
How and why I made a zine - chaghalibaghali
http://jvns.ca/blog/2016/08/29/how-i-made-a-zine/
======
DonHopkins
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Jennings)

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

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

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

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

[http://www.phrack.org/](http://www.phrack.org/)

------
lusen
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](http://staycalmcomic.com/how-to-zine)

~~~
endswapper
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.

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

~~~
mahmud
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.

------
TurboHaskal
the zine [http://jvns.ca/strace-zine-unfolded.pdf](http://jvns.ca/strace-zine-
unfolded.pdf)

------
bootload
_" 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](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMbLzaVkn2s)

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

------
maaaats
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.

------
pmtarantino
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.

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

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

------
0xmohit

      # 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://imagetragick.com/)

[https://github.com/ImageTragick/PoCs](https://github.com/ImageTragick/PoCs)

~~~
semi-extrinsic
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.)

~~~
masklinn
> 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.

