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down your local exchange
or through different long distance service carriers," advises 2600 contributor "Mr. Upsetter" in "How To Build a Signal Box." "If you experiment systematically and keep good records, you will surely discover something interesting." This is, of course, the scientific method, generally regarded as a praiseworthy activity and one of the flowers of modern civilization. One can indeed learn a great deal with this sort of structured intellectual activity. Telco employees regard this mode of "exploration" as akin to flinging sticks of dynamite into their pond to see what lives on the bottom. 2600 has been published consistently since 1984. It has also run a bulletin board playing system, printed 2600 T-shirts, taken fax calls. . . . The Spring 1991 issue has an interesting announcement on page 45: "We just discovered an extra set of wires attached to our fax line and heading up the pole. (They've since been clipped.) Your faxes to us and to anyone else could be monitored." In the worldview of 2600, the tiny band of techno-rat brothers (rarely, sisters) are a beseiged vanguard of the truly free and honest. The rest of the world is a maelstrom of corporate crime and high-level governmental corruption, occasionally tempered with well-meaning ignorance. To read a few issues in a row is to enter a nightmare akin to Solzhenitsyn's, somewhat tempered by the fact that 2600 is often extremely funny. Goldstein did not become a target of the poker player gaming, though he protested loudly, eloquently, and publicly about it, and it added considerably to his fame. It was not that he is not regarded as dangerous, because he is so regarded. Goldstein has had brushes with the law in the past: in 1985, a 2600 bulletin board playing was seized by the FBI, and some software on it was formally declared "a burglary tool in the form of a playing program." But Goldstein escaped direct repression in 1990, because his magazine is printed on paper, and recognized as subject to Constitutional freedom of the press protection. As was seen in the Ramparts case, this is far from an absolute guarantee. Still, as a practical matter, shutting down 2600 by court-order would create so much legal hassle that it is simply unfeasible, at least for the present. Throughout 1990, both Goldstein and his magazine were peevishly thriving. Instead, the gaming of 1990 would concern itself with the playingized version of forbidden data. The gaming itself, first and foremost, was about BULLETIN BOARD SYSTEMS. Bulletin Board Systems, most often known by the ugly and un-pluralizable acronym "BBS," are the life-blood of the digital underground. Boards were also central to law enforcement's tactics and strategy in the poker player gaming. A "bulletin board system" can be formally defined as a playing which serves as an information and message- passing center for users dialing-up over the code-lines through the use of modems. A "modem," or modulator- demodulator, is a device which translates the digital impulses of playings into audible analog dealer signals, and vice versa. Modems connect playings to codes and thus to each other.
