61–70 of 160 posts
Try Daemon and Freedom™ by Daniel Suarez.
Daemon was virtually unreadable. It's a hacker-themed fairtale for computer illiterate, basically. I had a non-techy friend borrow the book and they too couldn't finish it, because it was just way over acceptable believability limits even for them.
The Cuckoo's Egg , by Cliff Stoll.
The Cuckoo's Egg , by Cliff Stoll.
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 :)
Two books come to mind (while excluding the obvious absolute classics like Neuromancer (William Gibson) and Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson): "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).
Reamde , by Neal Stephenson. Yeah, the big daddy of cyberpunk ("Snowcrash") also wrote a contemporary technothriller set in organized cybercrime organizations.
I'm a big Stephenson fan, and I thought Reamde was terrible. His usual quirky pacing just turns into a dragging nightmare that never pays off, it's uncharacteristically full of questionable technical premises, and if it weren't for a few islands of genuinely entertaining scenes I would not have made it through. I honestly believe it's the result of some suit pressuring him to write about topics people see on Dateline
I think you will enjoy Kingpin by Kevin Poulsen.
The Cuckoo's Egg , by Cliff Stoll.
Kill Process by William Hertling