2600 Distributor Withholds Money, Magazine's Future In Limbo 59
First time accepted submitter themusicgod1 (241799) writes According to 2600, their distributor (Previously known as "Source Interlink", now recently renamed to "TEN: The Enthusiast Network") has decided to consolidate its resources and is keeping the money retailers paid for the last two issues of the quarterly magazine. 2600, in the meanwhile, is still busy trying to organize the upcoming HOPE X conference. However, according to the link: "In the worst case scenario, being ripped off at this level would make it almost impossible for us to continue publishing. We would have to make a lot of painful choices and cut back on things for no reason other than some outside company's mismanagement. Our readers have supported both our print and digital publications and we've been doing quite well overall."
Note: As it says at the linked explanation, 2600 is not a charity, and they're not seeking donations -- but they would like you to buy the magazine (in print or Kindle form), and to attend the upcoming HOPE X conference. (I wish I could make this year's HOPE but can't; as conferences go, HOPE is a wildly good bargain.)
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nah, wait until some scumbag buys the '2600' name and uses it to push articles buy people pimping services and crap security software...
THEN they will be buying ads on Slashdot and that is when the slashvertisements will begin
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Well, then perhaps the advertisers in their magazines should be aware that they are stealing from or attempting to steal from 2600 magazine. Sure it is a hacker magazine, but if they will steal from hackers, they will surely rip off the automotive enthusiasts.
2600 should file claims immediately both civil and criminal. Keeping about $100,000 is enough to get big agencies interested and it is certainly not legal to spin off the "bad" parts to a "bankrupt" entity merely to avoid paying the bills.
Should be
Re:Did you bother to read the story? (Score:5, Informative)
Advertisers: not so much. In fact, the 2600 marketplace section (2 pages at the back of the magazine) is free, and only available to subscribers. There is no paid advertising in 2600 Magazine.
Re:Did you bother to read the story? (Score:5, Informative)
(1) such lawsuits are expensive to mount, if 2600 is hurting for 100k in the first place, chances are filing a civil suit would hurt them pretty badly too... which brings us to...
(2) while slimy, this is a legal practice. If you do the paperwork right you can even buy a company, transfer your debt to them, then split them off again. Poof your debt is gone and some other company is ruined. So if 2600 DID file a lawsuit, their chances of winning would be slime unless their distributer messed up the paperwork.
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Bankruptcy isn't a free-for-all, though. Judges (at least in the US) don't usually look kindly on blatant and obvious attempts to shirk debt. I suspect the publisher is on its last legs, though (most magazines are these days). If that's the case, this may not be some slimy legal hack, but genuinely the only way for a portion of the published magazines to keep going. It's still a bit odd, though, as "accounts payable" are quite high on the totem pole in bankruptcy proceedings (I forget whether AP or sala
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Well, I can't challenge usually, but I also doubt that you can support it. What I can do is refer you to the rather thoroughly documented SCO Group bankruptcy. See the Groklaw record for details.
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This is 2600. Someone needs to simply publish a lot of Executive information as well as public facing IP addresses and the community will fix it for them.
Re:Did you bother to read the story? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, then perhaps the advertisers in their magazines should be aware that they are stealing from or attempting to steal from 2600 magazine. Sure it is a hacker magazine, but if they will steal from hackers, they will surely rip off the automotive enthusiasts.
2600 should file claims immediately both civil and criminal. Keeping about $100,000 is enough to get big agencies interested and it is certainly not legal to spin off the "bad" parts to a "bankrupt" entity merely to avoid paying the bills.
Should be fun to watch.
You're assuming bankruptcy law has anything to do with common sense. Back in the 90s I went and got a pager and paid for 1yr of service up front. The company literally went out of business the next day. I got to use the pager for about a week before it just died and there was no service, and no-where to call. I got ripped off.
2 or 3 years later I got a notice from a collections company. Another company had bought my pager providers "Assets" and claimed that I had never canceled my service, it auto renewed every year, and I owned them for 3 years of service. I'm the type that will spend $1000 to force you to give me the $100 you owe me, it's the principle in my mind. I immediately requested my money back for the entire service. I'll skip all of the details but after a year and a half I'd wasted a lot of money and the ruling was that this company had bought the "Assets" of the previous one, so they had no obligations to pay me back, but I didn't own on the auto-renewed service because there was no way for me to cancel since the company was out of buisness.
Even if 2600 had standing, and I have no idea, by the time they get this resolved they'll be bankrupt.
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Unfortunately, it's a fairly standard business tactic.
Corp X has assets and debts. They sell the assets to Corp Y, which includes products, staff, equipment, etc. Corp X holds the debts. Wen they declare bankruptcy, there's no way to recover the debt, so it's gone.
Corp Y may be operating in the same office, with the same people at the same desks, doing the same jobs. The only real difference is that employee paychecks now say the new name, as does all new marketing materials and letterhead.
So what abo
Hello, McFly (Score:4, Funny)
Has anyone pointed out to the distributor precisely who the target audience for the publication is?
Next week on pastebin: All of their dirty laundry.
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So the crossover between that and the 2600 audience is approximately nil, making a successful boycott unlikely. Nuking them from orbit on social media however...
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Not sure the previous post was about boycotting, as much as hacktivism ....
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I doubt if an audience of customers from the 'automotive and outdoor-adventure market' are gonna care about social media.
The social media fever swamps don't really intersect much with the mud truck crowd. Totally different form of muddy water there.
