Bruce Sterling's classic work highlights the 1990 assault on hackers, when law-enforcement officials successfully arrested scores of suspected illicit hackers and other computer-based law-breakers. These raids became symbolic of the debate between fighting serious computer crime and protecting civil liberties. However, The Hacker Crackdown is about far more than a series of police sting operations. It's a lively tour of three cyberspace subcultures--the hacker underworld, the realm of the cyberc...

My "hacking" career never got much further than making a few free long-distance calls to random people and pirating a few (maybe more than a few) games for my Commodore 64. Still, I spent time on BBS's and had an awareness that there were plenty of people much, much deeper into hacking. So I had high expectations given the author and the subject matter. I think though, that the author's love of the subject results in a lot of detail and digressions that make the read a bit of a slog.It's neatly

Non-Fiction. On January 15, 1990, AT&T's long-distance switching system went down. It was due to a flaw in AT&T's software, but it was easier to blame hackers for the period of lost service. Because hackers, nobody likes 'em, right? This led to a nationwide crackdown on phone phreaks and computer hackers, which lead to the beginning of a political movement to protect online activities as free speech, which lead to you and I, able to discuss a book about computer hackers without the FBI kicking d...

Don't take my 5 star rating on this seriously. I read this book first as a teenager and it changed my life. It gave me heros I looked up to for quite some time and I think I have retained the good parts of it even today. This book also introduced me to another author Cory doctorow who is basically the person who shaped me the most.

I enjoyed this more than I expected, and it was interesting learning about these events now that it is 20 years later. Having been a victim of hackers at work, an incident that actually made our processes much more robust once we fixed everything, I have a very dim view of the assholes. However there was certainly law enforcement overreach in these cases. Seems it is a tricky path to walk.

This is an interesting read, both due to nostalgia of my old BBS days (and dabbling around and near the hacker community at the time) and as a historical piece. Cybercrime is serious business now but back then it was a complete mess. I definitely learned a lot from this, even if it’s not as relevant now as it was at its publishing. And it’s well-structured and full of information.

An interesting snaphot of the early years of the Internet. I especially loved the part where Sterling includes the text of the "stolen" document, and finding out that it is almost completely unreadable! And worth only about $13! That was priceless...

I wanted to love this book, but instead I just sort of liked it. The book definitely was not a bad read, but it did not fit my needs.

It's almost two decades old at this point, so, well, it's dated. But it's so excellently written, and it covers such a wide range of topics. It also has a whole lot of that early 90s cyberpunk-hacker spirit that I can't help but feel a bit of nostalgia here.That said, it covers rather well some of the first battles pitched over civil liberties on-line in US courts, and the resulting founding of EFF and other such groups. Two decades later, it's a fascinating artifact of its time.It does tend to

Essential reading for anybody that has ever typed anything on the internet.

I enjoyed this one a lot more than expected - some history of early 90's hacker groups like Legion of Doom, the cat + mouse interactions with LEO's, and telecom. The author has such a charming way of elucidating dense (and outdated) technical information while still retaining the cheeky social nuances. Excellent to pair with "Hackers" as the next phase of history before the Web 1.0.

A very nice read - really sets the mood for the times and takes you along for a story - loved it!

Well-written and -researched, but not my style of book. On the other hand, a friendly, digestible intro to all about how telecommunications takes place. Definitely all about computer and telephony systems. It has some fun, and at this point, slightly obsolete, terminology and slang.

Nonfiction! Woo! Computer CRIME!This is a classic non-fiction about late eighties and very early nineties hacking from both sides of the law, but what is most most interesting is not that it's written by a classic cyberpunk author, but that it's written in such a way as to awe and amaze us readers even this late in the internet game... before there was truly a real Internet. BBS's and phreaking was is its own kind of world, as was trashing and other kinds of social engineering. Not that we don't...

This book is a veritable "Who's Who" of the early internet days and those who stepped outside of the lines of the law of this new frontier, often times before the lines were marked in ink. Stirling has done a masterful piece of work with this book, making the internet's history come alive in such a way that you could almost hear the humming of vacuum tubes and taste the tension in the air as a literal Old West battle ensued between the 'white hats' and 'black hats', new sheriffs taking power in

It would be hard for me to write an unbiased view of this book, so I might as well be up front with why I was predisposed to like it. One, I know Bruce Sterling, count him as a friend, and have always liked his writing style. In fact, I credit Sterling (along with Mike Godwin, about whom more later) for helping me to develop my reading palate, that is, to urge me to examine what I was reading with a critical eye, in order to discover a wider variety of interest. Two, although I’m not a hacker, I...

Dry at times, and not as compelling as "Masters of Deception". Very informative and introspective, however.

Sterling first delivers the background of the telecommunications system in the United States, specifically the expansive growth of AT&T and its recent dismemberment at the hands of the courts system. A near-total network outage during a national holiday, while entirely a spontaneous glitch based on weaknesses in AT&T’s software, was blamed on outside intruders ; the government’s own increasing interest in suppressing pirate BBSes distributing pilfered, sensitive, or suspicious materials (everyt

When ‘The Hacker Crackdown’ - written by the cyberpunk novelist Bruce Sterling – was released in 1992, it was a hugely acclaimed journalistic study of the cyberspace of the late 80s and early 90s detailing the affairs and people who have influenced this chaotic electronic frontier. Written during a period when the modern day Internet was taking it’s first steps, this book is a historic chronicle of the outlaw culture of the electronic frontier right from it’s beginner days, and inspects the seri...

This book forced me to save up my money and buy a modem.I could only scrounge enough for a 2400 baud Hayes; at the time, the U.S. Robotics Courier was the top-of-the-line running at 14.4k.I got to see the twilight of the BBS era as the crepuscular Internet age broke over an unsuspecting nation.Which quickly led to the "September that never ended"...