Paged Out #6 [pdf]

https://pagedout.institute/download/PagedOut_006.pdf

by pcfwik • 1 year ago

306 53 1 year ago

pagedout.institute

mati365• 1 year ago

Gratz Gyn!

gynvael10• 1 year ago

Thanks! Kudos to the rest of the team and the authors :)

yu3zhou44• 1 year ago

Gyn, Aga and reviewers like Xusheng and others do really a great job! They are responsive, helpful and pleasant to work with. If you think about writing a piece, it’s definitely worth your time

PaulRobinson• 1 year ago

The world needs more 'zines.

parentheses• 1 year ago

Love this zine! Great work. Glad I saw it.

gwern• 1 year ago

https://pagedout.institute/download/PagedOut_006.pdf#page=3 to skip to the ToC.

who-shot-jr• 1 year ago

Nice, really liked the AI stuff.

yu3zhou44• 1 year ago

Author of Differentiable Architecture Search page here! I hope the overview of the technique is helpful and you had a good time reading. If you have any comments or feedback I will very much appreciate

4ndrewl• 1 year ago

Love the look of this - has vibes of Crash magazine from the 1980s

nickthegreek• 1 year ago

I had to stop when I got to usb foot switches as I had already spent enough time looking through this! Great lil zine. I’ll check it out and priors later.

VladVladikoff• 1 year ago

Is it possible to order this as a print magazine delivery? Or is it only for download and print at home? I would love to receive a magazine like this in the mail!

gynvael10• 1 year ago

Hey, PO!'s lead here. It's not available yet, but we're working on making it available via some digital print services like lulu.com. There's no definitive timeline for this, but we're pushing to make it happen before the next issue (which is planned around June/July).

noisy_boy• 1 year ago

Not who you are replying to but thanks for mentioning lulu.com - I have a camera manual pdf that I have been meaning to get printed as a spiral bound book and their rates look quite reasonable.

GICodeWarrior4• 1 year ago

The "How to use a Python variable in an external Javascript (Django)" examples are likely vulnerable to an XSS attack, when the variable contains user supplied content.

It's important to output-encode for the correct context. By default, Django encodes template variables for an HTML context, which can allow XSS when output inside a script tag or as a JavaScript file.

gynvael10• 1 year ago

Thanks! I'll pass this to the author.

Out of curiosity I've started looking in Django docs (I'm more of a flask person myself), and they seems to confirm what you're saying. More to the point, the `strings` are the main issue. The default autoescape actually encodes ' and " as HTML entities, but doesn't encode a backslash, so leaving a \ at end of a ' or " string would escape the string ending - this would be exploitable if the attacker controls two strings of the same "type' in a row.

I guess this is the proper way to do it: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/5.1/ref/templates/builtins...

Kwpolska3• 1 year ago

All JSON serializers worth their salt can serialize a single string to JSON, so the simplest way is to do json.dumps(the_string) and mark the string as safe so that it doesn't get escaped twice.

GICodeWarrior4• 1 year ago

If you're interested to explore lots of XSS edge cases, I've found this CTF to be enjoyable.

https://alf.nu/alert1

elsadek• 1 year ago

Thanks @GICodeWarrior for taking time commenting on the article. Shamefully, I can already imagine a scenario on how the attack could be carried out. Fortunately, the vulnerability can be corrected by introducing escapejs template filter. Big thanks to @gynvael.

GICodeWarrior4• 1 year ago

Encoding for each scenario can be quite complex unfortunately. Django does have some template filters to help.

I recommend following the documentation carefully, and using a JSON API or other similarly standard mechanism if the documented options are insufficient.

claytonwramsey• 1 year ago

Thanks for making this! I got an invite to contribute some time ago but didn't have the time to put something together - it looks amazing though; I'll have to figure out something good next time.

okincilleb• 1 year ago

I really really like this. Especially “Spotting Quacks with Puzzles”. Very unique approach to tackling media literacy, couldn’t be better timed with the new 4o image generation update.

nullpxl• 1 year ago

Oh hey I wrote that one! Thanks for the kind words. I'm hoping it can get the creative problem solver audience of PO!/HN thinking about the challenge of media literacy education

laacz2• 1 year ago

I really like this. Reminds me of ezines and webzines. However, I'm tempted to ask - how to comfortably read this on a computer if you don't have a reasonably good vision? Either you have to scroll up and down to follow the content, or you see whole page at once, but need to squint to read contents.

