3 ms·

Guys, do you have recommendations on books in the same topic? (surveillance, hackers, NSA, etc) YA or not? I've read Little Brother, liked a lot, even thought

Guys, do you have recommendations on books in the same topic? (surveillance, hackers, NSA, etc) YA or not? I've read Little Brother, liked a lot, even thought I'm not in the target audience. So I would like some 'grown up' recommendations.

mattoc 13y ago
I'd recommend _We, The Watched_ by Adam Bender[0]. It's available in ebook or print and the author has similarly licensed it under Creative Commons (NoDerivs as opposed to ShareAlike however). - [0] http://www.wethewatched.com/ http://www.wethewatched.com/ (edit: fixed CC license type)
gemma 13y ago
Less surveillance and more hackers/cryptography/NSA origins: Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson.
pavelludiq 13y ago
Kevin Mitnicks autobiography "Ghost in the Wires" is very good. Although it's non-fiction, it read like a cyberpunk spy novel.
teeja 13y ago
Goes back quite a ways. There's John Brunner's 1975 classic Shockwave Rider. See also early cyberpunk stuff (Gibson, Sterling et al): http://project.cyberpunk.ru/lib/ http://project.cyberpunk.ru/lib/. More recently, Stephenson Snow Crash, Stross Halting State. Also thoroughly enjoyed both Cory's works, esp. LB.
unimpressive 13y ago
My favorite 'hacker' story (It's really a phreaker story, but for the most part about the more benign, cooler parts of that culture.) is Evan Doorbell's three hour long "How Evan became a phone phreak" which starts at a place that's very rare for a hacker story, the beginning. (Compare The Matrix, where when we first meet Neo he's already searching for Morpheus in the opening scene.) Evan recorded all the old phone sounds. (This is the man who brought you The Sounds of Long Distance) He includes these in the program as he talks, so it's almost like you took a time machine back to the seventies and stood by him with a pay phone as he tells the story. He also makes sure to explain things in the order that he figured them out, which is a subtle detail that makes the story a lot more interesting. The only thing I don't like about this entire series is that he never finished it. You never actually get to the point where Evan figures out how to Bluebox. Available here: ftp://ftp.wideweb.com/GroupBell/ (It's the "howBPhreak" files)
AdrianRossouw 13y ago
You could read the sequel 'homeland'. it was actually fairly prescient about the whole current nsa scandal. Well, more like it stated the obvious before we had conclusive evidence... but still
- lessnonymous 13y ago
  Homeland made me sad. In the book, the DHS's surveillance is revealed .. and everyone goes apeshit and protests. In real life it seems 90% of the population just keep drinking the Cool Aid
nl 13y ago
Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. It's far future space opera science fiction.. but Vinge is an ex-Computer Science professor, and it shows the impact of security vulnerabilities. Wait until you read the bit about the guy who comes out of hibernation only to find these far-future space ships are running a variety of Unix, with a backdoor he wrote in hundreds of thousands of years ago. Or if that's a bit much, Vinge's 1981 True Names[1] or 2007 Rainbow's End address the issues more directly. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End
lessnonymous 13y ago
Not quite about surveillance, but a great hacker book: "The Eudaemonic Pie" is a 1985 book by American author Thomas A. Bass, about a group of University of California, Santa Cruz physics graduate students (known as the Eudaemons) who in the late 1970s and early 1980s designed and employed miniaturized computers, hidden in specially modified platform soled shoes, to help predict the outcome of casino roulette games. The players knew, presumably from the earlier work of Shannon and Thorp,[1][2] that roulette wheels obey Newtonian physics, and that by capturing the state of the ball and wheel and taking into account peculiarities of the particular wheels being played they could increase their odds of selecting a winning number to gain a 44 percent advantage over the casinos. (from Wikipedia)
vezzy-fnord 13y ago
You can try "Masters of Deception: The Gang that Ruled Cyberspace". It's a fictionalized retelling of the stories of the two prominent BBS hacker/phreaker groups during the 80s and early 90s. It's not really brain food or anything like that, but it's a quick and decent read if you have free time.

