Tuesday, November 9, 1993

Interesting book review --- Bruce Sterling's Hacker Crackdown The adjective may be chosen to modify either. Ian Stewart is a mathematician who writes wonderfully well, as readers may see by looking at his review, in the London Review of Books 15 (21) of 4 November 1993, of Bruce Sterling's `The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier', Eric Raymond's edition of `The New Hacker's Dictionary', and Bryan Clough and Paul Mungo's `Approaching Zero, Data Crime and the Computer Underworld'. (I had wondered what Clough had been doing since he retired from soccer). Stewart refers to various incidents, such as the 15 Jan 1990 4ESS problems, the stoned virus, the Internet worm (but when will people stop deprecating Eric by implication?), and the Secret Service crackdown on Steve Jackson games and `Knight Lightning'. Stewart's closing sentence: `"Approaching Zero" shows that we have a lot to fear from the activities of those (few) hackers who are genuinely malevolent. "The Hacker Crackdown" suggests that we have just as much to fear from programming errors - and that American citizens have far more to fear from their Secret Service.' Peter Ladkin [Dr Peter B Ladkin via risks-digest Volume 15, Issue 24] 0:03 # G!