/ / Little Brother, News, Remixes

Bill Clementson turned the bibliography at the end of the book into a hyperlinked file, making it easy to follow the references. Here it is — I’ve also updated the HTML version to include the info. Thanks, Bill!

No writer creates from scratch — we all engage in what Isaac Newton called
“standing on the shoulders of giants.”
We borrow, plunder and remix the art and culture created by those around us and by our literary forebears.

If you liked this book and want to learn more, there are plenty of sources to turn to, online and at your local library or bookstore.


Hacking
is a great subject. All science relies on telling other people what you’ve done so that they can verify it, learn from it, and improve on it, and hacking is all about that process, so there’s plenty published on the subject.

Start with Andrew “Bunnie” Huang’s

“Hacking the Xbox,” (No Starch Press, 2003) a wonderful book that tells the story of how Bunnie, then a student at MIT, reverse-engineered the Xbox’s anti-tampering mechanisms and opened the way for all the subsequent cool hacks for the platform. In telling the story, Bunnie has also created a kind of Bible for reverse engineering and hardware hacking.

Bruce Schneier’s
“Secrets and Lies”
(Wiley, 2000) and
“Beyond Fear”
(Copernicus, 2003) are the definitive lay-person’s texts on understanding security and thinking critically about it, while his
“Applied Cryptography”
(Wiley, 1995) remains the authoritative source for understanding crypto. Bruce maintains an excellent

blog and mailing list at schneier.com/blog. Crypto and security are the realm of the talented amateur, and the
“cypherpunk”
movement is full of kids, home-makers, parents, lawyers, and every other stripe of person, hammering away on security protocols and ciphers.

There are several great magazines devoted to this subject, but the two best ones are
2600: The Hacker Quarterly
, which is full of pseudonymous, boasting accounts of hacks accomplished, and O’Reilly’s
MAKE magazine
, which features solid HOWTOs for making your own hardware projects at home.

The online world overflows with material on this subject, of course. Ed Felten and Alex J Halderman’s

Freedom to Tinker (www.freedom-to-tinker.com) is a blog maintained by two fantastic Princeton engineering profs who write lucidly about security, wiretapping, anti-copying technology and crypto.

Don’t miss Natalie Jeremijenko’s
“Feral Robotics”
at UC San Diego (xdesign.ucsd.edu/feralrobots/). Natalie and her students rewire toy robot dogs from Toys R Us and turn them into bad-ass toxic-waste detectors. They unleash them on public parks where big corporations have dumped their waste and demonstrate in media-friendly fashion how toxic the ground is.

Like many of the hacks in this book, the tunneling-over-DNS stuff is real. Dan Kaminsky, a tunneling expert of the first water, published details in 2004 (
www.doxpara.com/bo2004.ppt
).

The guru of “citizen journalism” is Dan Gillmor, who is presently running Center for Citizen Media at Harvard and UC Berkeley — he also wrote a hell of a book on the subject,

“We, the Media” (O’Reilly, 2004).

If you want to learn more about hacking arphids, start with Annalee Newitz’s Wired Magazine article
“The RFID Hacking Underground”
(www.wirednews.com/wired/archive/14.05/rfid.html). Adam Greenfield’s
“Everyware”
(New Riders Press, 2006) is a chilling look at the dangers of a world of arphids.

Neal Gershenfeld’s
Fab Lab at MIT (fab.cba.mit.edu)
is hacking out the world’s first real, cheap “3D printers” that can pump out any object you can dream of. This is documented in Gershenfeld’s excellent book on the subject,

“Fab” (Basic Books, 2005).

Bruce Sterling’s
“Shaping Things”
(MIT Press, 2005) shows how arphids and fabs could be used to force companies to build products that don’t poison the world.

Speaking of Bruce Sterling, he wrote the first great book on hackers and the law,
“The Hacker Crackdown”
(Bantam, 1993), which is also the first book published by a major publisher that was released on the Internet at the same time (copies abound; see
stuff.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html
for one). It was reading this book that turned me on to the

Electronic Frontier Foundation, where I was privileged to work for four years.

The
Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org)
is a charitable membership organization with a student rate. They spend the money that private individuals give them to keep the Internet safe for personal liberty, free speech, due process, and the rest of the Bill of Rights. They’re the Internet’s most effective freedom fighters, and you can join the struggle just by signing up for
their mailing list
and writing to your elected officials when they’re considering selling you out in the name of fighting terrorism, piracy, the mafia, or whatever bogeyman has caught their attention today. EFF also helps maintain
TOR, The Onion Router
, which is a real technology you can use right now to get out of your government, school or library’s censoring firewall (
tor.eff.org
).

EFF has a huge, deep website with amazing information aimed at a general audience, as do the
American Civil Liberties Union (aclu.org)
,
Public Knowledge (publicknowledge.org)
,
FreeCulture (freeculture.org)
,
Creative Commons (creativecommons.org)
— all of which also are worthy of your support.
FreeCulture
is an international student movement that actively recruits kids to found their own local chapters at their high schools and universities. It’s a great way to get involved and make a difference.

A lot of websites chronicle the fight for cyberliberties, but few go at it with the verve of
Slashdot, “News for Nerds, Stuff That Matters” (slashdot.org)
.

And of course, you have to visit
Wikipedia
, the collaborative, net-authored encyclopedia that anyone can edit, with more than 1,000,000 entries in English alone. Wikipedia covers hacking and counterculture in astonishing depth and with amazing, up-to-the-nanosecond currency. One caution: you can’t just look at the entries in Wikipedia. It’s really important to look at the “History” and “Discussion” links at the top of every Wikipedia page to see how the current version of the truth was arrived at, get an appreciation for the competing points-of-view there, and decide for yourself whom you trust.