yu3zhou44• 1 year ago

Agreed! If we went full latex, it could be make a two way like arxiv recently did with html5 rendering of latex

gynvael10• 1 year ago

Sadly that's not doable for us. LaTeX, for all its benefits, has terrible user experience and would drive away a lot of authors. One of the benefits of using PDFs is that anyone can use almost any tool they feel comfortable with to make the article (except for Photoshop - we banned Photoshop PDFs because they are ridiculously constructed). For example, I use Google Slides for my articles (which seems like a weird choice, but it's so easy to do complex one-of formatting in it).

gynvael10• 1 year ago

(PO! lead here) You are right, that's one of the unfortunate limitations of the format – having to constantly scroll the PDF. And this is on me, since ultimately I've made some decisions when establishing it which basically boxed us into this format.

I.e. thanks to using a PDF we can give authors full flexibility on how to lay out their article, which allows folks to be really really creative (as you can see in this issue). The obvious problem with that (apart from countless hours foxtrot_charlie - our DTP/PDF programmer - has to spent on fighting with PDF weirdness) is that reading an A4 PDF isn't great for phones, computers screens, or tables. It's even worse if you're using a screen reader, since getting PDFs in the way we get them and making them screen reader compatible is... complicated, to say the least (that's why it's not yet there). On the flip side, everyone has a PDF reader nowadays, articles look everywhere the same (this wouldn't be true for other formats), and it's also printable almost out of the box.

So, pros and cons. At the end of the day I don't think there's an easy out for us without breaking any of the things which make Paged Out! what folks like about it. The things I want to improve is getting printed versions more accessible, and some day finally getting solid screen reader support. But other than that I do believe the scrolling problem with remain with the zine.

ETA: Actually I also want "readings" of articles to become a thing. From the get go we put the in the author's license (note: not all articles use it, but most do) the ability for folks to agree to have their articles be recorded in an audio form. I think that would be cool for folks who like consuming things like audiobooks or podcasts. And it would save us from scrolling (for the cost of having illustrations described instead of seeing them).

laacz2• 1 year ago

Printable subscription would be nice. It often times just helps financing the venture, as well as for sponsors to have something on hand.

I'd still keep in mind that this format severily limits reach in times where short (kudos for one page thing!) and accessible form is an expectation.

Nevertheless - I will keep reading and spreading the word.

Tangenatially. How would audio reading work for posts with code samples and diagrams in it? Do you have an example of that?

Kwpolska3• 1 year ago

It would be good to figure out how many people actually care about printability. Perhaps what you could do is:

1. HTML is the primary format for articles. Authors can do whatever tricks they like in CSS, but are encouraged to make their layouts reasonably responsive. JS should be limited to things that actually benefit the article (such as LaTeX rendering or simple live examples).

2. The article must fit on one page when printed to PDF using a mainstream Web browser.

3. The author should provide a PDF file. It could just be the output of printing the HTML to PDF from a browser, or it could be something fancier, as long as it fits on a page and has the same text as the HTML version.

Looking at the most recent issue, most articles could be faithfully reproduced with a typical modern Markdown implementation (one that supports tables and code highlighting, and maybe LaTeX math) and some simple CSS.

linsomniac• 1 year ago

First of all let me say that I think this is a really great zine. I'm not really a zine guy, but I'm really excited about this. But, gently, let me say this format kind of sucks for reading. I generally HATE reading on paper, but this had me saying "I'd buy this on paper". My biggest gripe is I read partway through last night, and then wanted to go back to it today and my browser "suspended" that tab so I'm back at the front page. Probably like if I laid down a print pub. ;-) I guess the right answer there is to download and open it in a pdf reader.

All that said, I'd encourage you to NOT switch to HTML and leave it as PDF. There's something about it.

gcr• 1 year ago

Setting some gentle publication conventions could help a lot with this. For example, requiring two-column or three-column format greatly improves article readability on mobile.

throw10920• 1 year ago

I've thought about this problem a lot, and come down to the conclusion that that means that this is basically art, as opposed to pure information/an educational resource.

Art is almost always inaccessible to someone because that's part of what constitutes "art". Music is inaccessible to the deaf. Paintings are inaccessible to the blind. Food is inaccessible to those unable to smell.

