Humble Bundle Announces 'Hacker' Pay-What-You-Want Sale (humblebundle.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Humble Bundle announced a special "pay what you want" sale for four ebooks from No Starch Press, with proceeds going to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (or to the charity of your choice). This "hacker edition" sale includes two relatively new titles from 2015 -- "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python" and Violet Blue's "Smart Girl's Guide to Privacy," as well as "Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering" by Andrew "bunnie" Huang, and "The Linux Command Line".

Hackers who are willing to pay "more than the average" -- currently $14.87 -- can also unlock a set of five more books, which includes "The Maker's Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse: Defend Your Base with Simple Circuits, Arduino, and Raspberry Pi". (This level also includes "Bitcoin for the Befuddled" and "Designing BSD Rootkits: An Introduction to Kernel Hacking".) And at the $15 level -- just 13 cents more -- four additional books are unlocked. "Practical Malware Analysis: The Hands-On Guide to Dissecting Malicious Software" is available at this level, as well as "Hacking: The Art of Exploitation" and "Black Hat Python."
Nice to see they've already sold 28,506 bundles, which are DRM-free and available in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI format. (I still remember Slashdot's 2012 interview with Make magazine's Andrew "bunnie" Huang, who Samzenpus described as "one of the most famous hardware and software hackers in the world.")

Comments

Hahaha

[Anonymous Coward]

""The Maker's Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse: Defend Your Base with Simple Circuits, Arduino, and Raspberry Pi"."

Step 1: Try to use this book to fight zombies using mass produced consumer electronics starter kits
Step 2: Run screaming as the zombies overwhelm your position
Step 3: Find a real engineer
Step 4: Die to a zombie, unmourned for your uselessness and narcissism.

Re:Hahaha

[Aighearach]

That one sounds good, but then they bundled a bunch of black-hat crap that is going to get people on the no-fly-list along with freakin' maker books. Because, "hackers," I guess. Fucking clueless, and not even harmlessly clueless.

Andrew Huang's book is probably good. Too bad they had to bundle him with that crap.

Re:Hahaha

[Chibi Merrow]

Step 1: Try to use this book to fight zombies using mass produced consumer electronics starter kits

Actually it's a shame they described the book that way, as that's not all that it contains. It also has details on how to scavenge useful parts out of existing devices (car alternator, disposable camera capacitors, etc.) It's not just Pi and Arduino stuff.

Re:Hahaha

[gweihir]

While there is a lot of truth in that, occasionally (say 1 in 100 cases) people actually get started on real engineering this way. You can recognize them by them eventually developing a strong disdain for these toys that essentially cater to the stupid. While Arduino hardware has some merit, in particular if you have a clue what you are doing and can read a data-sheet (quite unlike the typical "maker"), the Raspberry Pi is an unmitigated disaster, with not a single competent engineer involved in the design and quite a bit of arrogance in the whole team and the community.

Re:Hahaha

[Anonymous Coward]

The Pi is a great machine, except for the fact that it routinely slaughters the SD card it needs to run.

Re:Hahaha

[gweihir]

Or the fact that they chose the worst possible SoC with no valid upgrade path and a secret data-sheet and very limited interfaces. (In a machine targeted at _education_! It really does not get worse than that: You may run pretty little programs, but if you want to look under the hood, you are out of luck...) The networking and USB is unreliable, has bad performance and is generally one big disaster. (Comparable offerings from, e.g., Allwinner, have on-the-chip GbE, USB, Audio, and even SATA...) The original power-regulator stage was designed by an "electronics engineer" that does not even understand switching regulators. The "audio" is a horrible joke. A recent release was sensitive to bright light as the "designers" apparently did not know that this happens with case-less semiconductors. They tried to laugh it off, but it is just another proof of their fundamental incompetence.

I have probably overlooked quite a few things, because after I found all these issues I have given up on the RPi I own. Just not worth the time.

