Cory Doctorow's Little Brother . I could not put it down, and read it in one sitting.
The sequel, Homeland, is also pretty great.
Ask HN: Recommendations of good cybercrime novels?
121–130 of 160 posts
Re: Ask HN: Recommendations of good cybercrime novels?
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed a great book. 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 :)
Including this one posted this morning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7GYYerlQWs 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_.
His TED talk is probably my all time favourite.
https://www.ted.com/talks/clifford_stoll_on_everything
Re: Ask HN: Recommendations of good cybercrime novels?
#123"The Right to Read" by Richard Stallman[1] is certainly not a novel, but it is a short bit of fiction about cybercrime (or rather, what would happen if certain day-to-day developer activities were made criminal) and is certainly worth the I seem to recall that it received a bit of hysterical "oh that could never happen" reaction when it was released but I can't seem to find a source for that recollection. It may have mostly been a reaction that was generated by the somewhat emotive backlash that tends to appear whenever Stallman makes a statement about "freedom" though, and the story certainly is allegorical, so anyone who disagreed with him may have posted about it online and skewed the discussion in that direction. I can't recall much about the specific reaction at the time (it was more than 10 years ago now) though so much of the above is really just poorly-informed speculation on my part.
It is, unfortunately, disappointingly prescient and it's something that I think everyone working in the tech industry should read, regardless of whether they think they agree with RMS's views on software freedom and intellectual property.
[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
Edit: I just re-read it and my initial estimate of "<20 minutes" was way off. I had forgotten just how short the story actually was, so perhaps my recollection about the reaction to the allegory isn't entirely accurate either. Nonetheless, I'm leaving this comment here as witness to the fallibility of my memory.
Re: Ask HN: Recommendations of good cybercrime novels?
#124This isn't quite in the category, but John Carreyrou's nonfiction book "Bad Blood", which covered the rise and fall of Theranos, satisfied me in a similar way. There's plenty of crime, although it's really about pretending to be high-tech rather than actually being high tech. For people in tech who love a good fraud story, I highly recommend it.
I was just going to mention "Bad Blood" as well. I am currently reading it and just can't stop.
Re: Ask HN: Recommendations of good cybercrime novels?
#125not really a cybercrime novel, but really interesting for people in that business i'd say. Spy Catcher. That is written by someone in high position of MI:5 and their first 'science' officer. a lot of interesting information about spying which later really kickstarted cyber espionage / crime in a way...
...and in a related vein, anyone with a hacker mindset ought to check out R.V. Jones’ ‘Most Secret War’; Jones was the UK senior scientific adviser during WW2 and the book reads like an endless string of anecdotes about one-upping the Germans.
I guess tricking early IFF and radionavigation systems could be considered cyber crime - today, at least, he’d get the DMCA thrown at him for his trouble. :)
Re: Ask HN: Recommendations of good cybercrime novels?
#126Cory Doctorow's Little Brother . I could not put it down, and read it in one sitting.
In the spirit of the fact that a few of these book suggestions have been made available online for free, I feel obligated to point out that Cory Doctorow has chosen to make both Little Brother and Homeland (the sequel to Little Brother, mentioned by another commenter) available in a few different formats on his website. [1] [2]
Re: Ask HN: Recommendations of good cybercrime novels?
#127The Cuckoo's Egg , by Cliff Stoll.
Second this. Fantastic book about true events. If you like the story, there is also a movie which covers the same events as the book. The movie is called "23" and is available in German and English.
Oh wow, didn't realize there was a book behind "23". BTW, there's a terrible American film with the same name - one wants:
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).
Re: Ask HN: Recommendations of good cybercrime novels?
#128Mark Russinovich's Jeff Aiken Trilogy. If you're looking for a quality bestseller similar to Dan Brown books. Zero day, Trojan Horse and Rogue Code are all excellent novels. Some common themes include computer virus epidemics, cyber armies, cyber warfare, dangers of an overnetworked but undersecured society
They're not great, but they're more or less as entertaining as the Dan Brown books (which also wouldn't be in my list of great literature).
Re: Ask HN: Recommendations of good cybercrime novels?
#129Reamde , by Neal Stephenson. Yeah, the big daddy of cyberpunk ("Snowcrash") also wrote a contemporary technothriller set in organized cybercrime organizations.
Bit of a stretch to call out Stephenson as a "big daddy of cyberpunk"? What title would you give to Sterling and Gibson?
Re: Ask HN: Recommendations of good cybercrime novels?
#130In a hard SF rather than contemporary context, A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge, is an absolute delight (and a Hugo winner for best novel). Vinge was a mathematics and computer science professor, and very much knows what he's talking about.
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.