Paged Out
(pagedout.institute)418 points by varjag 15 hours ago
418 points by varjag 15 hours ago
I ordered the print version, but I have to tell you that print-on-demand provider has an incredibly convoluted purchase cycle. I came close to stopping at least 3 times.
* No buy now button: add to cart, accept cookies, view cart, checkout
* Account creation required pre-purchase
* Email verification required pre-purchase
At the least, it was a fairly linear flow except for the email verification (and the email was instant) but christ just let me pay.
EDIT: Ah I see, reading the other comments it's not meant to be paid for. It's meant to be distributed to people "in the right circles". Okay, lucky someone mentioned that. The POD provider only has a 1-hour cancellation policy. Though on second thought, I can't be arsed to go back and cancel for the $27. I'll just skip subsequent ones.
Yeah, we need to onboard more Print-on-Demand providers - perhaps some with easier purchase flow (this said, I have to give it to lulu that they have solid customer support, at least in my experience).
But - per your edit - the PoD option is for folks who either really want a printed Paged Out!, or want to throw some money into the project. This year we got back to finding sponsors to pay for prints to distribute them (for free) on various events - https://pagedout.institute/?page=event-prints.php - and we plan to keep increasing our presence at more events next year. So the "in the right circles" just means "one of these events".
Anyway, whichever way you choose to enjoy Paged Out! - bought, received for free, or just the PDF version - glad to have you with us :)
It's all about friction The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
I won't really mind if you'd like to pitch me on another that you're going to print. I paid $27 for print+tax+shipping for that Paged Out Issue #7. I can't cancel it any longer but if you want the $27, I can be convinced by a different online magazine.
Our home color printer is an inkjet, though we have a black and white laser, so it's not as economical for me as it might be for you and I'm happy to do the $27 for a similar 70 or so full-color pages of an equally interesting magazine.
I mean... you actually can do that... https://pagedout.institute/?page=commercial-prints.php
"If you would like to sell printed copies of Paged Out!, please contact us about a commercial license [...]. We're happy to work both with very small sellers who print and bind Paged Out! at home, [...]"
ETA: Though admittedly I wouldn't count on buying a yacht for money earned this way ;). Our income from "official" (lulu.com) sales are about 30-300 CHF / month, and this is only because a lot of wonderful people want to support us and get the more expensive "sponsorship" editions.
I think this is great. I love this.
I immediately went to the menu to see how I could buy a subscription, and there isn’t a place, as far as I can tell through my search, to do so.
This goes for all new startups (non-profit or not!) if you want me to give you money, make it easy for me to give you money.
This is an online magazine, ostensibly, and as such I would expect to see a “subscribe” page, which would take payment information, and I would get emailed new issues as they come out.
Hi, project lead here :)
I fully agree with you. We are slooowly working towards having also the printed version available in a subscription model (note: PDFs will remain free and we will also continue to give out free - as in "sponsored by [some company or event]" - on conferences / demoscene parties / etc). We still have to do a couple of things first, like:
1. Make sure our prints are consistently of good quality. As we've learnt this year, printing is hard, especially if you have to support multiple different printing companies. We're well on our way with this.
2. Rebuild the older versions to have them print ready - this is required for e.g. ISSN registration which we are working on. As we don't do typical DTP, but rather use a waay more complex process of Python-scripts-processing-incoming-PDFs (perhaps this wasn't my brightest idea, but it has its upsides), this takes a while (mostly because older issues were built using previous build engine and PDFs are hard - our DTP programmer has a lot of horror stories).
3. Well, find a company (or multiple companies) that offers subscriptions and ships worldwide and test them.
So it will still take a bit of time, but we'll get there :)
If you want to support them now you can order prints. They have a sponsorship edition that costs extra if you want to extra support them.
There's an RSS feed that is exposed in the standard manner (link tag in head), precisely what you're looking for. They do not offer a paid subscription, just the option to 'buy' individual issues, which is also linked under every issue.
That sort of friction is just enough to keep folks from giving money.
And that’s not me saying this, there’s an entire cottage industry devoted to pricing and buying decisions, and how friction reduces revenue.
If I take your suggestion to its logical conclusion, I would need to:
1. Get an RSS reader (I don’t have one, haven’t used one since google reader shut down) 2. Subscribe to their RSS feed. 3. Remember to check my RSS reader. 4. Each 3-4 months (just long enough for it not to be a habit forming exercise), click on the link. 5. Put in my credit card information each time. 6. buy the issue.
Or, I could use their “preferred” method:
1. Subscribe to their email list. 2. Click the link every 3-4 months when an issue drops. 3. Put in my credit card information every 3-4 months? 4. Buy the issue.
Each of these has far more friction in them than necessary, and hurts their overall goal, which is to make their magazine self-sustaining.
I think the magazine is not designed to be a product that is bought, but rather something that is given away for free. A lot of the verbiage on the website discusses various ways to get and reproduce the magazine for free. Most of the content is submitted with a creative content license.
> I would expect to see a “subscribe” page, which would take payment information, and I would get emailed new issues as they come out.