Re:Hahaha

[serviscope_minor]

You can recognize them by them eventually developing a strong disdain for these toys that essentially cater to the stupid.

Yeah well, snobs abound. Nothing that can be done about that.

While Arduino hardware has some merit

Arduino hardware has plenty of merit. It's a like a cheaper, more widely available, standardised pinout version of vendor's devkits. Useful little devices.

the Raspberry Pi is an unmitigated disaster,

Except, no it isn't. For what it's for, it does the job well. I have one and it runs OctoPi to drive my 3D printer. It does the job great, and being a fixed platform, it's super easy to upgrade the software because SD images are available.

But seriously, though, why have you got an entire hive of killer bees in your bonnet?

Re:Hahaha

[ColdWetDog]

Boo!

Re:Hahaha

[Anonymous Coward]

The day I get put on a no-fly list for simply purchasing a widely available book, I'll consider our freedoms completely lost. I don't want to fly to a country that would treat me that way, anyway, and I sincerely doubt any modern nation would do that. I could be proven wrong, but so be it. Not going to live my life under someone's boot.

Re:Hahaha

[Aighearach]

Don't forget to include an idea with your comment next time, ideas are a critically important part of any exchange of ideas.

Re:Hahaha

[serviscope_minor]

In a machine targeted at _education_! It really does not get worse than that: You may run pretty little programs, but if you want to look under the hood, you are out of luck...

You have to want to get pretty far under the hood, given you can look at the source code for all of the software, and recompile and run any of it. Perfect? No, but much better than you're making out.

Comparable offerings from, e.g., Allwinner, have on-the-chip GbE, USB, Audio, and even SATA...

So? It was never meant to be a performance monster. Education, remember...

The original power-regulator stage was designed by an "electronics engineer" that does not even understand switching regulators.

They used a cheap LDO linear regulator. I find it hard to care that it wasted power since for 99.9% of use cases the RPi draws completely negligible amounts of power. It's not like the reg needed a heatsink or anything anyway. You can top it out at about 500mA if you try really hard, so you're wasting a glorious 2W at most.

Since it's not being operated in a thermally limited or power limited scenario, what's your reason for using a more expensive switcher instead of the linear reg?

Re:Hahaha

[Anonymous Coward]

I hear what you're saying and it sounds like, "I'm a loser who hasn't done much with my engineering life and, like some hipster in NHS glasses before NHS glasses were cool, I'm going to get pissy about successful projects because they aren't perfect - even though the task of any engineer is to make something usable rather than ideal."

Instead of whining about how shit the Raspberry Pi is, why not ask yourself why people have chosen it rather than "offerings from, e.g., Allwinner". Could it be because education doesn't require you to cram as many buzzwords into one system as possible? I was growing up at the time of the original BBC B, and people didn't go around whining that it wasn't a good educational tool because it didn't have the graphics capability of an Amiga.

But people like you will never understand because people like you are ultimately angry with themselves - angry about their own inadequacy - and there is no man more stubborn or prone to lash out than one who doesn't want to admit he's just a little disappointed in himself.

tl;dr You sound like me in my early 20s. Have a Snickers/Marathon, mate.

Re: Hahaha

[Anonymous Coward]

Insallah brother, and a good Mohammad to you

Re:Hahaha

[serviscope_minor]

Now you are just disgracing yourself, and obviously so. Your knowledge is all surface, no depth, and it shows.

Right. So far, you've posted claims with no argument, I disputed them and that's the best you can come up with?

So go on tell me, O wise one of the deep knowledge, what's so awful about using a cheap linear regulator when you're not in a power or thermally limited situation?

Re:Hahaha

[serviscope_minor]

AC nailed it.

Plus, Marathon? That takes me back...

But yes, there's a reason the RPi is popular despite not being the cheapest, most powerful or most capable. And it's not because everyone else is the most appaling hipster who can't recognise the glorious TRUTH of gwehir.

Re:Hahaha

[Anonymous Coward]

Laugh as much as you want, mate - you know it's true. In summary:

1) Eben Upton: successful engineer at Broadcom and successful Raspberry Pi founder.

