500 DEAR HACKER

500 DEAR HACKER

The “ingenious” hacker derived some inspiration from the cover of an old issue of 2600.

Please continue to be my muse. Name Removed

Toronto

Well, gosh. Is this a confession? We are quite flattered if indeed our Fall 1997 cover inspired this action which caused confusion to so many. In the words of one flustered commuter: “You go home and you are trying to rest from work and all of a sudden where they usually talk about Ticketmaster, all of a sudden you see this thing say ‘Stephen Harper Eats Babies.’ I wasn’t even sure when I got off the train. Was I hallu- cinating?” And of course, the funniest statement of all: “To prevent it from happening again, GO Transit will have to power down all the signs on their cars and use special software that is being couriered from the United States to password protect 790 such digital signs.” Translation: these fools had no protection at all from this sort of thing and are trying to make it seem like having a password is a real pain in the ass when it should have been what they were doing all along. They are indeed lucky to have gotten their wake-up call with a degree of humor. But we are going to err on the side of caution and not print your name since we live in a time where a harmless joke like this can be blown way out of proportion and we don’t want to help in that endeavor. And for any authorities actually pursuing this, we have printed out a copy of this email and burned it just to be safe. So don’t waste your time.

Dear 2600:

I was using the self checkout at Albertson’s the other day and was having trouble getting some flowers to ring up. The associate had to come over and manually enter the price. While he was doing that I noticed that the floral code for manually entering a price is “2600.” Just thought you guys would like to know. Keep up the good work!

Jason Flowers. How nice.

I recently joined the Libertarian Party and noticed the address for the Libertarian headquarters is: 2600 Virginia Avenue NW, Suite 200, Washington DC 20037. Is 2600 finally influencing the political parties?

Matthew It might also be interesting to note that this is the address of the Watergate Hotel,

the only building ever to take down a president. But we’re going to continue to say that we named ourselves after the frequency since that’s far less suspicious.

Dear 2600: Where I originally come from, they still have old buses. Tickets for the

train are validated by machines but when you go to take the individual buses, it’s all done by the bus driver. Ironically, this weakness comes with technology being used. I recently moved to a larger city for job opportunities and right away I noticed their much more advanced bus technology.

It’s no longer left squarely up to the bus driver to examine your one- time passes here. On the stand-alone buses, they have machines that do the validation. When a pass is put in the machine, it will verify the printed markings on the pass to see if it’s still valid. If the pass hasn’t been used, there will be no markings of date and time. The machines print date, time, and when the ticket expires when you insert it into the machine. You can buy these passes in ten packs or you can always get a monthly pass which costs a fortune ($70 or so). The ten packs have tear-away tickets. One day I was in a hurry for the bus and tore out a ticket. Unfortunately, when I went to put it in the machine, it didn’t accept it. The machine reported that there was an error and that I didn’t insert the ticket in the right direction. I have a habit of doing this all the time, so I went to put the ticket in again, but it was