Customer Reviews

Steal This Computer Book: What They Won't Tell you About the Internet

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

Overall this is a good book. The first part is sorta stupid, though. It talks mainly about how not to only listen to one person but to get information from multiple sources. It could be summed up in about a page.

Chapter 4 talks about buying computers and software. It helped me out by giving me some tricks to do next time I buy a computer.

Chapter 5 tells you about keeping your files secure with encryption. It tells you about some different types of encryption algorithms and how to write your own encryption programs. It also shows you how to play some dirty tricks. It talked about using anonymous remailers to send anonymous email and talked about just how anonymous they were. It even told you how to surf the web anonymously so that people couldn't receive information about your computer, browser, and more.

Chapter 6 told about phone phreaking history such as captian crunch. Wallace then goes on by telling you possibly things that could've happened but didn't. When telling these stories he tries to make himself sound like a phreaker but he didn't even do anything. Then, he tells your some really obvious stuff like "To start phone phreaking, you need access to a telephone." and "phreaking from your own phone will let the telephone company trace it to your house." I don't know if he couldn't think of anything else or he thinks you are really stupid. After that, he talks about phreaking color boxes and then goes on to voice mail hacking. Then, he talks about cellular phone fraud and tv satellite descrambling.

Chapter 7 talks about defeating windoz 3.1/95/98 screen saver passwords which if you ever tried you should've done it on the first or second try. It also talks about cracking program passwords and then it goes on to defeating parental control software. If you can't access certain web pages, Wallace tells you how by having the html code emailed to you. He also shows you how to read banned books in secret.

Chapter 8 talks about harassing online services, how pedophiles stalk innocent children and what you can do to stop them. He tells you about generating fake credit card numbers and making your own online harassment program.

Chapter 9 talks about stopping spam. It shows you multiply ways to take revenge on spammers. If the spammer used a forged email address, Wallace shows you how to track down the spammer like two magnets attracting each other.

Chapter 10 shows some pictures of acctual hacked web sites and how to hack them.

Chapter 11 shows you how to track people down by using specific things about them. For example if you only had their SSC# how you could still find them no matter where they were. At the end of the chapter, he shows you how to hide yourself if you don't want to be tracked down or how to let someone easily find you if, for example, you gave your child up for adoption years ago and you don't want to contact him/her but you do want to let them find you if they ever wanted you.

Chapter 12 shows you about ConGames on the Internet. It shows you how to do them and how to protect yourself from them.

Chapter 13 Viruses Part I. ( I heard that the plural form of virus is exposed to be virii, just like the plural form or fungus is fungi but in the book it is written viruses so that's how I will spell it.)

This chapter expains what viruses are, the parts of them, how to tell if you have a virus on your computer, the different infection methods, if all viruses are bad and how to learn more about them.

Chapter 14 Viruses Part II.

This chapter shows the different methods of how an antivirus program works and what to do if you find a virus ( If you say any idiot knows that if you find one you should delete it, but you could also send it in to an antivirus program if you think it is a uncommon virus, keep a copy of it, modify the virus and make a new one and many other things.)

Chapter 15 tells you about writing your own computer virus. Wallace also tells you to watch out because viruses sometimes attack their own creators. He tells you some true things about antivirus companies like how they hire virus writers to help them detect viruses (makes sense, doesn't it) and how that their isn't any evidence of this, but that they may hire the virus writers to write a virus that only they have the antidote for so people will buy their program to detect it.

Chapter 16 is about Java applets. I haven't read all of it but so far so good.

Appendice A is the glossary with a decent amount of terms covered in the book. I really haven't used it too much because I never needed to.

Appendice B is Visual Basic 3.0 ( a very easy programming language that I suggest you learn ) source code for altering Mega$hack. A program he discusses in 12. ( it is used by cons but he alters it so they get a taste of their own medicine.) The source code is written on the page so you will have to type it into your Visual Basic Compiler.

Appendice C is about additional resources. It is compiled of online magazines, webpages, hacker conventions and more.

Summary: This book is for you if you are interested in the above things. The websites and newsgroups in the book lead to nothing except for a few like metacrawler that he obviously was paid to advertise for. If you are still unsure after unreading all the reviews, go to a local bookstore and see if they have this book there. If they do then look at it, see if you like it and if so, compare the prices of Amazon plus the shipping and time to the prices of the bookstore. I hope that this review helped you because I know what it is like to have one person rate it 5 stars and another person rate it 1 star. Sinse this is a pain, I figured that instead of giving my opinion, I would tell you what the book had in it.

"Steal This Computer Book" is a good introduction to the existence of the dark side of computing, but there's not a whole lot here for the advanced user. Some chapters just seem to be lists of reference material (URLs, mostly); others provide some in-depth info on specific topics. If you're looking for a "how-to" guide, this is not the book for you. The final chapter, "Hostile Java Applets," contains the entire code of three such applets, but has no explanation of how they work -- if you don't already know Java, this chapter will do almost nothing for you. It has the feel of an author who has some basic knowledge of the subject, and has read some other books or articles on the topic, but then went and found some things and just pasted them into his book. The section on phreaking is the same way. My advice? Buy this book, read it all the way through and copy down all the URLs, and then return it. Even advanced users (like, I daresay, myself) will have gained some additional perspective on certain matters, though a good amount of the material needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Newbies certainly should read this book, to gain at least a basic groundwork of knowledge (if not understanding) about the topics presented herein.