2) gweihir: Irrelevant /. keyboard warrior.

You could still make a positive contribution without being as well known as 1). I'm not as skilled technically or in marketing, but I still try my best, learning from those who have achieved rather than putting them down. Thought about doing that, champ?

Re:Hahaha

[Anonymous Coward]

That one sounds good, but then they bundled a bunch of black-hat crap that is going to get people on the no-fly-list along with freakin' maker books. Because, "hackers," I guess. Fucking clueless...

Speaking of fucking clueless, ever ask yourself how many authors of those "evil" books are on the no-fly list?

Yeah, I thought so. Now how about you loosen that tinfoil hat of yours. It's obviously cutting off circulation.

Re:Hahaha

[Aighearach]

Your communications are all logged, because you post on slashdot, and *I* (and others here) have visited the Linux Journal website, which is flagged as a radical dissident publication.

Being flagged as a potential radical dissident will not, alone, get you on the no-fly-list.

But being on existing lists increases the chances that you will also get placed on other lists.

And black hat stuff is evil and illegal shit. People doing that stuff are dangerous. Buying books on criminal subjects will not alone get you in trouble. But it can get you on lists that interfere with travel. You might find that when you travel, you get searched a lot more often. "Randomly."

I don't care if people buy the book. Stick it to the man! Yeah, whatever. Freedom Fries. I'm merely concerned it is insensitive to the authors of the books on "maker" stuff to be sold as packages with "black-hat break-into-computers" stuff. These are not related things, or the same meaning of the word "hack."

Re:Hahaha

[Aighearach]

As somebody who mostly agrees with the sentiment, I think you're overstepping by slagging on the stuff that you don't respect.

I'd rather use an AVR directly than use the Arduino, probably because I would have read the data sheet either way, and the Arduino C code doesn't appear to provide any benefits other than not being compatible with other AVR code.

But the pi is only intended to be an educational toy. They weren't trying to make an engineering platform. It sucks in various ways, but they needed it to be cheap. They used a sucky chip that is a black box, because the company provided them some assistance in getting off the ground. They just want a cheap doodad that gives students a way in to learn about the software. It isn't a toy for EE design, it is a toy for beginners to get excited about computing in a non-desktop-OS setting, and for more advanced students to get fairly close to the metal with software, without having to be reading datasheets because they're still just kids.

I'm skeptical that their students have that much use for technology, but that would be true even with better engineered, more expensive devices. The important thing is, the kids end up having fun with it. So it is clearly a technical success, even if the engineering is warty.

Re:Hahaha

[Aighearach]

I have a box full AVRs, and no Arduinos. I do things the way the snobs want. But they're mostly full of shit; this way is better for me, and perhaps better for engineers, but that doesn't tell me about what is good for other people. And I sure as heck am not going to pay $50, or $250, for a dev kit. If I was worried about providing the correct amount of power or whatever, or wanted a pre-installed bootloader, arduino would be a good starting place. You can use normal non-arduino AVR code on them, anyways.

But for me, I wish I had bought a $10 arduino and installed software to make it into an AVR programmer. Not because the $15 costs more, but simply because they played games with the USB ids so that I have to edit the avrdude config on a system before I can use it. Minor, minor complaint, but I did resent paying $5 extra for the pleasure, when it is the exact same firmware in both cases. The funny part? The programmer is made by one of the official arduino companies.

Re:Hahaha

[gweihir]

Still funny. Because I know it is not true. I got to admit that Eben Upton managed to sucker millions of people into buying badly designed hardware and praising him for it, but my aspirations in life do not run to "con-man". Incidentally, nobody is ever more irrelevant than an AC.

Re:Hahaha

[gweihir]

As to AVR, that is why I wrote Arduino "Hardware".

