I recently read American Kingping by Nick Bilton and I thought it was really good. It’s about the founder of the Silk Road and how the FBI tracked him down.
Can you recommend any similiar novels?
Readit NewsReadit NewsCan you recommend any similiar novels?
And (tiny spoiler-alert): a small easter-egg (though not intended as such) for people on HN: the founders of HN/YC show up in the book, admittedly in a very minor capacity.
Btw, I recently discovered that Cliff Stoll is one of the awesome guys who appears on the Numberphile YouTube channel, so if you watch that, know that it's him :)
Any time the subject of Cliff Stoll comes up, I always comment that someday I want to be as excited about _something_ as Cliff Stoll is about _everything_.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0126765/
not this here rubbish: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0481369/ (hm, really it was with Jim Carrie? Maybe there's yet another terrible version. Or maybe this was just that bad).
Here's part of it:
Giggling a little from the alcohol, the four points began the slow juggling routine I'd sent them; just a simple ball passing, in rhythm. Pass, pass, pass. Throw and catch in the same instant; the balls went round and round until all four were landing in palms at the same time, four little smacks merging into one sound. Their avatars were better at this than they were. After a moment I threw another ball in, then another, until there were eight in the circle: four in the air, four in the hand. Faster and faster they went round, until there were little streaks of light behind them, until the streaks almost formed a complete, rippling circle.
Around us the world leaned in, currents of energy creating a field of magic potential. Rhythmic motion always attracted the attention of the underlying world routines as they struggled to incorporate it into the ebbs and flows of the wind and water; a vortex here, at one of the two hearts of the world, drew a lot of processing power. And each point of the cross was a magic-using engine; those strands of energy consumed a surprising amount of resources. But the real trick was the synchronization: slight imperfections in the coding routines for distribution and rationing of magical energy made them susceptible to a timing attack. It was a matter of chance, though; each time the circle tossed and caught, quanta of energy were requested at nearly-identical times. Sooner or later the system would try to service two at once and--ah.
One of the balls vanished momentarily, lost to accounting for a brief instant before the system found it again. It left a tiny kink in the circle of light as it passed: an opening, into the collection routines. This was what my watch-spell was waiting for: a chance to insert my own instructions into the information transmission stream: instructions that said 'open', 'open'.
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/396337
Part of the fun is that, on a 5000 year old spaceship set arbitrarily far in our future, long past the end of Moore's Law, all the systems are still running Unix. And one of the jobs on board is "Programmer-Archeologist", digging through generations of code to try to find useful bits from the past. But story-wise, there's some outstanding hacking ideas going.
"Cryptonomicon" by Neal Stephenson. It goes from WW2 to modern time.
"Cyberpunk" by Katie Hafner - Read it aeons ago so working from long term memory. 3 real world stories of famous hackers and their "crimes" (Kevin Mitnick, Pengo, Robert Morris).
It talks about the Stuxnet and the story behind it, and I got the chance to learn some fairly interesting stuff in the meantime (like the complexity of building a nuclear bomb).
I found it much more useful than the American Kingpin, which just mentions that Tor and Bitcoin offer anonymity online, but doesn't get anywhere even close to explaining either of the technologies that are crucial for the storyline.
We Are Anonymous by Parmy Olson also made me feel kind of the same, but the writing wasn't quite as engaging as the Countdown to Zero Day was.
I can't believe no one recommended this. The guy literally evaded the FBI using technology.