This is one of those books that never quite turns out as good as I hoped it would be... Steal This Computer Book 4.0 : What They Won't Tell You About the Internet by Wallace Wang. It tries to cover a lot of ground, and as a result it's not as focused as it should be...

Contents:
Part 1 - The Early Hackers: The Hacker Mentality; The First Hackers - The Phone Phreakers; Hacking People, Places, and Things
Part 2 - The PC Pioneers: ASNI Bombs and Viruses; Trojan Horses and Worms; Warez (Software Piracy)
Part 3 - The Internet Hackers: Where The Hackers Are; Stalking A Computer; Cracking Passwords; Digging Into A Computer With Rootkits; Censoring Information; The Filesharing Networks
Part 4 - The Real World Hackers: The Internet Con Artists; Finding People On The Internet; Propaganda As News and Entertainment; Hacktivism - Online Activism; Hate Groups and Terrorists on the Internet
Part 5 - The Future - Hacking For Profit: Identity Theft and Spam; Banner Ads, Pop-Up Ads, and Search Engine Spamming; Adware and Spyware
Part 6 - Protecting Your Computer and Yourself: Computing On A Shoestring - Getting Stuff For (Almost) Free; Computer Forensics - The Art Of Deleting and Retrieving Data; Locking Down Your Computer
Epilogue; What's On The Steal This Computer Book 4.0 CD; Index

This book has been around for quite a long time, and it's gone through a number of revisions (the 4.0 in the title). The earliest reviews of this book are from mid-1998, and in some areas it looks like the book has never been updated. Part of that is the historical nature of the material he's covering, and I'm sure there's a number of readers trying to figure out what MS-DOS is. The central theme of the book is "hacking", but there are areas where he strays into areas that I've not traditionally put in that category. Getting free stuff like email accounts and blogs? Censoring information? Hate groups? Even in the areas that I *do* consider more "hack-like", like file-sharing networks, he leaves out any mention of BitTorrent. Granted, there's a reference to the Steal This File Sharing Book, but still... It just seems that the information is a bit eclectic and rather "hit or miss" at times.

But even having said that, there is a guilty pleasure in reading this book. It's similar to reading about the seamy underbelly of your local city... you know it's there, you don't condone it, but you have a hard time averting your eyes when you drive by. And there are some things that I didn't know... like services that will email you requested web pages so as to avoid http logging.

So... I don't know that you'll get a lot out of it if you've been around computers for any length of time. It's still a fun read, and you can scan the areas that don't quite hold your interest...

Sheesh the reviews are so harsh for this book it's amazing that a new edition was even published!!

This book is kind of a mish-mash of lots of different topics. While it's not as bad as these reviews make it out to be, it's not that good either. Even the title of the book gives no indication what this text is about. To summarize, I would say that this book talks about the Internet in general, and all the shady aspects of it. File sharing via P2P applications, banner ads, OEM software for sale, finding wireless networks... basically if you want to learn more about the dark site of the Internet and how you can use (or be used) it to your ad/disadvantage, this book is a fun read.

Overall I cannot recommend this due to a writing style which is subpar and no clear-cut direction of what the author is looking to achieve.

Real the other reviews and make your own assessment. It's not that bad, but just because the title is (kind of) creative and the cover is black, that doesn't necessarily make this book good.

***

This book wasn't to bad as some make it out to be but not as good as others act like it is. I gives a pretty decent general understanding on a wide variety of things: encryption, viruses, phreaking, a bit of hacking, etc. It also gives lots of info that i found basically useless about different kinds of scams which are basically common sense, and other things like how foreigners hate americans. Basically this would be a good book for someone to pick up that is newer to the computer underground but has a little bit of knowledge about it. But if you already have a good understanding then pass this up and get a book that goes into more depth on one lone subject.

I found this book to be pretty easy to get into, with a lot of things I didn't know about (I'm a newbie). I can see it as limiting to someone who's been doing their own research on-line, but for those that don't have the unlimited access and want to learn a little for low cost, this it a good book.

If you are looking to hack this book is for you. I found that visual basic is a good programming language. C++,Python,Java, and many more langs will have hacks. Its up to you to learn how to write them. You must learn the programming language before you start looking at hacking, because other wise you are wasting your time.Many hackers are self driven and want to create programs and discover flaws in programs. It is my personal experience that you will not find every thing you want to know from one book. If you are seriously into Networking and Security i sugeset learning from some one who will teach you and offers classes on it (this would be hands on learning) EcCouncil is a great reference and will teach you a lot.

It's not bad, it just too basic. For some reason I had the expectation that it would be a more deep book about hacking.

This book is a must for newbies. It's easy to understand and it's not very technical. The topics discussed in this book are very broad and it doesn't go into details. If you wanted to find out the details you could could visit the links that are listed in the book. So if your a newbie by the book! If your more experienced don't even bother reading any more of these reviews, because this book is not for you!

This book is a pretty good read and is informative to a point but is a bit too general at times. URLs are included at every section so you can continue to learn more specifics if you please, but I thought some topics covered weren't all that necessary considering other topics that were left out altogether (actual information about network security was barely even touched upon beyond encryption and secure passwords). Advanced users may get a few web addresses they didnt have before but thats about it.