How and why I made a zine | Hacker News Reader

How and why I made a zine

jvns.ca

Zines by techies have a long history! Tom Jennings [1], who founded FidoNet [2] and The Little Garden ISP, published one of the first Queercore anarcho-punk zines called Homocore [3]. He's written a retrospective and published an archive of his Homocore memory [4] of San Francisco during 1988-1991.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Jennings

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homocore_(zine)

[4] http://worldpowersystems.com/HOMOCORE/

Phrack is my favorite example of a tech zine! It's a classic.

http://www.phrack.org/

I imagine a lot of technical people are or could be into zines: they mix DIY and maker zeal with principles of distributed information sharing. They're the OG artisanal local blogs ;-p

You can make little zine booklets -- which I find especially satisfying -- from a single sheet of computer paper using the following instructions: http://staycalmcomic.com/how-to-zine

I like the way you phrased, "They're the OG artisanal local blogs," and I think of them the same way.

When I was in junior high and high school one of my best friends and I started producing a 'zine in Cleveland around the punk and hardcore music scenes. We interviewed bands, made crazy art work, she wrote some poetry, and it was a very fun, very satisfying collaboration. We used a mac at the time to do all of our layout and then went to Kinkos to assemble it.

Because of the relationships we developed we started producing concerts for the bands we liked. Basically, we were able to corral enough people to pay for a show we wanted to see by bands that weren't otherwise coming to Cleveland.

Julia Evans' zines are the most entertaining way to learn about linux/unix internals I've encountered yet :)

This was really fun and informative. Like a good comic book.

She brings back the child-like wonder and joy of early "tuts" of hackerdom. The old "asciiz" were tutorials written by people who both _enjoyed_ programming, and found it mischievous.

the zine http://jvns.ca/strace-zine-unfolded.pdf

" Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution Paperback about riot grrl and people making feminist zines and starting punk bands,"

Kathleen Hanna had a big hand in this movement [0] and if you want to see/listen then watch "The Punk Singer" ~ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMbLzaVkn2s

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Hanna

I was once at a tech-presentation where the presenter drew/wrote everything freehand like this on a tablet, almost similar to how one would use a blackboard. I really liked the way she presented compared to a static slide-deck, as she could adjust/add examples based on questions and feedback from the crowd.

From time to time I want to make a zine, but the distribution it is a problem. Startup idea time: I upload my PDF, the lists of address, and you print them and distributed them.

Many print shops can do this sort of thing for you.

Reminds me of my wonder pouring through Factsheet Five, a zine catalog (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factsheet_Five and http://zinewiki.com/Factsheet_Five)

  # imagemagick is the best thing in the world

Unfortunately, the number of vulnerabilities in ImageMagick has earned it another name, ImageTragick.

https://imagetragick.com/

https://github.com/ImageTragick/PoCs

"It's riddled with features!"

That's a big issue for imagemagick as an API/library (working on arbitrary data for a web service/application) not as a CLI tool to work on data you created yourself, which is the case here.

TBH, I can't really blame ImageMagick devs too much for this. They're not making an image editing suite for web-facing services with access to sensitive user data. They're making an image editing suite for the Linux command line, which web devs happen to use on user-submitted images with absolutely no sanitization. The latter part of the sentence is the problem.

Adding to that, ImageMagick had it's first release in 1990! That's half a decade before the first release of Apache. It's no surprise some of the code in ImageMagick make it unfit for unfiltered use in web apps, when it was written before graphics-capable webservers, even graphics-capable browsers, were a thing.

What we really need is for someone to write a security-focused universal wrapper, that plugs straight into existing frameworks, so everyone can get the benefit of best-practices, and can report vulns and get them secured quickly.

So really, blaming ImageMagick is not that far from blaming Python for having vulnerabilities if you run a Django app taking unsanitized form input and doing subprocess.Popen() with it.

(That's not to say the "imagetragick" folks are wrong for alerting the community, using that moniker to increase awareness.)

> TBH, I can't really blame ImageMagick devs too much for this. They're not making an image editing suite for web-facing services with access to sensitive user data. They're making an image editing suite for the Linux command line

On the other hand, CLI image display and edition doesn't mean it'll only face trusted content, it's not rare to download a file and display it or further manipulate it.

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