(A demerit to Poulsen for omitting the year of birth-I had to find it online-and for being rather casual in general about Max’s personal chronology.) By age eight he was a computer geek, and by high school, Max had gone bad. Max was born in Idaho to middle class parents in 1973. Kingpin focuses on the sleazy life of one Max Butler (a.k.a.
Kevin Poulsen’s new book, Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground, is a flawed but fraught overview of our current digital underworld, where such vile hoodlums thrive. But there’s nothing childlike or amusing about today’s version of phone phreaks: criminals who, for plunder (lots of it) and other more sinister reasons, ruthlessly and zealously inflict havoc on and through cyber networks. In retrospect, those characters seem almost ingenuous and amusing, more interested in relishing their naughty exploits than with mayhem. Readers of a certain age might remember the “phone phreaks” of the 1960s and ’70s who deviously manipulated telephone technology in order to make free long distance calls, disclose American Telephone and Telegraph secrets and, in general, drive AT&T crazy.
0 kommentar(er)
