An eye-opening, immensely distressing exposé on the current state of organized cyberspammers.
How once-harmless Internet advertising developed into the dangerously intrusive inbox enemy it is today.
Former Washington Post reporter and current Web security analyst Krebs addresses the threat of email spam as much more than simply an online nuisance; rather, it’s the byproduct of fully functioning “virtual pirate coves of the Internet” trafficking illegal goods and services to unsuspecting users. His nuanced detective work uncovered corrupt business practices at rogue pharmaceutical sites (an industry which a large portion of email spam promotes). Digging deeper, he discovered a global conspiracy targeting just about anyone with an email address. Krebs’ guided tour of the cybercriminal underworld is a cautionary tale about menacing cultures of hackers, spammers and duplicitous digital network “cybercrooks”—e.g., shifty Russian e-commerce mogul Pavel Vrublevsky, whom the author surprised with a perilous, impromptu in-person meeting at his home in Moscow. Krebs’ background in cybersleuthing (he broke the story on the late-2013 Target credit-card database breach) is maximally utilized in chapters covering how “bulletproof hosting networks” and their integrated, parasitic “botnets” disseminate spam across scores of email addresses while frenetic anti-spam groups deploy ingenious counteroffensive tactics. The author analyzes how and why spammers become lucrative by tracing e-payment brokers directly to the illegal online pharmacy websites they contract with and expanding outward to the covert spamming networks like the notorious Russian Business Network and other underground factions based in the former Soviet states. Krebs admits it was his vigilante investigations into these types of criminals that sabotaged his 14-year tenure with the Post. For lay readers, an effectively revealing closing chapter offers tips on how anyone can safeguard their personal online information from hacker infiltration.
An eye-opening, immensely distressing exposé on the current state of organized cyberspammers.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1402295614
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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