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In June 2011, Julian Assange received an unusual visitor: the chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, arrived from America at Ellingham Hall, the country residence in Norfolk, England where Assange was living under house arrest. For several hours the besieged leader of the world’s most famous insurgent publishing organization and the billionaire head of the world’s largest information empire locked horns.
In May 2013, Glenn Greenwald set out for Hong Kong to meet an anonymous source who claimed to have astonishing evidence of pervasive government spying and insisted on communicating only through heavily encrypted channels. That source turned out to be the 29-year-old NSA contractor Edward Snowden, and his revelations about the agency’s widespread, systemic overreach proved to be some of the most explosive and consequential news in recent history, triggering a fierce debate over national security....
In late 2010, thousands of hacktivists joined a mass digital assault by Anonymous on the websites of VISA, MasterCard, and PayPal to protest their treatment of WikiLeaks. Splinter groups then infiltrated the networks of totalitarian governments in Libya and Tunisia, and an elite team of six people calling themselves LulzSec attacked the FBI, CIA, and Sony. They were flippant and taunting, grabbed headlines, and amassed more than a quarter of a million Twitter followers.
Like it or not, your every move is being watched and analyzed. Consumers' identities are being stolen, and a person's every step is being tracked and stored. What once might have been dismissed as paranoia is now a hard truth, and privacy is a luxury few can afford or understand. In this explosive yet practical book, Kevin Mitnick illustrates what is happening without your knowledge - and he teaches you "the art of invisibility".
This manual will give you the incognito tools that'll make you a master of anonymity! Other books tell you to install Tor and then encrypt your hard drive...and leave it at that. I go much deeper, delving into the very engine of ultimate network security, taking it to an art form where you'll grow a new darknet persona - how to be anonymous online without looking like you're trying to be anonymous online.
Peter Schweizer explains how a new corruption has taken hold, involving larger sums of money than ever before. Stuffing tens of thousands of dollars into a freezer has morphed into multibillion-dollar equity deals done in the dark corners of the world. President Donald Trump’s children have made front pages for their dicey transactions. However, the media has barely looked into questionable deals made by those close to Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Mitch McConnell, and lesser-known politicians who have been in the game longer.
In June 2011, Julian Assange received an unusual visitor: the chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, arrived from America at Ellingham Hall, the country residence in Norfolk, England where Assange was living under house arrest. For several hours the besieged leader of the world’s most famous insurgent publishing organization and the billionaire head of the world’s largest information empire locked horns.
In May 2013, Glenn Greenwald set out for Hong Kong to meet an anonymous source who claimed to have astonishing evidence of pervasive government spying and insisted on communicating only through heavily encrypted channels. That source turned out to be the 29-year-old NSA contractor Edward Snowden, and his revelations about the agency’s widespread, systemic overreach proved to be some of the most explosive and consequential news in recent history, triggering a fierce debate over national security....
In late 2010, thousands of hacktivists joined a mass digital assault by Anonymous on the websites of VISA, MasterCard, and PayPal to protest their treatment of WikiLeaks. Splinter groups then infiltrated the networks of totalitarian governments in Libya and Tunisia, and an elite team of six people calling themselves LulzSec attacked the FBI, CIA, and Sony. They were flippant and taunting, grabbed headlines, and amassed more than a quarter of a million Twitter followers.
Like it or not, your every move is being watched and analyzed. Consumers' identities are being stolen, and a person's every step is being tracked and stored. What once might have been dismissed as paranoia is now a hard truth, and privacy is a luxury few can afford or understand. In this explosive yet practical book, Kevin Mitnick illustrates what is happening without your knowledge - and he teaches you "the art of invisibility".
This manual will give you the incognito tools that'll make you a master of anonymity! Other books tell you to install Tor and then encrypt your hard drive...and leave it at that. I go much deeper, delving into the very engine of ultimate network security, taking it to an art form where you'll grow a new darknet persona - how to be anonymous online without looking like you're trying to be anonymous online.
Peter Schweizer explains how a new corruption has taken hold, involving larger sums of money than ever before. Stuffing tens of thousands of dollars into a freezer has morphed into multibillion-dollar equity deals done in the dark corners of the world. President Donald Trump’s children have made front pages for their dicey transactions. However, the media has barely looked into questionable deals made by those close to Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Mitch McConnell, and lesser-known politicians who have been in the game longer.
The Internet of Money by Andreas M. Antonopoulos contains 11 of his most inspiring and thought-provoking talks, including: Introduction to Bitcoin; Blockchain vs Bullshit; Fake News, Fake Money; Currency Wars; Bubble Boy and the Sewer Rat; Rocket Science and Ethereum's Killer App; and many more!
