B&N Removes Magazine From Nook Store Due To Feature Article On 'Hacking' | Hacker News Reader

B&N Removes Magazine From Nook Store Due To Feature Article On 'Hacking'

techdirt.com

70 pointsmikecane29 comments

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Curious. I always used to get my 2600 from their shelves, and they were always prominently displayed.

I did too, though it made for some weird conversations at the checkout counter.

I came to say the exact same thing.

And they still carry "The Hacker Quarterly".

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/c/2600-magazine

They must think it's about woodwork with axes or for people who have chronic coughing problems.

They still carry them, but recently (starting maybe 2 or 3 years ago really), the BN in Philadelphia has been 'hiding' their copies of 2600 in the cabinets underneath the magazine racks.

I don't know if poor sales or customer complaints are the cause.

well back in the early/mid 90's in the Uk Forbidden Planet used to have Mondo 2000 and Wired in the rack next to Skin 2.

Skin2 is a famous Fetish Mag - for those you who don't get out much.

Same here. Additionally Amazon carries the digital version of 2600 (although I wish it came in the same visual format as the print version.)

Came here to say the same as well.

My guess? The same management that "knee-jerk reaction" bans a mag just because it has the word HACK in bold large text doesn't bother to figure out the actual contents of 2600.

You'd think a book store's manager wouldn't judge a book by its cover.

Here is the cover in question: http://www.linuxformat.com/files/lxf_covers/154-big.jpg.

> Learn to Hack, Attack servers >> Crack passwords >> Exploit services >> Beat encryption >> Everything you need to be evil

Not sure if that warrants pulling from shelves, but it explicitly endorses illegal activity. Everything up until the last phrase could be sold as legitimate penetration testing. I can easily see their lawyers getting twitchy.

Um, except that's "Everything you need to be evil*". The asterisk clearly references this: "for self reference only. Don't break the law!"

(EDIT: removed snark)

I do appreciate the correction and detail, since I honestly can't make it out on my screen.

edit: redaction

Fair enough, apologies for the snarky attack. The caveat is hard to make out, though the asterisk is quite obvious.

It wasn't to me - I thought it was another phrase divider.

This article goes out to say that the term "Hack" is increasingly less commonly used to refer to malicious users. While that might be true in tech circles, I'm skeptical that a significantly larger group of people off the street would respond positively if I asked them what the term "hack" meant. I'm not saying Hacking is bad, I think the term has been somewhat hijacked, sure. But, let's be realistic, I think it's generally a negative term to most people and will probably stay that way into the indefinite future.

Yes I think the author of the article desperately wants "hack" to have its old MIT usage - I am afraid that train has left the station decades ago.

Well, this website still uses it...

No. On this site hacker doesn't have any of its original meaning, it means IT-startup entrepreneur. Don't forget that this site was named Startup News before.

So why was it renamed then? The name hackernews was actually chosen to reflect that this news site should not only be strictly about IT startups.

http://ycombinator.com/hackernews.html

The negative meaning should not be accepted or acknowledged. When something is incorrect it's incorrect, no matter how many people believe it.

It's a neologism...a lingual bookmark for a concept in the popular consciousness. I'm not sure that you can just tell people they're "wrong" for using it. They'll just tell you you're wrong for not using it.

Sorry, but that's not how language works.

The article on cursory glance seems to be no more than a brief tutorial on Metasploit, books about which are available for purchase on B&N.com.

Censorship is censorship. It never works, and in this particular case sounds incredibly ignorant.

Some day perhaps there will be a deep-catalog "open source e-bookstore" that is device agnostic so the gatekeepers are bypassed altogether. Hm...

Sign me up.

Oh, wait, they have that now, in the form of torrent sites. I think their prospectus would have some statement of existential risk.

Then presumably they'll also be removing books like this one?

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/web-security-testing-cookboo...

I had the same reaction when I saw the issue with the title, "How to Beat the CIA - Keep Everybody Out with our Ultimate Privacy Guide."

Original source:

http://tuxradar.com/content/learn-hack-was-pulled-barnes-and...

Techdirt is the third-hand source here.

This is probably the best thing that could happen to this magazine though. Publicity from all these news sources.

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