A Hacker's Mind

How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back

By: Bruce Schneier

Narrated by: Dan John Miller

Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins

Publisher's summary

Legendary cybersecurity expert and New York Times best-selling author Bruce Schneier reveals how using a hacker’s mindset can change how you think about your life and the world.

A hack is any means of subverting a system’s rules in unintended ways. The tax code isn’t computer code, but a series of complex formulas. It has vulnerabilities; we call them “loopholes.” We call exploits “tax avoidance strategies.” And there is an entire industry of “black hat” hackers intent on finding exploitable loopholes in the tax code. We call them accountants and tax attorneys.

In A Hacker’s Mind, Bruce Schneier takes hacking out of the world of computing and uses it to analyze the systems that underpin our society: from tax laws to financial markets to politics. He reveals an array of powerful actors whose hacks bend our economic, political, and legal systems to their advantage, at the expense of everyone else.

Once you learn how to notice hacks, you’ll start seeing them everywhere—and you’ll never look at the world the same way again. Almost all systems have loopholes, and this is by design. Because if you can take advantage of them, the rules no longer apply to you.

Unchecked, these hacks threaten to upend our financial markets, weaken our democracy, and even affect the way we think. And when artificial intelligence starts thinking like a hacker—at inhuman speed and scale—the results could be catastrophic.

But for those who would don the “white hat,” we can understand the hacking mindset and rebuild our economic, political, and legal systems to counter those who would exploit our society. And we can harness artificial intelligence to improve existing systems, predict and defend against hacks, and realize a more equitable world.

©2023 Bruce Schneier (P)2023 Recorded Books

Excellent book for non tech savvy people

Really enjoyed it and finished the book, but if you are up to date with tech you probably do not need ro read thus book.

Repetitive. Will Age Fast.

This book is kinda interesting because it relates to topics that are currently happening. The fact that it discussed ChatGPT v3 shows that. But the newness will fade quickly and the anecdotal tales will become uninteresting. There comes a point in the book where you have already heard the same message repeatedly and it gets old fast. There is no promotion of higher level thinking either to help the reader get to a place that promotes the processes that lead to hacks.

Bland

Expected more out of this book than just age old examples of how the Rich have been hacking the poor for years. Some decent insights and questions posed about AI and technology but other than that pretty boring.

All good.

Well, there was a bit of repetition, this was an overall very informative book.
Narration was great.

Kind of boring

Nothing new here. the author is an accomplished individual in Cybersecurity, but this is honestly a boring read. at least for me

not worth the time.

I listened all the way through, hoping for a skill to be learned. instead it felt like a failed life complaining and making excuses for why they failed. also, the authors political bias was painfully obvious. pass

Political Derangement Syndrome

This would have been a great book, with excellent perspective had it not been used by the author as a political ploy to damage the political party in America that he deems oppositional. All of his representations are cherry picked from a handful of states, politicians, and marginally representations of his points. Example: His representation of 2018 Georgia election of Brian Kemp was chosen rather than the 2022 election of Katie Hobbs in Arizona.

The author also based every deduction of a political nature on the premise that government is good at its job and any money or Power deprived from government from any source is a detriment to society, even when overwhelming evidence proves that the same power or resource is much more advantageous in the private sector.

essentially, this is the author's attempt to write a book that blames Republicans for everything and glorifies Democrats in their quest for absolute tyrannical power in the United States of America in the 21st century.

Tired. Lazy. Statist.

Every so often someone influential will write a book which tries to force the entirety life into the narrow paradigm that is their subject matter expertise. It almost always fails.

This is one such case.

By stretching the term “hack” and “patch” Schneier makes the case that sum of human existence can be seen through the lens of these two terms. It’s lazy… even disrespectful to the reader. That fact that he is a raging statist makes it even worse. No thank you.

interesting

I did enjoy the book, and I learned a thing or two about the concepts of "hacking" within society. the most interesting parts are the stories of how people implemented hacks in the world. I was impressed with the variety of subjects the author knows. I would be very interested in listening to his lectures. That said, after quick research about the author before reading the book, I was expecting more based on the book's summary. I would have liked a bit more detail about some of the stated hacks, instead of what seemed like mentions from a list. This book did prompt me to take notes, research topics I did not know and ultimately learn. (although going in I knew almost nothing about most of the topics he spoke about) . Favorite hack was the one about the Indian election! and some AI topics were very amusing too. If your interested in getting a broad basic understanding of how hacks can be in every day life this book is for you. If you want more in depth detail maybe look elsewhere.

Interesting but

Find it quite biased every political corruption hack was aimed at republicans. I’m independent and would love to see both sides of the story.