Top cybersecurity journalist Kim Zetter tells the story behind the virus that sabotaged Iran’s nuclear efforts and shows how its existence has ushered in a new age of warfare - one in which a digital attack can have the same destructive capability as a megaton bomb.
The Book of Satoshi, the collected writings of Satoshi Nakamoto, creator of the bitcoin. The foreword was written by Jeff Berwick.
Bitcoin became a buzzword overnight. A cyber enigma with an enthusiastic following, it pops up in headlines and fuels endless media debate. You can apparently use it to buy anything from coffee to cars, yet few people seem truly to understand what it is. This raises the question: Why should anyone care about bitcoin? In The Age of Cryptocurrency, Wall Street journalists Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey deliver the definitive answer to this question.
With the rise of bitcoin and blockchain technology, investors can capitalize on the greatest investment opportunity since the Internet. Bitcoin was the first cryptoasset, but today there are over 800 and counting, including ether, ripple, litecoin, monero, and more. This clear, concise, and accessible guide from two industry insiders shows you how to navigate this brave new blockchain world - and how to invest in these emerging assets to secure your financial future.
It began with a tantalizing, anonymous email: "I am a senior member of the intelligence community." What followed was the most spectacular intelligence breach ever, brought about by one extraordinary man. Edward Snowden was a 29-year-old computer genius working for the National Security Agency when he shocked the world by exposing the near-universal mass surveillance programs of the United States government. His whistleblowing has shaken the leaders of nations worldwide, and generated a passionate public debate on the dangers of global monitoring and the threat to individual privacy.
Here, anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom: He shows that before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods - that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors.
Chris Hedges has been telling truth to (and against) power since his earliest days as a radical journalist. He is an intellectual bomb-thrower who continues to confront American empire in the most incisive, challenging ways. The kinds of insights he provides into the deeply troubled state of our democracy cannot be found anywhere else.
Steven Levy's classic book traces the exploits of the computer revolution's original hackers - those brilliant and eccentric nerds from the late 1950s through the early '80s who took risks, bent the rules, and pushed the world in a radical new direction. With updated material from noteworthy hackers such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Stallman, and Steve Wozniak, Hackers is a fascinating story that begins in early computer research labs and leads to the first home computers.
A New York Times technology and business reporter charts the dramatic rise of Bitcoin and the fascinating personalities who are striving to create a new global money for the Internet age.
Half a dozen years ago, anthropologist Gabriella Coleman set out to study the rise of this global phenomenon just as some of its members were turning to political protest and dangerous disruption. She ended up becoming so closely connected to Anonymous that the tricky story of her inside-outside status as Anon confidante, interpreter, and erstwhile mouthpiece forms one of the themes of this witty and entirely engrossing book.
The extraordinary twists and turns of WikiLeaks have been closely followed by the Guardian newspaper ever since the website launched in 2006, and Guardian journalists have had unprecedented access to all the major players, from angry and embarrassed politicians and diplomats to the extraordinary figure of Julian Assange himself. Here they reveal the many strands—legal, ethical, security related—of a story that continues to dominate world headlines.
Cypherpunks are activists who advocate the widespread use of strong cryptography (writing in code) as a route to progressive change. Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of and visionary behind WikiLeaks, has been a leading voice in the cypherpunk movement since its inception in the 1980s.
Now, Assange brings together a small group of cutting-edge thinkers and activists from the front line of the battle for cyber-space to discuss whether electronic communications will emancipate or enslave us. Among the topics addressed are: Do Facebook and Google constitute "the greatest surveillance machine that ever existed", perpetually tracking our location, our contacts and our lives? Far from being victims of that surveillance, are most of us willing collaborators? Are there legitimate forms of surveillance, for instance in relation to the "Four Horsemen of the Infopocalypse" (money laundering, drugs, terrorism, and pornography)? And do we have the ability, through conscious action and technological savvy, to resist this tide and secure a world where freedom is something which the Internet helps bring about?
The harassment of WikiLeaks and other Internet activists, together with attempts to introduce anti-file sharing legislation such as SOPA and ACTA, indicate that the politics of the Internet have reached a crossroads. In one direction lies a future that guarantees, in the watchwords of the cypherpunks, "privacy for the weak and transparency for the powerful"; in the other lies an Internet that allows government and large corporations to discover ever more about internet users while hiding their own activities. Assange and his co-discussants unpick the complex issues surrounding this crucial choice with clarity and engaging enthusiasm.
So for starters, if you want a preview of this book you can watch the Julian Assange Show episode titled Cypherpunks 1 and 2 (available various places, I watched it on Hulu) . The audiobook is a text version of a conversation between Julian Assange, Jeremie Zimmerman, Andy Müller-Maguhn, anbd Jacob Appelbaum, and the show is the video of part of the interview, though the book has the entire conversation.
