Having chronicled the digital-data brigandage of the notorious Kevin Mitnick (The Fugitive Game, 1996), Littman casts a cool, discerning eye on Kevin Poulsen, who led law-enforcement agencies in a merry chase along the Information Highway. Drawing on extensive interviews with 31-year-old Poulsen, his partners in crime, and the cops who chased them down, the author offers an absorbing, evenhanded portrait of the hacker as a dangerous young man. A technical virtuoso before he was out of his teens and in trouble with authorities early on, the disaffected young Californian (whose on-line alias, The Watchman, was taken from the antihero of a dark-side comic series) also held responsible programming jobs at both SRI and Sun Microsystems before his Pacific Tel break-ins and other computer felonies made him officially unemployed. Going outlaw on a full-time basis, Poulsen trespassed on the memory banks of machines linked by modem on the Internet, exposed the security weaknesses of government and university installations, played embarrassing pranks on rivals, and otherwise showcased his considerable talents for electronic wizardry. He rigged a contest run by an L.A. radio station (by diverting its phone lines) and collected a couple of Porsches as prizes. He also managed to ferret out wiretaps Big Brother's helpers (FBI, Secret Service, et al.) had planted on the ACLU, foreign consulates, suspected mobsters, and others. Despite his professed allegiance to a hacker code, Poulsen was not fastidious about profiting from his skills, putting them at the disposal of call-girl rings and shady private detectives. Eventually brought to book in 1990 on a wealth of charges, the chronic offender was allowed to cop a plea in the interests of protecting the feds' dirtier secrets. An arresting account of the career of a New Age intruder whose capacity to strike at will mocks the very notion of computer privacy and security. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 31, 1997
ISBN: 0-316-52857-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
