Deeply technical zine. And it's free.
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By CobrastanJorji 2025-12-0221:433 reply 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.
By ykonstant 2025-12-037:36 The "I do NOT hold the legal rights to share or distribute this content" checkbox made me laugh out loud!
By yu3zhou4 2025-12-037:59 Glad you enjoyed it, your comment made my day
By nullpxl 2025-12-0420:26 I wrote the AI detection with copyright one :) Happy you liked it! I found out a bit after publishing that a comic called SMBC had a similar idea a few months before me, and their approach is really funny too http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/security
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 :)
By NoMoreNicksLeft 2025-12-0318:161 reply You guys need to apply for an ISSN.
By gynvael 2025-12-058:37 It's in progress, but we need to rebuild all older issues (to include publisher information on the editorial page as requested by the Swiss ISSN authority). And, because some of them were made when we still had the old build engine, there are technical issues we need to solve first before we can rebuild them ;). I expect we'll get the ISSN either near the end of this month or early next though.
Man, if making money off freely-available zines is this easy then I need to stock up on printer toner.
By arjie 2025-12-037:41 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.
By gynvael 2025-12-038:59 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.
By senorqa 2025-12-038:40 It's all about friction The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
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 :)
Thank you for following up.
As I said, this magazine is wonderful. One caution I have, taking what you said that you only intend to charge for prints, is that I don’t think it’s a great idea to self-devalue the PDF version by not charging for it as well.
1. Visit the site and get it free. 2. Subscribe, get the PDF delivered to your inbox and discount on printed version.
That way, you give folks an easy on-ramp to paying you while still giving out the free version.
By gynvael 2025-12-0314:42 What you're saying makes sense and it's a good idea. It's not fully directly applicable to Paged Out! though due to certain assumptions we've made with our base operating model.
I.e. our intention is to charge readers neither for PDF nor for print, to the extent that is possible. In case of print-on-demand or print-subscription that of course won't be possible, but at various events we're successfully bringing printed Paged Out! issues to distribute for free. The idea is rather for the zine to finance itself through ad sales, sponsorship editions, and special collector bundled editions. We have a couple of other more-typical ideas as well, like Pateron later on.
Admittedly, so far we're in the red (not terribly though), but that's OK. There are still certain things we need to roll out before being able to evaluate whether we need to change the base operating model. If we do have to change it, it's not unlikely to start with ideas like the one you proposed - they do make sense.
By redundantly 2025-12-0222:26 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.
By Elidrake24 2025-12-0222:261 reply 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.
By doctoboggan 2025-12-0222:451 reply 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
By tester756 2025-12-0420:26 >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.
Man, as far as I know this is not some wanna be unicorn startup, this is curiosity-driven, for-hackers content managed by people who were top at competitive security for many years
By grimgrin 2025-12-0222:27 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
