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Steal This Computer Book 3
The book is a travelog of many of the most interesting or inflammatory corners of the Internet. There are chapters on hacktivism, hate crime, con games, spam, phone phreaking and dozens of other topics. If someone's spent time flaming about it, banning it, subpoenaing it, or demonizing it, there's probably a section on it here. All of the sections come with screen shots and URLs for further digging.
I found reading the book to be an odd pleasure. There was no way to click on the sites or try any of the software without heading for a computer, but that didn't seem to matter. If anything, it was nice to skip over the links and put off heading down alternate paths until later. The more I experience books like this, the more I begin to wonder if there's much in the hyper-fragmented, postmodern view of a narrative built out of multiply forking paths. This book offers one fairly simple arc that carries us through the most talked about corners of the web and it does it fairly gracefully. That's a pleasure unto itself.
The book comes with a rebellious gloss and semiotic history. The title was stolen from Steal This Book a collection of anarchist schemes written by Abbie Hoffman in the 1960s. Despite the title, that book became a bestseller -- offering a glimpse of the longterm prospects for Hoffman's revolution. All of the prole sheep dutifully bought a book filled with bombmaking techniques that promises to show you where "exactly to place the dynamite that will destroy the walls."
Hoffman's book showed that people will buy something they value even when they're told to steal it. The prole sheep intuitively understand that books cost money to create. But maybe that was a different era, before the web existed. This website offers the text even though there are four editions for sale at Amazon. I wonder who holds the rights?
Wang's book is nowhere near as radical or as dangerous. Hoffman wrote sentences like "The purpose of part two is not to fuck the system, but destroy it." Wang generally avoids such antagonistic language and speaks generally about anti-social behavior in the third person: "When hackers use social engineering, they often masquerade as a consultant or temporary worker..."
Much of the book, in fact, is filled with techniques that are presented as tools for protecting your privacy and your personal information. The back cover asks, "Is your computer safe from computer viruses and malicious hackers?" It's only partially aimed at helping people do asocial things on the Net. Helping people protect themselves from the evil hordes is a large part of it. Given that identity theft is a booming business, this edition is practically an anti-crime book.
What does this mean for the this Internet revolution? Will the current file trading yippies overthrow the copyright system? Will file sharing actually become the norm? Or will all of the Napsterites follow the paths of Hoffman's proteges and grow up, have kids, move to the burbs, and start paying for their content? Well, they might if the content is as comfortable as this book in the hands while sitting in a La-Z-Boy recliner. No popup windows. No flash graphics. No registration required. Just pure content. Hmmm.
Peter Wayner is the author of books like Policing Online Games, Translucent Databases and Java RAMBO Manifesto. Please don't steal them. You can purchase Steal This Computer Book 3 from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Is great for non-techies, and is well written. But I suspect the average /.'er has learned most of the stuff in books 1&2 by osmosis already... and I'll wager that book 3 isn't much of a departure in terms of content.
46. The Hobo smiles, his eyes glaze over, and he burps. "Beware the man who has lived longer than the Wasteland."
After this review, I'm more interested in the Hoffman book than the Wang book.
"Hoffman's book showed that people will buy something they value even when they're told to steal it."
That should tell you something about the true value of the wares you peddle, RIAA. Try cranking out something that contributes to culture, instead of the teen-pop whores and gangsta rappers that are contributing to it's decline.
Is it just me, or was this review almost completely devoid of any content actually relating to the book being reviewed?
Paragraph 1 - A very broad overview of what the book covers
Paragraph 2 - "Hey, reading a book is completely unlike reading a webpage"
Paragraphs 3-5 - Review of a completely different book
Paragraph 6 - Finally, some hint as to what's actually in the book. But no indication of whether the content is good or not. Are the techniques mentioned good or outdated? Easy to understand?
Paragraph 7 - Back to talking about about the Hoffman book and completely ignoring the one actually being "reviewed".
My dad always had a great example of why books are better than the internet. :)
He says, "because you can do this." and proceeds to flip through all the pages like a big stack of crisp, 20-dollar bills. The instant information access, unless the book is in a fire or something, is what always makes books cool. That, plus they're easier on the eyes than a CRT (for me).
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Hoffman's book showed that people will buy something they value even when they're told to steal it. The prole sheep intuitively understand that books cost money to create. But maybe that was a different era, before the web existed. This website offers the text even though there are four editions for sale at Amazon. I wonder who holds the rights?
Any author can chose to release any writing with copyright into the public domain prior to the natural expiration of copyright. Once that occurs, nobody owns the rights.
Given the author, and the book, my guess would be that it's in the public domain.
without leaving a trail of cookies.