My impression is just that a student that actually wants to learn more about the RPi and then finds they cannot even get a decent datasheet and in addition find that most of it does not follow good engineering practices, then that is exactly the wrong message to send. My other impression is that unreliable network and USB is not something that will make working with this thing fun at all. Sure, by now there are enough work-arounds that it is mostly reliable. But still, bad engineering offends me, and even more so when it is targeted at "learning". Students should never be shown something crappy as "the way to do it".

Re:Hahaha

[SirSlud]

Are you sure you've ever read your own signature?

Re:Hahaha

[serviscope_minor]

I have a box full AVRs, and no Arduinos.

The raw chips? Or other dev kits.

I do things the way the snobs want. But they're mostly full of shit; this way is better for me, and perhaps better for engineers,

Indeed. I think I do too: I tend to use g++ and a Makefile directly. I don't use the Arduino environment for a variety of reasons, some good some not. Sometimes I need more precise timing, so that rules it out. Otherwise, I'm not really a fan of IDEs, I quite like poring over microcontroller datasheets and there's the overhead of switching between arduino style and raw style.

I'm not sure if liking thge bootloader makes me a wannabe engineer though :)

but that doesn't tell me about what is good for other people.

Indeed. To me it seems that the Arduino environment is good for plenty of stuff, and I don't see why one shouldn't use it if it fits well.

And I sure as heck am not going to pay $50, or $250, for a dev kit.

I've got two of them (the $250 mark) though not for AVRs.

If I was worried about providing the correct amount of power or whatever, or wanted a pre-installed bootloader, arduino would be a good starting place. You can use normal non-arduino AVR code on them, anyways.

Yeah, they're pretty useful that way. One plug goes in (USB) and that serves as the programmer and regulated power and so on. I have a few kicking around for prototyping various bits and bobs. I gather there are lots of useful shields too, but I've not got into them yet.

Re:Hahaha

[Aighearach]

Chips, and a couple bags of crystals. Plain C. Emacs.

It isn't all rainbows and unicorns, I do have one 328 stuck at 32khz. Which would be great, except for a software bug in the timer; it is supposed to have a bicycle blinker controller, but it waits 3 minutes to toggle instead of 1 second. I didn't realize that without a fancy expensive programmer, I had to have the code perfect before setting the fuses for that speed.

But it's worth an occasional bricked $3 chip to have the pleasure of working directly on a breadboard. It is just more fun for me. And I end up with a whole circuit, instead of just some firmware. I like to think about, "what if I was just using discrete logic ICs? What algorithm am I actually using, and how big is it?" In software it is normal to have 10, 20, 1000, 10000 times as much code as there are basic steps in the algorithm, just to package, protect, and glue everything together. If I'm building a kitchen timer or something for the house, I might not want or need that many steps. I might get a better device if it is very simple. Or just a door stop, if it is too simple. But still, a microcontroller is more practical than a handful of logic ICs.

Re:Hahaha

[Aighearach]

Kids are not usually trying to find a datasheet, and even if they're nerdy enough to have read about them in internet forums they're not going to have even the technical vocabulary to understand them. They aren't complete, they don't have glossaries; even for adults who read a lot and understand jargon from related industries they can be rather opaque at times because of the low quality of the writing. Often there are formulas with variables that are not explained anywhere on the sheet, and they're not constants or something that can be looked up. You have to have a lot of experience with technical documentation to root out all the numbers you actually need to complete even the basic formulas given in the "applications" section of many datasheets. Often you have to root out variable values by figuring out the other name for the thing, and understanding that it is the result of one of the formulas given. And the formulas are almost never given in the order that a student, using available parts, would need to do them in to figure out the values of the components that they have to select.

That is true even for very smart kids who are doing more interesting things than what the datasheet is about. Kids who are building awesome things and learning a lot that is generally in the subject of engineering, and who will go on to be awesome engineers, do not necessarily benefit from having "good engineering practices" placed in their path. If they're not excessively dull, they'll simply reject that sort of nonsense at that age; best practices are best practices for real reasons that schoolchildren are not yet facing.

