founding of the publication. The moment you
subscribe, you’ll receive a link to a ZIP archive
containing, at the time of writing, 36 annual
digests – scans for the early pre-digital issues,
and true digital copies for the later issues.
Each spring you’ll receive another PDF for
your growing collection.
Is it worth it? Well, 2600 is an institution,
and the more recent issues have a lot to say
about tech topics from privacy and security
to hobbyism and, yes, criminality. Its current
editor-in-chief is the noted hacker Emmanuel
Goldstein, who served as a consultant on
the classic 1995 film Hackers, and lent his
pseudonym to Matthew Lillard’s character,
Cereal Killer. Contributions come from across
the world, although the quality of each article
can admittedly vary.
The back issues are a treasure trove of
historical content, little of which is directly
applicable today – you won’t find a Blue
Box much use on a modern telephone
network, for example. That’s not to say
these issues aren’t without value by any
means though. Reading from the beginning
to today provides a look at how technology
and telecommunications have evolved, and
from a perspective rarely considered by
mainstream tech publications.
All subscription options are available
from store.2600.com, along with individual
back issues.delivered. The standard subscription works
the same way now as it did back in 1988- a printed magazine drops through your
letterbox once a quarter. For those who
aren’t tied to physical hard copies, a relatively
new digital-only subscription bundles four
quarterly publications into a single annual
digest as a DRM-free PDF, which lands in
your inbox each spring.
There’s no cost difference between the
physical and digital subscriptions, but digital
subscribers get rewarded in a different way,
with the subscription including every back
issue going all the way to 1984 and the
The magazine has kept its counter-culture feel
over the yearsFor the completist, 2600 offers a box filled with
physical back issues – and every future issue to
come will land at your door tooArduino launches Nano RP2040 Connect
Arduino has officially launched its competitor to Raspberry Pi Pico, the Arduino Nano
RP2040 Connect. It’s more expensive, but it packs in a range of impressive
features. Designed to be pin-compatible with the Arduino Nano and
fully supported in the Arduino IDE and Arduino IoT Cloud, it’s
powered by the same RP2040 microcontroller as Raspberry
Pi Pico, but boasts 16MB of external flash and support
for Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.2 and Bluetooth
Low Energy (BLE).
It also has an on-board six-degrees-of-
freedom inertial measurement unit (IMU)
and a microphone. The board is available
from store.arduino.cc for $24.50 US
(around £17.35 ex VAT).N EWS IN BRI EF
copy of the magazine going forward for a
one-time fee of $260 US (around £183,
zero-rated for VAT).
Correcting for inflation, that’s $587 US
(around £414, zero-rated for VAT) in today’s
money, yet you can still pick up that same
lifetime subscription for just $260 US, or
$310 (around £219, zero-rated for VAT) for
subscribers outside the USA.
Thanks to the march of technology, you
also get a choice of how the magazine is