As long as you don't check it out of a library (USA PATRIOT Act.)
Somehow it seems that taking the content of the internet out of the context of the internet allows you to see it in a new light. Just as the internet brought new meaning to content through interactivity, multi-media presentation and hyperlinkage, books have their own virtues that cannot be replicated on the net. Whereas the internet encourages and supports a short attention span, and IMO, detail-oriented thinking, the book format usually demands a longer attention span and 'big picture' sort of attitude.
Both have their place, of course, and I don't think a short attention span is necessarily a bad thing. But books try to force you to carry a thought through to a conclusion, within limited parameters, where the internet allows you to branch off and fragment your thought -- which in turn allows you to consider many ideas from many points of view -- just not very deeply.
So putting the internet into a book may just force some people to think about the implications of the new media, rather than focusing on the ever changing content.
Maybe partying will help...
non fiction as in Bowling for Columbine ? I think your argument is valid for technical articles that are objective in nature. For subjective analysis of other non fiction topics, books/other media are still the king.
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
If this is at all like the previous editions of the same title, then I recommend you Skip this Computer Book.
Get a decent book about computer abuse/misuse:
Hacking Exposed, 4th edition
Hackers Beware, by Eric Cole
Counterhack, by Ed Skoudis
These books are written by computer security professionals who may their living both doing computer security and teaching computer security (SANS and Foundstone).
Steal This Computer Book seems to be aimed at too young to know they are getting ripped off kids and computer novices. So don't buy this book if you are over 10.
Hoffman's book showed that people will buy something they value even when they're told to steal it.
No, it didnt. Noone ever took the title literally, as a command to steal it. They took it as what it was, a sort of ironic tongue-in-cheek wisecrack. The book didnt empower people to "fight the man", it poked fun at the new mooching generation of hippies, showing how wrong their ideals were.
This is like saying you were shocked when the end credits rolled after watching The Neverending Story.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I think that line just about covers all non-fiction (and some fictional) books out there.
As a professional researcher, I can tell you that Google points to maybe 4 percent of the useful data on the Internet, and that 90 percent of the truly useful data in world is not accessible on the Internet. Only the truly ignorant thinks that a) all useful data resides somewhere on the Internet and b) Google knows wherre it is. Google is a great tool for the amateurs, but the pros don't really have a use for it.
I've used big iron multiprocessors to run my code (wot I wrote) but I can honestly say I couldn't make Windows say Hello World without severe head scratching :)
And that's one of the problems with "kids these days."
You think if you can't find it with Google it isn't on the internet; and if it isn't on the internet it isn't real.
Well Sparky, those of us who are more than 10 years old remember things that happened and things we read about them in books and magazines that Google has no clue about. If such books and magazines are in a computer archive somewhere they're diked off from the internet ( a growing phenomenom as more and more people realize that not only is their information valuable, their information is the only thing of value they have to exchange)
Case in point. If you use Google to find information about the sucessful flying of a kite across that Atlantic ocean all you will find is my own Slashdot post avering that it has been done. . . and a denial by someone else because they couldn't find it in a Google search.
Yet all you have to do to find an in depth article of the feat is to go down to your local library and start browsing (yes, we browsed magazines in "the old days") copies of New Yorker magazine from the late 60's.
The universe of knowledge has not been transfered to the internet.
KFG
Of course, the trick is knowing to browse copies of The New Yorker from the late 60's...
So one obscure fact that was in a magazine 40 years ago not being stored on the internet makes it useless? No one said that every fact every is online, but if you wanted to know a random fact, would you first go to google or go to the library and start reading back issues of the New Yorker?
"Freely available information just too valuable to mankind as a whole."
Food is too valuable to the individual and will always win out, in the extreme, to the value to mankind as a whole.
The question becomes, in an exchange society, with an abstracted medium of exchange which can only be obtained from other people ( self-sufficiency being virtually illegal), how does one obtain rice in the bowl tonight, as opposed to pie in the sky tomorrow?
It's a legitimate quandry that's going to become more and more pressing to solve.
In my case, last week I put rice in my bowl this week by charging money for the transmission of mathmatical information, which, in my turn, had to pay for as well.
For the most part I was even only able to do this because of an artificial market for mathmatics imposed by the government ( I was tutoring high school students).
As it happens I'm a poor American. I have a distaste for modern monetary trade, the art of making a living by filching money from the pockets of others. My approach is more old world. I be perfectly happy to do what I do for "free," because I do what I do because I wish to do it and not merely becasue I get payed to do it.
So, in an exchange economy where my knowledge is valuable, but all I have to exchange is my knowledge, how do I put rice in my bowl ( and ideally a roof over it) without charging for it?
KFG