And best practices that are followed even before having done it the "wrong" way are not understood by those following them, and often lead to design flaws.

Sloppy engineering annoys me for entirely personal reasons, and I'm not a schoolchild, so it doesn't annoy me at all that many childrens games are unsuitable for me. I certainly wouldn't want to mislead myself to think that because I don't enjoy a game, or a type of educational play, that it must somehow be "bad" or "offensive." Students should never be told not to do something merely because adult professionals would consider the technique "crappy." Is doing something in a crappy way even less educational than skipping ahead to avoid those lessons? And are the lessons taught by a raspberry pi even EE lessons, or they more likely to be IT, CIS, and CS lessons? Is "your hardware kinda sucks, but it can do stuff so deal with it" even a crappy lesson?

Seeing adult makers use arduinos where they didn't actually need to disappoints me mostly for business reasons; many of these people intend to eventually put their doodad into a product, and they'd be a lot better off using an AVR on a breadboard from the start, and they wouldn't even lose any time. Their first project, when they're unsure about the power supply, etc., it makes total sense. Makers who don't intend to sell their thing, they just want to make it and share the design, arduino is perfect for them because the forums that they get to by following the cattle guards will be filled with like-minded people. Ones who want to sell their stuff should at least use avr-gcc with standard APIs instead of the Arduino software. Using the hardware crutch at the start is harmless, if the software is the same. And the forums they'll find themselves in will be filled with engineers who are interested in helping them.

Re:Hahaha

[Obfuscant]

Actually it's a shame they described the book that way,

Actually, it's a shame that when you order from them they demand an email address that they tell you they will use to "Notify me about upcoming promotions", but not that this is the only way they will tell you how to get the books you just bought. It's only after you pay the money that they tell you about some "download link" that you are supposed to get, apparently by email, since there is no download link that appears after purchase.

A nifty way to gather validated email addresses for future marketing, that have had to opt-in in order to take delivery of the product.

Poor deal

[Anonymous Coward]

Just $14.87 to lose your fourth amendment rights?

Ick

[Anonymous Coward]

Violet Blue is a feminazi cunt.

Re:Ick

[allo]

Indeed, the book has quite some reasonable stuff in it, but every other sentence is "especially for women, which are often a target ...".

"Hacking" the word that means nothing now

[kuzb]

Half of this stuff isn't hacking. I wish the mainstream would stop co-opting the culture for its own ends. I mean automate stuff with python? A privacy guide? Fuck that.

Re:"Hacking" the word that means nothing now

[serviscope_minor]

It is meant for people that want to see themselves as "hackers" or "makers" and as superior to any actual engineer

Well, the important thing is that you've managed to feel superior to them.

Bunny is pretty good though, definitely deserved than engineering PhD for hacking the xbox.

It's cool and he's a very smart guy, but that's not the sort of thing that PhDs are generally awarded for.

I know several people (including myself) that could likely have done it

Talk, as they say, is cheap.

Re:"Hacking" the word that means nothing now

[serviscope_minor]

You are wrong. And this nicely shows you have no idea what you are talking about.

Except you said youself that you and serveral people you know could have done it. In other words, the tools and techniques while tricky are already in existence and so no new research is required.

But what do I know? I've only supervised and examined a few engineering PhDs. It's not all that much of a surprising claim either: I used to be an academic and that's part of the standard duties.

Re:"Hacking" the word that means nothing now

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like a PhD in "hacking" please. Since it doesn't mean squat these days, I'll pick a vaguely computer-y topic that I know how to do. Shouldn't be a problem because PhDs are pretty dime a dozen too, these days. I'm pretty good with this posting as AC, that's pretty edgy, right? Anonymous? Should be worth a PhD, right?

Re:"Hacking" the word that means nothing now

[gweihir]

You have no clue what people I know and what _they_ did for their engineering PhD work or what they are now doing in academic and industrial research. Not everything gets published. And where did I actually imply that I was talking about _recreating_ Bunny's work? I rather obviously talked about doing the initial research. But you are probably so full of yourself that you cannot grasp that.

