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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.
GO LINUX!
Get over yourself. It was just a witty book title, nothing more, nothing less.
When you can spell correctly, it's really not all that hard.
Fag.
How about "Steal this idea and make it safe for suburbanites and the unorganized white collar computer professional class."
I would like to personally thank 2003 for making everything so tepid.
Hi, I am the RIAA. Mr. Coward, your suggestion has been duly noted and we wil work on implementing it immediately. Thank you for your feedback.
bah.
...
chinese and their timing. that's all. timing.
let's time ourself to death. NOT!
anyway, i was just thinking about writing a book about the human mind and complex forms. it's still intriguing to me how complex-geometry and the appetit for sex correlate. say everybody wants to see buttoms (your ass) and bubis (tits) and "dicks" etc. why is this. negatively curfed space (e.g. complex geoemetry) and genitaly design have alot in commen. very strange indeed!
some humans tend to value forms they don't see offenten (day-to-day basis) as something erotic, yes?
well i will be pondering numbers to forms and especially numbers to "forms of gentialy" in the near future.
i'm still trying to figure out if people having sex acctually get to watch TV without a TV, but i seemm to hit a barrier of shy-ness
[more to come]
Ditto for the MPAA.
Right now, Matchstick Men is making its way to the theatres. The basic plot is that a con artist teams up with his daughter to steal real money. I think it's ironic that an organization which cries so loudly about "theft of intellectual property" makes money by selling movies that glorify theft in the physical world.
Hate to say it, MPAA, but you had it coming. You produce movies which influence people to steal, and then complain because a poor college kid downloads your work over the internet. Who taught him to do that? It sure wasn't the Religious Right that Hollywood loves to hate. It sure wasn't his parents, who tried to teach him that stealing was wrong. It was your movies.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Heh
Sounds made up to me.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!