Introduction

Dear reader, this is a weird book.

These are the collected works of the International Journal of Proof of Concept or Get The Fuck Out, a prestigious publication for ladies and gentlemen with an interest in reverse engineering, file format polyglots, radio, operating systems, and other assorted technical subjects. The journal’s individual issues are published in a variety of countries across the Americas and Europe, but this volume you hold contains our first nine releases in 788 action-packed pages, indexed and cross referenced for your convenience.

At first glance, it’s a technical book. It’ll tell you how to do strange and clever things, how to make polyglot files¹ and crazy radio signals² and boot sector video games.³ It will teach you a lot about reverse engineering,⁴ and also about frustrating reverse engineers.⁵ This is a book to teach you about machines, about how they really are rather than how they are supposed to be.

But this is a bit more fun–and far more irreverent–than most technical books. While some articles cuss for the fun of it,⁶ others carefully build an argument across pages to end with a single harsh word in uncompromising support of scientific reproducibility.⁷

You will also find a few pieces of philosophy, a grumpy old preacher’s ramblings about Lysenko,⁸ fashionable straw hats,⁹ and the Thanksgiving holiday.¹⁰ You will find a song in the style of Gilbert and Sullivan¹¹ and a poem about cryptography.¹² This is a book to give you some culture.

But I really do believe that this is also a therapeutic book, to be read when times are tough and you’re feeling low. When your day job becomes dull and you begin to feel you’ve lost the magic of our profession, when you forget that joy which is found in a short and clever proof of concept, search within this book for something to liven things up and make you care once more.

Every last page carries with it the sincere belief that each and every one of us can outsmart those infernal contraptions, the wretched blinky boxes that sometimes seem to rule our lives.

Your neighbor,
Pastor Manul Laphroaig, T.G. S.B.