If the purpose of the thing that you're creating is art, then it is necessarily inaccessible along the dimensions of your artistic freedom. (obviously, intentionally making it inaccessible along other dimensions, such as requiring a verbal test in order to view a painting, is silly, but we're not considering that) That's just what art is. That doesn't mean that you can't strive to make it a bit more accessible (e.g. with readings of content that a screen reader would have a hard time parsing), but merely that you have to acknowledge that (1) there's some parts of your art that certain people will never be able to experience (which is not your fault) and (2) that some things will be economically (in the spiritual sense, e.g. including volunteer time) infeasible to make accessible.

Conversely, if what you're making is meant to be a purely functional resource, then you should probably strive to make it accessible - but the only reason you can do this in the first place is because you've made a value decision to sacrifice aesthetics/art in the name of function.

That's a very long way of saying that I think you're taking a very reasonable position on this.

b0dhimind• 1 year ago

A vertical monitor

ArcHound2• 1 year ago

Let's go... thanks for including my article, asn-check.

Just a couple pages later there's a rust in python article, gotta try this to speed up the program further.

vindex104• 1 year ago

I like the journal format, especially the illustrations - they are human made, not AI made - builds really good atmosphere. However, I don't particularly support the idea of using illustrations made by Russian artists who currently live in Russia (and pay taxes, with all the consequences) when there is such a variety artists to choose from.

jstanley• 1 year ago

Can we please not discriminate against people because of what their governments are doing?

Thoughtful intelligent people deserve to be included regardless of what regime they live under.

vindex104• 1 year ago

in my opinion there is a pragmatic aspect to it,

to put it simply, the taxes paid go to finance "whatever their government are doing".

also, do you think, like - all russians are against the war and don't have imperialistic mindset. it's just their government to blame? I'd say there is a decent part that got affected by propaganda both imprinted into education and news.

I don't know about the artists contributed to the journal (do you?), but in my opinion it is just a safer bet to find an artist unrelated to Russia.

apart from that, promoting russian culture (i.e works by russian artists) while it is actively destroying culture of other countries - means contributing to the process.

pests• 1 year ago

The small taxes any Russian would pay for this pales in comparison to the income Russia is generating from selling oil to Europe. Should we also boycott all of Europe too?

vindex104• 1 year ago

Thanks for raising this question, and I agree it is important. Maybe encouraging independence from the russian oil would be a more efficient way to go. Of course, it can't happen immediately, but if some countries consciously don't want to work in this direction - such situation may constitute a safety threat to Europe - and this shouldn't be left without attention.

tiniuclx• 1 year ago

Thanks for sharing! I’m proud to have written “Deriving Music Theory with Python”, featured on page 51.

ngneer• 1 year ago

Great magazine, but not without limitations. The one page limit effectively means each article is at most a minimal anchor for a topic (and sometimes an ad for the author), so not a lot gets conveyed. PoC || GTFO and Phrack are better for content in my mind. Also, the typesetting variability is a definite con for me, causes fatigue. Each page is visually a world unto its own, which is straining. I understand LaTeX excludes certain authors since it is less user friendly, but is there not a way to have the best of both worlds? Have you considered a locally hosted Overleaf?

gynvael10• 1 year ago

The format of Paged Out! – the 1 page limit, the custom layout, are done on purpose. They have their downsides of course – exactly as you have pointed out. It has to be recognized, that so do the no-page limit / strict layout publications (and I am writing this as someone who has been cooperating with several technical magazines as both a reviewer/editor and an author over the last 15 years).

In a typical magazine authors feel the pressure to write long articles about everything, and they don't feel comfortable posting short notes on cute tricks. So Paged Out! is basically meant to fall into this 1-page niche where short notes on cute tricks can find a happy home.

Is this 1-page format limiting? Yes, it is. Can you write everything in this format? No, you can't. And that's OK.

We're not trying to be PoC || GTFO or Phrack (both of which are wonderful btw and I'm a huge fan of both; there's a lot of love flowing in the zine community btw - see e.g. DNS TXT records for pagedout.phrack.org and phrack.pagedout.institute). We just found our own niche of short articles to occupy.

As for the layout chaos – I understand what you mean. At the same time, this is another niche which I put PO! in on purpose. I sometimes joke that PO! is a therapy for me after having to squeeze my idea into the exact layout a publisher wants, or after reviewing too many waaay too long articles for another magazine.

This is to say: I recognize your points and I believe you are right. At the same time I'm pretty happy with this little flawed niche I found and put PO! in.

Two more links about these two points: https://pagedout.institute/?page=faq.php#why-one-page & https://pagedout.institute/?page=faq.php#layout

Paged Out #6 [pdf]

Related Stories