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Author: Emmanuel Goldstein
ISBN : B001UQO3TM
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Download electronic versions of selected books Free The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey for everyone book mediafire, rapishare, and mirror link Since 1984, the quarterly magazine
2600 has provided fascinating articles for readers who are curious about technology. Find the best of the magazine’s writing in
Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey, a collection of the strongest, most interesting, and often most controversial articles covering 24 years of changes in technology, all from a hacker’s perspective. Included are stories about the creation of the infamous tone dialer “red box” that allowed hackers to make free phone calls from payphones, the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the insecurity of modern locks.Download latest books on mediafire and other links compilation Free The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey
- File Size: 3128 KB
- Print Length: 889 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0470294191
- Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (June 6, 2008)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B001UQO3TM
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
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- Lending: Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #141,433 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
Free The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey
I remember finding my first issue of 2600, in a bookshop attached to an enormous, secretive government laboratory. Those were in the days after ESS but before the Internet (well, we had NNTP and SMTP and telnet, but HTML hadn't been invented). It seemed so illicit and exciting, I bought every issue I could find for years, and even wrote one article for them.
Over time, I read it less and less, both because the writing was generally bad, and because the revelations were often so weak. The Best Of book fairly reflects the content of the magazine -- it gives a good sense for the passions of a particular technological subculture, but much of what is here is dross.
So many articles were clearly written by people who did not know much, and who punt when they get to difficult work. "The encryption is done by a custom chip and, uh, you might want to decompile the EEPROM and see what's in there." Or they contain only trivial information, made to fill many pages through the inclusion of anecdotes about how the writer came to know the trivial information. (Four pages on how you discovered that ATMs run OS/2? The entire article could have been reduced to four words: "Many ATMs run OS/2.") And then there are the political articles, most of which are screeds about how the government and/or big companies are coming to take your freedom away, and their desire to be paid for your pirated movies proves it.
In some cases, it is hard to imagine how a given article was selected for inclusion in the magazine, let alone for reprinting in the book. An essay on the mathematics of lotteries is particularly weak, using high school level combinatorics to argue that nobody should ever play.
I am attending Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) in NYC this week-end, and have just spent time with this volume. Unlike the individual issues, all of which I have had in my possession over the years, this volume is HUGE, readable, indexed, and priceless. I mean that--PRICELESS.
The publisher is to be saluted for not only putting a great deal of effort along with the editor, the founder of 2600 Magazine and also of the HOPE conference, for making this volume a true reference work. I was immediately impressed by the selection of "best of the best," the organization of the material, the index, and the fact that the publisher moved away from the micro-print that was used to keep costs down on the volume of knowledge being transmitted in the individual journal issues, and instead went for a high-end glossy, "just right" white space presentation that should be in every Information Technology library across the country, and is also a collectible for anyone who pretends to know anything at all about information INsecurity.
If you got this far, this lovely volume, easily worth $60, is a real value at the much lower price being offered, and I hope enough people buy it to occasion a reprint or a second volume.
It merits comment that this is not just a volume of hand-picked items from a single journal. The editor and his closest colleagues created a community of over 30,000 hackers (whom I have always said are like astronauts on the edge with the "right stuff") and this volume LITERALLY represents the 30,000 who were decades ahead of the US Government, which is still--as are corporations and public utilities--largely stupid about information system security, to include our Supervisory Control and Direction (SCADA) systems, all of them on the Internet.