The book provides a very realistic, and often unseen look at freedom or lack thereof, as well as various ways the government is trying to limit privacy and free speech on the internet through various things like SOPA or through Facebook. The audibook also talks a lot of the various ways "Cypherpunks" are able to maintain their autonomy, against the will of the government.
I really enjoyed the audiobook, and finished it easily within two days. Once I started it I couldn't put it down.... I think I listened to three and a half hours straight after starting it.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful
We all need to understand the threats to the Internet, and we need to understand how the Internet is being used against us. This discussion is mostly about how governments and corporations work together to gather our information to be used however they want whether for us or against us.
Where does Cypherpunks rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
Powerful topic and unique format (the book is mostly discussions between Julian Assange & three other hacktivists, and I found the format refreshing and easy-to-follow). Definitely recommended.
Any additional comments?
A perfect precursor to this book would be "This Machine Kills Secrets", which provides a great overview of the backbone historical details of modern encryption, all in an easy-to-understand and open-minded narrative.
This entire four hour audiobook is merely a transcript of a conversation between four activists (with the exception of a short intro by Julian Assange). The narrator literally has to cite who is speaking as each speaker changes. Believe it or not, that didn’t harm the book or pace. However, as I listened to these guys talk amongst themselves about the future of the Internet, I felt like I could overhear the exact same conversation at the corner Starbucks. These four activists are essentially of the same mind, so they lob each other softball questions and go on long-winded anti-government and anti-American rants.
The conversation began to just sound like stoner talk.
Nevermind the MAJOR paradox they embody…a crusade for transparency by a group called ‘Anonymous.’ Nevermind that we have not elected then. Nevermind that we have no idea who they are.
These so-called cypherpunks are not unintelligent people. They are simply passionate about digital privacy in an irresponsible (and illegal) way. Luckily, I have faith that men and women of intelligence have the ability to self-correct, to recognize their contradictions, to evolve in a more constructive way. They just need to stop romanticizing their role as a “high tech rebel elite” and subject themselves to the laws of society, to be a part of society not apart from it.
Still, this is probably the great debate of our time. Hearing their point of view is critical in understanding the nature of problem. We regular people, the general public, are all in the middle. On one side we have a large central government invading our privacy and/or spying on its public, while on the other side we have these guys….a secret network of digital hackers who steal information and target businesses and groups that oppose them. We regular people really have no protection from either group.
If cypherpunks believe in transparency, then they themselves must be transparent. Otherwise, their strict culture of secrecy and their militant use of digital espionage is, in itself, the very antithesis of what they claim to fight for.
7 of 14 people found this review helpful
Like Assange himself, I think this book will strongly divide people. It certainly aroused conflicting feelings in me.
It starts with a stark warning. We are sleepwalking into a surveillance society, of constantly being watched, where every detail of our lives, everything we say or write, every website we visit, our histories, preferences, misdemeanours and even gossip about us, are collected and stored by corporations and governments - essentially forever. This is contrasted with an increasing cloak of secrecy surrounding those with power, as they increasingly take control of the infrastructure of the Internet. This is the very opposite of the liberation the old style hackers and cypherpunks envisaged for the Internet.
Following that dramatic introduction, the majority of the book is a four way discussion on the implications of this. At times it verges on the paranoid, at other times it is like four blokes down the pub, speculating on possibilities for a future dystopia.
Several themes recur: the "Four Horsemen of the Infopocalypse" are the rationale used by governments to justify increasing surveillance and censorship, which the book repeatedly seems to ridicule.
Here I started to have my doubts, for these seem to me serious societal problems, and perhaps the price of more security, is more surveillance - and that is a price worth paying.
Moreover, the strong recommendation of universal personal encryption measures, to evade surveillance, such as TOR for anonymous surfing, BitCoin for anonymous financial transactions, encrypted email clients etc. left me wondering why I would want to go to such lengths to hide what I see, buy, or write. Id be a little bemused if MI5 took a serious interest.
Then I read about Justin Carter, who was arrested and held for 5 months in Texas as a potential terrorist for making a sick joke on Facebook, and government starts to look less benign and more paranoid, and oppressive - and I concede that maybe Assange is on to something. As I write this the UK government is planning universal censorship by ISPs by default.
So, it's a worrying book, the narration is pitched just right, and it left me thinking seriously about the whole area of security, freedom, censorship and surveillance. That can only be a good thing.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful
It's better to have a gun and not need it than to need a gun and not have one, if you know what I mean? As we're all in on it together if we like it or not!