services on the internet that convert PDFs into a series of images. You can also view the PDF through e.g. Google Drive or similar services, which do PDF parsing and conversion server side.
Between the old-school hacker spirit and the short-form content, this is a real gem.