Subject: Review: "Hackers" by Bischoff

From: "Rob Slade, doting grandpa of Ryan & Trevor" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Apr 1996 20:04:04 GMT

Hackers
		David Bischoff/Rafael Moreu
		Review copyright 1996 Robert M. Slade
 
In the beginning was the movie, and then they decided to make a book out of
it.  The plot line is the usual hacker-meets-girl, girl-turns-out-to-be-
hacker, girl-gets-hacker fantasy that never happens in real life because
real hackers would get distracted by an interesting challenge somewhere
between events one and two.  The transition from film to book has not been
an easy one for this work, and you can almost see the calls from jump-cuts
from the original screenplay.  Characterization and development are minimal:
the "bad guys" are the usual evil big government and big corporation,
although the heavies seem more like victims, and the real trouble all seems
to come from one thoroughly nasty techie, who still manages to get away with
the loot, scot free.  The target audience is fairly easy to determine.
 
As far as technical background goes, the film/book is replete with graphical
messages sent to text terminals, viruses that carry lengthy audio and video
data, worms that subvert accounting systems rather than replicating, and a
salami scam.  (Has *anyone* got *any* evidence that a salami scam *ever*
happened?)  There is the usual conflation of crackers, phone phreaks and
virus writers together, the assertion that an elementary school student with
a weird pseudonym wrote the Internet Worm, and a "Da Vinci" virus.
 
The intriguing fact about the book is that valid and quality background
information must have been available to the authors.  The book starts with a
quote from "The New Hacker's Dictionary" explaining why "hacker" is the
wrong title for this work.  The number of sites hit by the Internet Worm is
closer than that usually given in news reports and the "greater than/less
than" reversal bug is referred to.  Examples of data base entry errors (and
the consequences) have been pulled from the archives of the RISKS-FORUM
Digest.
 
And then they go and disassemble a fragment of object code from an unknown
computer ...
 
%A   David Bischoff
%A   (screenplay by Rafael Moreu)
%C   10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY  10022-5299
%D   1995
%G   0-06-106375-4
%I   HarperCollins
%O   U$4.99/C$5.99 212-207-7000 fax: 212-207-7433 [email-masked]
%P   184
%T   "Hackers"

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