Re:"Hacking" the word that means nothing now

[serviscope_minor]

Not everything gets published.

No, but for a PhD it usually needs to be of publishable quality. It's a rare PhD with no published papers, and it's usually important to find rather easygoing examiners who owe you a favour for those cases.

I rather obviously talked about doing the initial research.

No, you really didn't.

Re:"Hacking" the word that means nothing now

[Anonymous Coward]

I feel everyone in tech needs to go back and read Steven Levy's "Hackers" again. The original definition of hacking (nearly 50 years old) was basically the ability to hack away lines of code to create something that would run on a mainframe-era computer. Over the last 20 years or so there's been ongoing attempts to reclaim its original meaning -- and the problem has always been that the media insists on using it to mean black hats and script kiddies rather than people composing elegant solutions to problems using code.

So I'm actually okay if a few technical book publishers want to use the word in a non-malicious context. I think that's at least a step in the right direction.

Proceeds are the same as always

[guises]

I've heard this line before, that the Humble Bundle is for charity. "Proceeds go to charity X." Bullshit. They can, if that's what you choose in the checkout section, but by default only 15% of the purchase goes to charity. Many many stores will allow ask for a donation to some charity at checkout, the only extra-charitable thing about the Humble Bundle is that option to divert a greater portion of your purchase to charity if you so choose.

I don't want to denigrate that, that's good, but the Humble Bundle is not for charity. It's a for-profit store with an odd business model.

Re:Proceeds are the same as always

[Anonymous Coward]

You're welcome to move the sliders to whatever contribution levels you want to. Of course it's a for-profit store, you think anyone does stuff like this from the kindness of their hearts.

Re:Proceeds are the same as always

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah - by default, more of your money goes to THEM than it does to charity. It's kind of shocking how little money actually goes to charity if you buy one of these "humble bundles." (And they have the gall to call their take a "tip." Here's a tip: stop pretending your business is a "charity.")

Re:Proceeds are the same as always

[Anonymous Coward]

but the Humble Bundle is not for charity.

I regard paying for virtual goods more or less a charity of itself.
I give Humble bundle very little but possibly some for bandwidth / they likely deserve lots for support towards me.
I distribute among content creators / right-holders and charity as I see fit depending on what I think each kinda deserve and what usage my money may have.
I agree however it's not something which has to be or even is simply to support charities because there's other ways to do that, what make me spend the money is that I get other things in return.

/ Aliquis posting as AC because he moderated up the "feminazi" comment because that's one person I'm ok not giving any money if that's true.

Thanks

[mushroom blue]

for the list. I went to kickass.to and paid what I wanted for the books. Even got the $15-tier books.

Re:Thanks

[barc0001]

You've got a 4 digit account, so presumably you're old enough that you're making decent money and you're still pirating books when they're being nearly given away? The authors' time and effort is really worth so little to you?

You want to pirate them, pirate them. But don't come back and boast about it, that's just an asshole move.

Designing BSD Rootkits

[manu0601]

"Designing BSD Rootkits". Seems cool stuff, but very specialized, indeed!

No DRM? Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice to see they've already sold 28,506 bundles, which are DRM-free and available in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI format.

Why pay for it when you can get it all on the web for free, right?

Re:No DRM? Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, I don't know, maybe because you respect the effort of the authors' research, evaluation, and communication of the topics in a format that you can read on an electronic device of your choosing without restriction, and you'd be willing to reward that effort with a small portion of your fucking fiat, asshole.

Step 1: Find something free. Step 2: Profit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Part of this bundle, which HumbleBundle.com has under the "Pay what you want!" section, is:

Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering by Andrew "bunnie" Huang

Before getting too excited about this offering from HumbleBundle.com, keep in mind that the publisher has previously made this available completely free. (See: Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering by Andrew "bunnie" Huang, for free.)