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Take a walk on the wild side
Book review:
Steal this Computer Book: All the Stuff They Never Tell You About the
Internet, By Wallace Wang
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October 7, 1998 by Sean Dugan |
From...
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(IDG) -- If this book had a soundtrack, it'd be Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side." From the comfort of your living room couch, you can slip over to the decidedly less illuminated part of the global village. Arguably the most powerful communication medium ever devised, the Internet also has a nasty, kick-in-the-pants dark side. That's what Steal this Computer Book: All the Stuff They Never Tell You About the Internet is all about.
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Want advice on how to mail bomb a spammer who is clogging your hard drive? Want a quick primer on practical encryption that will keep even the National Security Agency out of your computer? How about methods for getting computers on the cheap while sticking it to the "Great Faceless Corporation"? What are the quick and dirty hacks for common Web servers? It's tips like these that are the meat of this book.
Pretty much everything dark and borderline criminal is covered in this book to a certain degree. To state the obvious, you aren't going to walk away from this book and crack the New York Times Web site. Most of the information is either nontechnical or at least pretty straight forward. There are a few lines of code sprinkled throughout the book. And Wang has a breezy style and biting wit that makes the book a fun read.
This isn't so much a handbook for hacking and cracking as it is a profile of the lifestyles of the anonymous and technically literate. Understanding the hacker mentality, and some of the actual techniques used, prepares readers for that worst case scenario of having their security penetrated. This book is definitely a member of the "forewarned is forearmed" school of thought.
The book has a moment or two of preachiness, notably the section on terrorism. If you have a problem with the assertion that "terrorists" are just the soldiers with the underdeveloped PR machine, then you probably don't have the stomach for a book like this.
But, if you are serious about understanding the point of view of the people who might be hacking your site, you can pick up Steal this Computer Book and get a crash course in hacker psychology. If you have a moral problem with some of the information in this book then deal with it. It's real, and there are a lot of places on the Net that aren't well lit.
Sean Dugan is a Senior Research Editor at InfoWorld. He can be reached via e-mail at sean_dugan@infoworld.com.