A quick tale of black hats and white hats, with a lot of gray area in between.
Computer pranksters and the internet come of age together, as the former become the leading security experts on the latter, joining forces with and against corporations and governments alike.
“In its earliest days, the chief moral issues for the teens in the [hacking collective] Cult of the Dead Cow were how badly to abuse long-distance calling cards and how offensive their online posts should be,” writes Reuters technology reporter Menn (Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who Are Bringing Down the Internet, 2010, etc.). “But as they matured, the hackers quickly became critical thinkers in an era when that skill was in short supply….They all helped push a realistic understanding of security challenges and ethical considerations into mainstream conversations in Silicon Valley and Washington.” The author narrates a fast-paced story about how a little-known movement that could trace its roots to the psychedelic rock of the 1960s—one visionary was the son of the Jefferson Airplane’s drummer while another was a lyricist for the Grateful Dead—would eventually serve as security advisory for the Pentagon, the cybernetics industry, and geopolitical forces around the globe. Menn introduces many characters who were formerly anonymous or deeply underground, known only by their “cDc” monikers, the names by which they posted during the days before the World Wide Web, when bulletin boards attracted kindred spirits. The group had its genesis in the remote outpost of Lubbock, Texas, but its influence eventually extended from San Francisco to Boston and beyond, as computer technology triumphed over geographical logistics. They recognized the porousness of the web’s security because they had penetrated it, and they knew that those insisting that information was secure were in denial. They knew that “everything was unsafe and would only get less safe as the economy grew more dependent on technology. This was classic market failure, compounded by political failure.”
A quick tale of black hats and white hats, with a lot of gray area in between.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5417-6238-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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