Rating: 
Summary: WARNING !!!
Review: This book can hook you and don't loose you and make you skip activities, better begin it in the weekend.
I started to read it on Tuesday , now it's friday and I skiped other things just to read it :p
It's well written and it shows you that the lose in not only measured on the informatic side, but lose on the personal life too, this book tell you how.
Waking in the night, losing weekends with your girlfriend and friends...
Rating:
Summary: Hacker's Classic
Review: This is a classic book about real life network hacking.The book reads like a detective story, and all the details are real life happenings of a grad student from Berkeley and some astute West German hackers during the Cold War era (mid 1980's). The technical details are not esoteric, and should not dissuade the non-techies from picking it up. I picked up the book at the library one afternoon and could not put it down until the next day, when I had finished the last chapters. IMPRESSIONS: Very captivating, good exposition of technical details for the lay reader, fast read. Also, great epilogue speculating the future of security and "trust" on the web, meaning of digital security and how it will influence our lives.
Rating: 
Summary: The Case of the Hannover Hacker
Review: This tells of Cliff Stoll's involvement in reconciling a 75 cent bookkeeping discrepancy that led to an intruder who broke into the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in order to break into classified military systems. Cliff writes with a 'stream of consciousness' style that used over 350 pages where maybe 86 pages would be used in a more concise style. [Is using many pages a mark of bureaucratic style?] Cliff describes his lifestyle as a university serf: eating a lot of pizza, bicycling around, living with friends, sewing quilts. His big event of the year is dressing up for a Halloween parade in San Francisco. This book lacks a Table of Contents and an Index (not intended for reference?). I don't expect a sequel. This is worth reading as a slow-paced detective or mystery story. But it is unlike a Hammett or Chandler or other detective authors. One lesson is the care needed when talking over a phone line (the "F" entity). Cliff's comments on an uncaring Federal bureaucracy were echoed in the aftermath of 9/11/2001. The personal activities of Cliff and his friends show them to be dedicated followers of fashion who imagine themselves to be radically original. American telephones are computer controlled so they are easy to trace. Cliff is asked about the "adiabatic lapse rate on Jupiter". This wasn't "by chance", but a test of his bona fides (Chapter 45). Chapter 47 explains how to decrypt Unix passwords from words. Plodding through this book is like running on a dry sandy beach. He could have been more specific. Cliff claims the problem with viruses is they destroy trust (naive?). My advice is: trust no one.
Rating:
Summary: The Case of the Hannover Hacker
Review: This tells of the reconciling of a 75 cent bookkeeping discrepancy that ultimately led to an intruder who broke into the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in order to break into classified military systems. Cliff writes with a 'stream of consciousness' style that would be faster reading with a more concise style. [Is this a bureaucratic style?] The book describes the lifestyle of University serfs: eating a lot of pizza, bicycling around, living with friends, and sewing quilts. The big event of the year seems to be dressing up for a Halloween parade in San Francisco.
This book lacks a Table of Contents and an Index. This is worth reading as a slow-paced real detective story; it is unlike fictional detective stories. One lesson is the care needed when talking over a phone line (the "F" entity). Were his comments on an uncaring Federal bureaucracy echoed in the aftermath reports of 9/11/? The personal activities of Cliff and his friends show them to be 'dedicated followers of fashion' who imagine themselves to be radically original. [Some of this was done decades earlier.] American telephones are computer controlled so they are easy to trace.
Cliff was asked about the "adiabatic lapse rate on Jupiter". This wasn't "by chance", but a test of his bona fides (Chapter 45). Chapter 47 explains how to decrypt Unix passwords from dictionary words. Plodding through this book was tedious to me; he could have been more concise. Cliff claims the problem with viruses is they destroy trust, as he was later questioned about a virus. That was a sort of left-hand compliment, or hidden jealousy IMO. My advice is: trust no one.
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