The International Journal of Proof of Concept or Get The Fuck Out

April 26, 2015 1:35 PM

"Permission to use all or part of this work for personal, classroom, or whatever other use is NOT granted unless you make a copy and pass it to a neighbor without fee, excepting libations offered by the aforementioned neighbor in order to facilitate neighborly hacking, and that said copy bears this notice and the full citation on the first page. Because if burning a book is a sin—which it surely is!—then copying of a book is your sacred duty."

This is how entries in Travis Goodspeed's journal Proof of Concept or Get The Fuck Out or PoC||GTFO opens. With contributions from Mefi's own effugas, the journal intends to continue publishing offensive security research in the trend started by Phrack and Uninformed. Not only are the articles wonderful, ranging from amusing poems to in-depth technical proofs of concept, but the PDF’s themselves are riddles to be solved (warning, some are quite large). You can preview issues 4, 5 and 6 on Archive.org, with the option to read online before downloading in full.

posted by yeahwhatever (9 comments total)

quite technical: check
very humorous: check
clever copyright notice: check
great contributors: check
continuing the hacker tradition of 'zines: check

This is awesomesauce. And while Travis was a mensch before this endeavor, my esteem for him has grown even further.

Words of wisdom from issue 0x00:

First, I must caution you to cut out the Sun Tsu quotes. While every good speaker indulges in quoting from good books of fiction or philosophy, verily I warn you that this can lead to unrighteousness! For when we tell beginners to study ancient philosophy instead of engineering, they will become experts in the Art of War and not in the Art of Assembly Language! They find themselves reading Wikiquote instead of Phrack, and we are all the poorer for it!

posted by el io at 2:52 PM on April 26, 2015 [3 favorites]

My favorite aspect of this wonderful 'zine is that in addition to showing amazing stuff (like a PDF that is also a bootable operating system(!)), they give you the tools and teach you how to do it yourself. Lovely community, very funny, intellectually generous.
posted by dylanjames at 2:56 PM on April 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

This is fantastic -- thanks for posting it.
posted by Doofus Magoo at 6:18 PM on April 26, 2015

PoC||GTFO (and working with Travis in general) is one of the more fun things I've done. Hacking is always at risk of drifting towards religion and "thought leadership"; things like PoC||GTFO prevent that.
posted by effugas at 6:28 PM on April 26, 2015 [3 favorites]

I did not know that MeFi's own effugas was such an eminent personage. Dang, this place really has a good guest list!

For folks who don't know the infosec business, he's A Pretty Big Deal. (For example, he carries the American sliver of the global DNS system's nuclear football.) Just by hearing that he's involved in this, I am off to hunt it up and learn a thing or three.
posted by wenestvedt at 7:27 PM on April 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

The first issue is dated August of 2013. How did I not see this before?!
posted by wenestvedt at 7:29 PM on April 26, 2015

(Even in the U.S., we agree, there are two universal scary things , small towns and the 1970s)

The 70s are unsettling. Sometimes the collective sense I get from the 70s is, "Civilization is cool, but not real, because it dissolves with the application of violence ha ha ha. We are gods, but still meat!" and a general fawning over the shirtless killer outsider... before it was all tamed and commoditized in the 80s, when people stopped being gods and became products.
posted by nom de poop at 12:27 AM on April 27, 2015 [5 favorites]

This makes me giddy, and I understand nothing of the content and probably less than 20% of the humor.
posted by ipsative at 8:05 AM on April 27, 2015

the PDF’s themselves are riddles to be solved (warning, some are quite large)

they are large, but part of that is because each is (among other things) a zip file that contains (among other things) the previous issue, and so on recursively back to issue 0x00.
posted by russm at 3:59 PM on April 27, 2015