If you want to get at some real forbidden knowledge, have a skim around
Cryptome (cryptome.org)
, the world’s most amazing archive of secret, suppressed and liberated information. Cryptome’s brave publishers collect material that’s been pried out of the state by Freedom of Information Act requests or leaked by whistle-blowers and publishes it.

The best fictional account of the history of crypto is, hands-down, Neal Stephenson’s

Cryptonomicon (Avon, 2002). Stephenson tells the story of
Alan Turing
and the Nazi Enigma Machine, turning it into a gripping war-novel that you won’t be able to put down.

The
Pirate Party
mentioned in Little Brother is real and thriving in Sweden (
www.piratpartiet.se
), Denmark, the USA and France at the time of this writing (July, 2006). They’re a little out-there, but a movement takes all kinds.

Speaking of out-there,
Abbie Hoffman
and the
Yippies
did indeed try to levitate the Pentagon, throw money into the stock exchange, and work with a group called the
Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers
. Abbie Hoffman’s classic book on ripping off the system, “Steal This Book,” is back in print (Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002) and it’s also online as a collaborative wiki for people who want to try to update it (

stealthiswiki.nine9pages.com).

Hoffman’s autobiography, “Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture” (also in print from Four Walls Eight Windows) is one of my favorite memoirs ever, even if it is highly fictionalized. Hoffman was an incredible storyteller and had great activist instincts. If you want to know how he really lived his life, though, try Larry Sloman’s “Steal This Dream” (Doubleday, 1998).

More counterculture fun: Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” can be had in practically any used bookstore for a buck or two. Allan Ginsberg’s

“HOWL” is online in many places, and you can hear him read it if you search for the MP3 at archive.org. For bonus points, track down the album “Tenderness Junction” by the Fugs, which includes the audio of Allan Ginsberg and Abbie Hoffman’s levitation ceremony at the Pentagon.

This book couldn’t have been written if not for George Orwell’s magnificent, world-changing “1984,” the best novel ever published on how societies go wrong. I read this book when I was 12 and have read it 30 or 40 times since, and every time, I get something new out of it. Orwell was a master of storytelling and was clearly sick over the totalitarian state that emerged in the Soviet Union. 1984 holds up today as a genuinely frightening work of science fiction, and it is one of the novels that literally changed the world. Today, “Orwellian” is synonymous with a state of ubiquitous surveillance, doublethink, and torture.

Many novelists have tackled parts of the story in Little Brother. Daniel Pinkwater’s towering comic masterpiece,
“Alan Mendelsohn: The Boy From Mars”
(presently in print as part of the omnibus “5 Novels,” Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997) is a book that every geek needs to read. If you’ve ever felt like an outcast for being too smart or weird, READ THIS BOOK. It changed my life.

On a more contemporary front, there’s Scott Westerfeld’s
“So Yesterday”
(Razorbill, 2004), which follows the adventures of cool hunters and counterculture jammers. Scott and his wife Justine Larbalestier were my partial inspiration to write a book for young adults — as was Kathe Koja. Thanks, guys.

/ / Little Brother, News, Remixes


Chris sez, “I am also a member of the Cincinnati 2600 group. We get together once a month and listen to folks present on nifty things like SQL injections and packet sniffing. In early August we did lightning talks, which are little 5 minute presentations instead of the usualy 30-60 minute format. I gave 3 lightning talks that were inspired by Marcus’ exploits in Little Brother: running applications from a USB drive, using block encryption to safeguard data on a USB stick, and hiding your encrypted data in a deniable format in the event of capture and torture.

Click the links above to download Chris’s slides — this is just too damned cool!

/ / Little Brother, News, Remixes

Book-binder Abi Sutherland took one of the misprints from Pablo Defendini’s limited edition prints of his concept art for a paperback edition of my young adult novel Little Brother and custom-bound a hardcover of the book with it. I am consumed with lust for this one-of-a-kind edition. I hope Abi will let me see it in person some day!

Oh, and while I’m on the subject: the book’s just gone into its fifth week on the NYT bestseller list, and it’s still on the Indie list (formerly the Book Sense list) and as of this week, it’s also on Publishers Weekly’s bestseller list! Ho-ah!

Link

Update: Abi sez,

Slight corrections: it’s a blank book rather than a copy of Little Brother, mostly due to printer constraints. Printing out a whole book double-sided on my printer would be soul-destroying, and I don’t have signature-sewn editions to tear down.

The binding is a “sewn boards” binding, about halfway between hardcover and softcover. The paper that Pablo used for the prints has such a nice feel and weight; I wanted to work with its sensual qualities.

And I confess that it’s not one of a kind. I plan to make five or six of this set, one of which will be heading your way in the very near future. I was going to surprise you with it, but that requires secrecy. I got too excited about how the book came out and had to show it off: secrecy fail.

/ / Little Brother, News, Remixes

ZOMG — Writing in the comment section of Making Light, Abi Sutherland penned this Little Brother ditty, to be sung to the tune of How Can I Keep From Singing?:

My high school days were simple once
But now that time is ending.
I’ve learned how much I have to lose
And what is worth defending.
My freedom and my privacy
Depend on one another.
And those who threaten either one
Will deal with Little Brother.

Encryption guards my web of trust
Against the infiltration
Of DHS officials who
Would pry for information.
The Xnet grows with leaps and bounds
No outside force can smother
The message spreads from peer to peer:
We all are Little Brother.

The army trucks and prison cells
That caught us and confined us
Stripped all the innocence away
That we had thought defined us.
But now we know how strong we are
When we work with each other
So anyone who’s watching us:
Watch out for Little Brother.