Slashdot Mirror
Underground Surfaces
Julian Assange writes: "I'm very pleased to announce that thanks to Random House, Suelette
Dreyfus and myself the complete and unabridged electronic text to our
well-known book "Underground: tales of hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier" (approx 500 pp.) has been publicly and freely released... hacked to support Palm Doc!" Good reading.
I'd comment on the book but I haven't read it yet.
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Having prominent female writers like Julian sends a strong message to aspiring young girls who feel neglected by our school systems which channel them into clerical work or other low-paying fields saturated by women. The old-boys network is a tough one to crack, so thank you Julian for doing your part.
Read the rest of this comment...
As a result, I was able to see that there is a mirror of the plain text here and of the palm doc version here
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From the book: "There are other reasons for releasing `Underground' in this format. The electronic version is being donated to the Visionary Project Gutenburg, a collection of free electronic books run with missionary zeal by Michael Hart."
I am happy that writers are contributing their works to the Gutenburg Project, and I am wondering if there is something that we could do to help it also. Many a night I have stayed up reading the Gutenburg files, and this author is helping out a great deal--what can we do in order to help out also?
according to the introduction, the text of the book was also donated to project gutenberg. this is extremely cool. i hope it opens the doors for more authors to do the same thing.
there is a conflict, though. the free version i downloaded has quite a few restrictions, and is basically only for personal use; it even forbids using it as teaching material. and the author retains the copyright.
this is a change from the standard texts PG distributes. and their boilerplate says: "...this means that no one owns a United States copyright on or for this work..". interesting.
i still hope that the frequency of this type of donation increases.
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There is a mirror of the book at:
http://the.wiretapped.net/security/info/books/
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Spelling by m-w.com.
In light of this book, it annoys me to see Barnes and Noble and Amazon charging ridiculous amounts of money for Glassreader and MSReader books. If the book is $20 in hardcover and I am supposed to pay around $300 for the device, I better see some serious discounting on the ebook. Marketing and author's royalties aside, the cost of making the hardcover version of book has to be significant, otherwise why would they run paperback versions at $7.
But they aren't the only projects out there, so why not publicize the other hard-working e-text sites, like etext.org, textfiles.com, project goatenberg, and project bartleby? I urge you all to help these other great projects get the recognition they so deserve!
http://promo.net/pg/volunteer.html
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Text Version here
Palm Version here
www.matthewmiller.net, causing trouble since, whenever
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Another mirror here for the .txt , bz2 and .pdb format.
(I can't link to them directly because ci-hosting considers this outside of the unlimited traffic allowance)
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Jon - TheSpork
I just cannot imagine reading the equivalent of five hundred paper pages on a 160x160 pixel screen. PalmDoc is useful for reference works, but I think it's got a long way to go before I load a novel on it.
(To understand what I mean, this little slashdot posting would fill a PalmOS screen.)
[
I was under the impression that human males and females were near-identical from a genetic point of view. While some on Slashdot may not believe it, there aren't two distinct species of human.
They key word here is "near-identical", specifically the "near".
Yes, men and women are largely the same, and can largely do the same things. However, men have significantly better upper-body strength, on average. If a job requires that, then women are going to have a tough time with it. Running is another difference, although I don't recall exactly how it works. I believe it's something like men are better runners over short distances because the narrower hips work better for this sort of activity, but women do better for long distances because they have better endurance, or something like that. Women have proportionally greater leg strength for their body weight, at least.
Lest you think the differences are all physical, the brain is different as well. Men tend to have better spatial reasoning skills, women have better verbal skills. See this page for a barely-decent discussion.
This is not to say that there is any task that women can't do. All of these things are trends, tendencies, and averages. They will not necessarily apply to the individual. If there is some field where there are NO women, and no biological reason for it (e.g. you won't find any women impregnating other women, but that's ok), then you should probably question if women are being excluded. However, if there's a field that's only 25% women, then consider that there might actually be genetic reasons for men being more appropriate for the job, rather than it being just the result of a sexist society. Of course, not every field that's disproportionate like that will be due to genetics, but not every one will be due to sexism either.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
The web is so full of shit. When good content like this comes along you start to realise the potential of the internet for empowering people with information, and how far from the ideal we are right now.
any chance of someone being able to chop this up into pieces (ie 50k bunches instead of 1 500k pdb)? not all of us have 8 meg palms.