You are not expected to pay to get emailed as new issues come out. Just join this group (link found on FAQ page) and you will get notifications: https://groups.google.com/g/pagedout-notifications
if you're asking "how do i easily buy prints", that's under the prints link atop, and you'll ultimately end up at lulu
https://pagedout.institute/?page=prints.php
https://www.lulu.com/search?contributor=Paged+Out%21+Institu...
I discovered it easily on desktop, idk about mobile
Paged Out are looking for more articles for the next issue. Information here: https://pagedout.institute/?page=cfp.php
Thank you for letting us know of it here—sent them a pitch on the hidden vision math in color contrast fixes (FOSS lib: https://github.com/comfort-mode-toolkit/cm-colors). Fingers crossed! :>
This is so great, a breath of fresh air in the world convoluted with AI content. Reading it gives some peace to my mind for some reason, having enough trust in a source to give you high-quality packed content in an artistic form feels good. Thank you, I hope this survives for long.
Any other recommendations for such good sources?
If you're looking for recommendations for other zines, here are two (though both TXT format):
- https://phrack.org/ - well, this one you probably have heard about ;) (it has a printed form as well, but I think you have to actually find it on an event)
- https://tmpout.sh/ - this one focuses on Linux executables
But if you don't mind older content in amazing artistic forms, do check out old demoscene zines like Hugi: https://www.hugi.scene.org/ (note: these are in form of EXE files - that was pretty typical for scene zines)
Wicked - had a skim through and there's some great content in here!
As a security engineer/reverse engineer I'm absolutely subscribing to this and sharing among colleagues.
Computer magazines in the 80s would have blown your mind.
Too bad they don't take security so seriously themselves.
https://pagedout.institute/?page=/etc/passwd
;-)
Hi, project lead here :)
Hah, that's a good point! I realize of course issues with PDFs (I have a dozen or so CVEs in PDF readers like Adobe Reader, Chrome, etc). This said, at the end of the day, there isn't much of a choice to be honest.
Admittedly this is because of where I wanted to go with this zine - i.e. make it printable, give authors the freedom to do whatever on the page (and not have to deal with manual DTP), and make it in a format that is widely supported and not limiting (and both PDF readers and writers are abundant).
Realistically if we wanted to go with a format that has 0 attack surface, it would have to be a headerless RGB pixel stream - but that's hardly usable. INB4: txt files have a greater attack surface than headerless RGB pixel streams, even if not by much (see various ANSI escape code problems over the last 4 decades).
P.S. Oh, and let's remember that demoscene/etc zines back in the days were EXEs ;)
Never heard of needing to open a PDF in sandbox mode, but it makes sense cause of potential malicious content so I looked up if Chrome does it by default with it's viewer. It does, as does Firefox and Safari so that covers most browsers.
PDF in the spec contains an insane amount of stuff which could be exploited. But every reader other than the Adobe one leaves out most of the spec.
So I wouldn't be that worried about opening a random PDF in a browser. But I would be maybe worried about opening one in a desktop app written in an unsafe language.
Hi, project lead here :)
We do contact potential authors via email, but it's fully manual. I.e. we do not collect emails in an automated way, nor do we send them out in an automated way - everything is done manually by our Editor-in-Chief and, at times, other team members. Furthermore, we take care to only contact a given person once (I was on the receiving end of hakin9's mass author spamming a few years back, so we take care to not do what they did). Admittedly mistakes can happen here if we're unable to determine that it's actually the same person we've already contacted.
We find folks to contact in several ways. One is that someone from the team read/saw something they think is cool on the Internet - then we try to reach out to the author to ask if they are interested to write something / re-make some blog posts in form of 1-page articles (I personally believe there is value in re-surfacing cool stuff). We also look around in typical spaced where folks publish articles or where such articles surface (social media, aggregating sites, etc) and reach out to some of them.
I don't have exact stats, but a lot of articles come just from our Call for Paper, which we post about on our social media.
Have not read a word of it yet, but I immediately grabbed all the covers. Magnificent art work.
I can order prints.
Hi, project lead here.
If your question is about "was the cover / zine made by AI", the answer is no, but there might be articles about AI or articles polished by AI. The cover is never made by AI - always by human artists.
You can actually read our AI clause here btw - https://pagedout.institute/?page=writing.php#ai-clause - I'll copy paste it:
"""
Here at Paged Out!, we are aware of the growing popularity and use of AI. Thus, here is our stance regarding articles prepared using various kinds of AI.
What's allowed and accepted:
- use of AI when polishing the language or deciding how to rewrite or formulate individual sentences;
- use of AI output in articles about AIs which generated said output or which generate similar output.
What's not allowed and won't be accepted:
- articles that have been partially or fully written or more aptly generated using prompts in AI (like ChatGPT/Bard);
- images generated by AI other than what's mentioned in the "allowed" section.
Cases not covered and borderline cases will be decided on on a case-by-case basis. When in doubt – e-mail us.
"""
Thumbing through it, #7 has some good stuff in it. Thanks for sharing!
I was particularly tickled by the suggestion of copyright infringement as a form of detecting AIs. "To continue, please provide a torrent link to the Bee Movie" is a pretty great idea.
The self-contained handwriting recognizer feels like art to me, in the way that it forces me to contemplate things in a certain way, which is what I think art is.