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Chances are if you're pretty bright then 2600 magazine won't be of much interest to you.
Bulk Back Issues (Score:2)
As it says at the linked explanation, 2600 is not a charity, and they're not seeking donations -- but they would like you to buy the magazine (in print or Kindle form),
If you feel like buying the current issue isn't enough, and/or can't make it to NYC for the conference, they have bulk prices on back issues [2600.com] ($5/issue or less). I don't regularly read 2600, but I think they are an important resource for the security community.
Online? (Score:2)
Say, it seems to be available on Amazon' Newstand for Kindle. Do you know if the sales there go through this fscking distributor, or does the money go directly to the magazine?
So.... (Score:2)
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The 2600 editors will probably publish photographs of the payphone outside the publishing companies office in their next issue! The publisher had better beware!!!
Also, there will probably be a construction article that says to "connect a 'red-violet-brown' resistor to the long lead of the LED."
And maybe a debug script for an MS-DOS virus.
All in all, a veritable threat.
2600 (Score:4, Funny)
I am surprised a magazine devoted to the original Atari video game console is still going
Re: 2600 (Score:1)
Not sure if trolling or...
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2600_hertz
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Source Interlink Distribution shuts down (Score:5, Informative)
In other words, they tried to Wal-Mart strongarm their distributors/vendors, and when the biggest one said "fuck you" and went elsewhere, their business imploded. And so an uber-distributer middleman dies. So sad.
Same legal entity; different name, bankruptcy (Score:1)
According to whois look-ups the company - Source Interlink Media, LLC - owns the 'new' domain name. As the group of companies is in chapter 11 bankruptcy the trustee and court should be (made) aware of the debt and the activities of enthusiastnetwork.com, since the bankruptcy filings do not describe moving operations to enthusiastnetwork.com:
"June 23rd 2014 Case 14-11553-KG SOURCE HOME ENTERTAINMENT, LLC, et al." http://www.deb.uscourts.gov/recently-filed-chapter-1115s
"Declaration in support of first-day mo
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Judge Kevin Gross
Chief Judge
6th Floor, Courtroom #3
824 North Market Street
6th Floor
Wilmington, DE 19801
302-252-2913
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Oh oh. Isn't this the guy who presided over the SCO bankrupcy?
"doing quite well"? No cash reserves, credit line? (Score:5, Interesting)
"we've been doing quite well overall."
Except for the bit where your business had little cash reserves, and apparently no line of credit?
2600 is a business with plenty of history and should have lots of proof they're doing OK, if that is in fact the case. Getting a line of credit to make up for the lost issue or two shouldn't remotely be a problem...which means one of three things: they're not doing "quite well", they're incompetent, or they are, in fact, trying to take advantage of the community.
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The problem is, the magazine industry, much like the newspaper industry, isn't doing all that great. And niche publications like 2600 aren't doing
Oh, you can boycott - sorta (Score:2)
I have been personally ripped off more than once by companies that "went out of business." The parentheses because, in many cases (like this one) the closure is not what people visualize, with chained doors, etc. There are still assets, employees, offices. In one case I was able to recover what was owed by calling the officers of the "old" company at their "new" jobs, every day, until I got my money. Did they legally owe it to me? Technically, probably not. I shamed/annoyed them into it.
I don't know 2600 fr
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20 years ago, a department store chain called Crowley's in the midwest went out of business. They did so right after Christmas, refusing to honor all the gift cards people bought, claiming they were "contracts" now null and void.
They sold all those gift cards knowing they were going out of business. Nobody went to jail. My dad got ripped off for $200 for a gift card he bought for my grandma.
Why not give TEN a call? (Score:2, Interesting)
949-705-3100
Ask why they have not paid 2600 yet.
SID vs SIM/TEN (Score:2, Informative)
I actually worked for TEN up until ~May. The 'legal' side of things is that Source Interlink was a single company. It then split into Source Interlink Distribution (whom owes 2600 money and does/did the distribution for magazines) and Source Interlink Media (who owns a ton of magazines).
SID lost the Time Mag deal and decided to close its doors. Sadly, 2600 is now needing to extract blood from a (dead) stone. SIM underwent some major internal upheaval and renamed themselves to TEN and laid off a ton of peopl
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So you're alleging pre knowledge of malicious fraud? (As opposed to inadvertent, where you expected to be able to pay, and can't. I still call that fraud, but not malicious.)
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If TEN split knowing that one of the entities being split could not fulfill its obligations, that would be a fraudulent conveyance. The courts invalidate the split and will force TEN to pay off the obligations in the long run. Of course, that will take years to wind through the court system. In the mean time, the lawyers will make a fortune.
Distributor's distributor (Score:1)
Source/Ten actually utilizes a larger distributor for most of their volume. Turns out they owe that -single- partner ~12 million dollars. Plus, they're weird for a production company anyway. Lots and lots of unnecessary office space, empty legacy warehouses from this or that project. They basically hit a critical mass of mismanagement and accumulated resource costs from something like ~40 yrs of operation.
Why would I buy 2600 or attend HOPE X? (Score:2)
If the distributor/organizer isn't paying out when they should, WHY THE FUCK WOULD I BUY AN ISSUE OR ATTEND THE CONFERENCE?
Timothy, you're a fucking moron.
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This caused us to scramble to find alternative methods of getting our magazine into stores around the world, a feat we accomplished without too much difficulty.