...so here's another
regular text and palm db format (insane)
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I read through the first chapter of the book online, and so far it's excellent. The writing takes the chaotic, sometimes confusing occurence of a computer worm and turns it into a gripping race against the clock by a desperate group of sys admins and computer managers. I would really recommend that everyone take the time to read at least the first chapter, as it provides insight into the origins of worms and viruses, both what it was like then, as well as how far we have come.
47.5% Slashdot Pure(52.5% Corrupt)
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
Anyone who reads this book and enjoys it should by a copy to show their appreciation to the author. It was thanks to this book that i became interested in Linux/Unix.
I found it portrayed hackers as real human beings many of whom have a moral belief behind their actions.
Nick Denham
Never believe in anything until it has been officially denied. -Otto von Bismarck
this is not intended as a dig, merely a reason why you would NOT hear of it going on, it's hardly what schools brag about.
I went to an above-average high school. Which was quite proud of it's co-ed policies regarding sewing and metalwork etc.
However, after getting straight A's for a single compulsory metalwork class, I asked to join the next metalwork class (which had never been done before), only to be told I couldn't "because you're a girl". No joke. I thought perhaps it was just one or two old-fashioned folks who were blocking me, but that wasn't the case.
The school was deadset against it, but after threatening them with legal action, I was able to join the class, but was given special "girl" projects. Rather than continue welding and learning other regular skills, I was instructed to make a pretty brass spoon, which was the ONLY thing I was expected to complete.
I didn't make their crappy spoon, as my male teacher was violently opposed to their silliness, and he let me weld to my hearts content, I outproduced every male in the class, in quality and quantity for every project (straight A's, top of the class).
When robotics was added to our classwork, I helped our teacher learn (they don't bother to train teachers for new subjects anymore, just buy them a couple of books) to use an Apple2E (he'd never used a computer before), which interfaced with lego technic robots. I debugged BASIC everyday, wrote demonstration programs to impress parents of new students.
And all of that I would have been deprived of... because I was a girl!
And aside from my metalwork class, no one in the school had any idea of the crap going on behind the scenes, because I was told to keep quiet until it was all sorted out.
Sexism is alive and well in many places. I'm lucky I have a brilliant teacher to thank for my continued education.
And for the record, I don't consider myself a feminist. There are some things that certain people do better than others. But I think sex has little to do with it. A tall and strong woman would easily outwork a short a weak man in a physical environment. Just as a tall and strong man would easily outwork a short and weak woman.
People are individuals, assuming things based on sex, race, appearance or whatever may well prove you to be an idiot.
Something I get quite sick of, is it being assumed I want to have children. Not all women want children, not all men do either, but people don't seem to expect them to.
Unless you got express written permission to mirror this, you are in breach of the copyright. But then again, so is everyone who downloads it without express written permission and intends to retrieve it from their retrieval system. I wish people who slapped copyright messages on their works actually read them. It'd save a lot of hassle.
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
This is an important book, because it helps to illustrate the psychological and sociological background to people "in the underground" - and help understand that computers, the internet and so on are not inherently evil or a media more suseptible to criminality, but the problems are the ever present problems of children, families, society and the swathe of humanity. Congratulations to Suelette and Julian for putting this important work into the public domain.
-- Matthew - matthew.gream@pobox.com, http://matthewgream.net
Actually, if I had my choice, some of the books I have would be on vellum with hard leather or wooden covers (such as my hardback copies of Tolkien). However, since I am not rich and can't get the custom printing and binding done, this will probably be forever a dream...
:-)
You don't need to be rich these days - download the text, format it and print it yourself, the way you want, on gorgeous paper, and hand bind it. Make the book such a beautiful and tactile item that you want to touch it, and handle it, and read it.
It's a very satisfying thing to do.
A start might be to choose a smaller book (say a short story), only a few pages perhaps, and produce that, perhaps with illutrations or illuminations (not necessarily your own art) as an exquisite gift for someone. It's a smaller project, so the monetary costs (paper, ink) are less, while the time required is about the same, due to the more complex layout (eg a lot more on each page more than a single block of text).
In the age of DTP and the web, everyone is a "designer", and the result is truckloads of badly designed garbage. But the point is that the tools are accessible, so if you do actually know what it is that you want, you can get there.
Another advantage of doing things like binding it yourself is that you can do far more sophisticated things by hand than what mass production allows.
(When I was studying typography, I hated actually doing it, but loved the results. Now that I rarely do it, it can be fun again, and I still love the results