2600

Charter / moderation notes

Charter for alt.2600 "My crime is that of curiosity." — The Mentor, "The Conscience of a Hacker," 1986 RATIONALE & HERITAGE alt.2600 takes its name from 2600 hertz — the pure tone that, blown into a payphone from a toy whistle packed in a cereal box, once convinced AT&T's long-distance trunks to hand a curious kid the keys to the network. It is the frequency that launched a thousand blue boxes and the number on the masthead of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. It stands for a culture built not on breaking things, but on refusing to accept "you don't need to know how that works." This group is RootBadger's home for the hacker ethic: the conviction that systems — phone networks, protocols, locks, silicon, and the bureaucracies bolted to them — are far more interesting understood than taken on faith. Hands on the hardware. Read the manual, then the source, then the errata. Curiosity as a discipline, not a crime. We honor the original alt.2600 in spirit and in rules: welcoming to the genuinely curious, merciless to the willfully lazy, and completely uninterested in helping anyone commit a crime against a real person. ON-TOPIC - Phreaking & telecom: blue/red/beige boxes, SS7, the PSTN, VoIP internals — the history and the lore. - Security research & defense: vulnerability analysis, reverse engineering, malware analysis, exploit development in a lab or CTF, red/blue/purple teaming, responsible disclosure. - The craft: cryptography, lockpicking and physical security, RFID/NFC, hardware and firmware hacking, software-defined radio, and the theory and defense of social engineering. - Culture & history: 2600 meetings, DEF CON and HOPE, the L0pht, Phrack, the CFAA and the cases that shaped it, and the ethics of disclosure. - Learning in the open: CTF write-ups, home-lab builds, papers and books worth reading, and honest "here's what I broke and what it taught me." OFF-TOPIC (the line that made the old FAQ famous) - "How do I hack my girlfriend's / ex's / boss's email, Instagram, or phone?" No. It was the wrong question in 1994 and it is the wrong question now. - Requests to access, attack, or damage any system you are not authorized to touch — a named site, account, company, or individual. - Carding, fraud, stolen credentials, combo lists, account-cracking services, and the buying or selling of any of it. - Malware aimed at real victims, doxxing, swatting, stalkerware, and harassment campaigns. - Booter/stresser/DDoS-for-hire and other mass-targeting tooling. The distinction is old and simple: understanding a lock is knowledge; opening your neighbor's door is burglary. Keep your work authorized — in a lab, on your own gear, in a CTF, or on a system whose owner has said yes in writing. MODERATION PLAN alt.2600 is unmoderated in the alt.* tradition: no pre-approval, no gatekeeping of ideas. RTFM is enforced by peers, not police — read the FAQ, search before you post, and show your work. Weak questions get pointed at the manual; good work gets built on. The hard limits above are not matters of moderator taste — they are the edge of this group's purpose and of the law. Posts that solicit or provide help attacking real, non-consenting targets, that traffic in fraud or stolen data, or that facilitate harassment will be removed; repeat or egregious offenders are reported and banned. RootBadger's platform anti-abuse controls for spam and harassment apply here as everywhere. Everything else? Welcome home. Now go read something.