El Libro De 2600

Reviews of The Best of 2600: A Hacker’s Odyssey
“For the first time, a compendium of hackers’ writings has been collected, unedited, and culled from the pages of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, a semi-underground publication around since 1984. 2600, along with the now-defunct Phrack, arguably represent the most authoritative of the various hacker publications, making this book not onlyunprecedented but incredibly valuable. The Best of 2600, along with its chronicler (and 2600 editor Emmanuel Goldstein) tackles the magazine’s 24-year run the best way it can—by being encyclopedic. Weighing in at 871 pages and rivaling a phonebook’s size and heft, the book covers the ups and downs of hackerdom’s brief existence: discoveries, busts, jokes, conflict. The book is laid out in three sections,covering the ’80s, ’90s and’00s. Within those divisions are chapters describing the great themes of those decades. I enjoyed the report on the conviction of Robert T. Morris Jr, author of the infamous ’88 Morris Worm. Morris’s story has stayed in my consciousness because my mom worked as a computer programmer at the time, and showed me frantic emails bouncing around the nascent Internet as theservers began to crash one by one. I think my favorite article of the ’90s was Billsf’s “True Colors” in which he describes the various phreaking tools like Blue Boxes and Red Boxes. Most of these don’t work any longer, but it was fascinating to read about them. Besides legal squabbles, the big story so far in the ’00s has been the ubiquity of wireless technology and mobile phones. A huge percentage ofthe stories about this decade have involved explorations of cellular and wireless networks. My favorite article is “Hacking the Genome” by Professor L, which explains the whole genome sequencing story (circa 2003) in layman’s terms. The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey is an important, amazing book that tells the story of these kids and adults as they explore a new frontier guided by the enigmaticEmmanuel Goldstein.” —John Baichtal, Wired

“Emmanuel Goldstein released The Best of 2600 at this year’s Hackers on Planet Earth conference in NYC— this is a three-decade-spanning, 900-page anthology of the best articles from the venerable hacker ‘zine 2600. As a one-time contributor, I am stoked.” —Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing “The thing that makes it (Best of 2600: A Hacker’s Odyssey) such apowerful tome is how its compilation of selected articles and commentaries collectively express the true spirit of an underground social movement, and how being a part of that movement affects those who involve themselves in it. The fact that it’s a TECHNO/social movement makes it even more compelling, for one huge reason: because of its origins in a time when computer technology was much younger andsimpler, it’s as much full of myth and legend as fact. No one yet knew what was possible. Everything was brand new and anything was possible! Any expression of the spirit of a thing needs its myths and legends; this notion is at the core of the very feeling of wonderment that drew us to this counter-culture in the first place. Nowadays, for the larger part this notion has vanished fromtechnological research and exploration. No longer scattered pockets of geographically dispersed hobbyists and researchers, the field is controlled by boring billion dollar corporations and dominated by a whole generation of “me-too’s” looking for a fast-track to peer recognition, ego-stroking, and how to capitalize on the next trend or fad on the web. Lather, rinse, repeat, ad nauseam. The Best of 2600reminds us of a time when myths and legends were the driving force behind the computer underground and the computer revolution itself, just as much as facts, and how anyone who came into contact with this social movement could be forever changed and propelled to new heights of exploration and understanding, simply because we believed that the possibilities of technology were limitless.” And dammit,...