Reviews

Space Rogue: How the Hackers Known As L0pht Changed the World by Cris Thomas, Cris Thomas

surefinewhatever's review

4.0

The book's epilogue touches on something I've heard summarized as "a man reading the newspaper sees an article about his field of work, reads it, finds it full of errors, and turns to the next page to read an article about another field and take it as truth." That is: it's sometimes very difficult to read about things you know, or kind of know, because your version of the truth and knowledge can clash with what's been written. This is a lot of build-up to say that I found very little to clash with in this book. I think it avoids a lot of common hyperbole in the computer security nonfiction arena, and I honestly wish it covered more things even though this isn't necessarily fair to a person trying to write a memoir/retrospective. There were some surprising and some unsurprising names, companies, and handles, and it helped stitch together my mental map of other accounts of computer security, internet history, etc.

I miss BBSes.