mattoc 13y ago

I'd recommend _We, The Watched_ by Adam Bender[0]. It's available in ebook or print and the author has similarly licensed it under Creative Commons (NoDerivs as opposed to ShareAlike however). - [0] http://www.wethewatched.com/ http://www.wethewatched.com/ (edit: fixed CC license type)

gemma 13y ago

Less surveillance and more hackers/cryptography/NSA origins: Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson.

pavelludiq 13y ago

Kevin Mitnicks autobiography "Ghost in the Wires" is very good. Although it's non-fiction, it read like a cyberpunk spy novel.

teeja 13y ago

Goes back quite a ways. There's John Brunner's 1975 classic Shockwave Rider. See also early cyberpunk stuff (Gibson, Sterling et al): http://project.cyberpunk.ru/lib/ http://project.cyberpunk.ru/lib/. More recently, Stephenson Snow Crash, Stross Halting State. Also thoroughly enjoyed both Cory's works, esp. LB.

unimpressive 13y ago

My favorite 'hacker' story (It's really a phreaker story, but for the most part about the more benign, cooler parts of that culture.) is Evan Doorbell's three hour long "How Evan became a phone phreak" which starts at a place that's very rare for a hacker story, the beginning. (Compare The Matrix, where when we first meet Neo he's already searching for Morpheus in the opening scene.) Evan recorded all the old phone sounds. (This is the man who brought you The Sounds of Long Distance) He includes these in the program as he talks, so it's almost like you took a time machine back to the seventies and stood by him with a pay phone as he tells the story. He also makes sure to explain things in the order that he figured them out, which is a subtle detail that makes the story a lot more interesting. The only thing I don't like about this entire series is that he never finished it. You never actually get to the point where Evan figures out how to Bluebox. Available here: ftp://ftp.wideweb.com/GroupBell/ (It's the "howBPhreak" files)

AdrianRossouw 13y ago

You could read the sequel 'homeland'. it was actually fairly prescient about the whole current nsa scandal. Well, more like it stated the obvious before we had conclusive evidence... but still

lessnonymous 13y ago
Homeland made me sad. In the book, the DHS's surveillance is revealed .. and everyone goes apeshit and protests. In real life it seems 90% of the population just keep drinking the Cool Aid

nl 13y ago

Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. It's far future space opera science fiction.. but Vinge is an ex-Computer Science professor, and it shows the impact of security vulnerabilities. Wait until you read the bit about the guy who comes out of hibernation only to find these far-future space ships are running a variety of Unix, with a backdoor he wrote in hundreds of thousands of years ago. Or if that's a bit much, Vinge's 1981 True Names[1] or 2007 Rainbow's End address the issues more directly. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End

lessnonymous 13y ago

Not quite about surveillance, but a great hacker book: "The Eudaemonic Pie" is a 1985 book by American author Thomas A. Bass, about a group of University of California, Santa Cruz physics graduate students (known as the Eudaemons) who in the late 1970s and early 1980s designed and employed miniaturized computers, hidden in specially modified platform soled shoes, to help predict the outcome of casino roulette games. The players knew, presumably from the earlier work of Shannon and Thorp,[1][2] that roulette wheels obey Newtonian physics, and that by capturing the state of the ball and wheel and taking into account peculiarities of the particular wheels being played they could increase their odds of selecting a winning number to gain a 44 percent advantage over the casinos. (from Wikipedia)

vezzy-fnord 13y ago

You can try "Masters of Deception: The Gang that Ruled Cyberspace". It's a fictionalized retelling of the stories of the two prominent BBS hacker/phreaker groups during the 80s and early 90s. It's not really brain food or anything like that, but it's a quick and decent read if you have free time.