Computerwelt

I've been reading a lot more than usual (which is saying something, because I really like to read) since I got home from Eureka. It wasn't until yesterday afternoon that I realized why I've wanted to do little more than work my way through the gigantic pile of Books I Want To Read* for the last couple of weeks: I've had my brain set to CREATE OUTPUT for so long, I think I've emptied the tank again. I feel like this from time to time, usually when I finish a big project or wrap a particularly satisfying acting job, but never for this long or this intensely.

It's a great problem to have, since solving it is as simple as consuming all kinds of stimulating and inspiring content, but I have a Memories of the Future Volume 2 that needs finishing, as well as a journal filled with story ideas that need telling, and reading

My business sense tells me that it's stupid to post so infrequently in my blog, because there have been tens of thousands of new readers since my most recent Big Bang Theory, but my brain gives me the old ACCESS DENIED whenever I try to browse /usr/wil/creative (yes, even when I run as the superuser; it's an undocumented WheatonIX feature, so I've stopped filing bug reports about it.)

In order to prevent this from becoming a post about not posting, here are a couple brief reviews of books I've recently enjoyed:

Spook Country

I understand that it's fairly polarizing among Gibson's fans, but I loved this book from page one. It isn't anything like his Sprawl series, so if you tried Neuromancer because your geek friends wouldn't stop talking about it and didn't like it, this may be a good place to try Gibson again.

Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace

This book was written and released shortly after Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown took the world by storm. It chronicles the exploits the infamous hacker group Masters of Deception, and gives an interesting perspective on their feud with the Legion of Doom. Like all of the stories written about the LOD/MOD feud, the subjects contest most of the facts as presented in the book, and like all of the stories written about hackers in the 80s and early 90s, it's difficult to tell what's fact and what's myth.

I think that's a big part of the fun, though: when I interacted with a lot of these guys in the early 90s, they all seemed larger than life and mythical. Nobody really knew the truth except the guys who dialed into Tymnet, and then as now it was in their personal interest to make themselves seem a little bigger, their conquests a little more epic, their accusers a little more dastardly than they may have been.

It's not as comprehensive as The Hacker Crackdown or as technical as The Art of Deception, and I found the author's efforts to strike a stylized, defiant, teenage tone distracting at times. Ultimately, though, it's a very quick and easy read, and the story they told was compelling enough to keep me engaged all the way through. In fact, it inspired me to go back to Textfiles.com and Phrack.com to reread a lot of those old philes that fascinated and intrigued me when the internet was 80 columns wide, built entirely out of text, connected by telnet, and delivered to your VT100 terminal emulator at 14.4K.

WIRED 

Every issue of WIRED since November of last year has been fantastic, and I've read them all cover to cover.

2600

The current issue of 2600 has an important editorial about trust, privacy, and cloud computing. It's a good companion piece to this article at Ars about the Cloud and the Fourth Amendment.

Yeah, there's clearly a theme here: I've had technology on my mind, both its (underground) history and its (uncertain) future. I'm not sure if I'll be able to convert any of this input into useful output, but I'm enjoying it so much, I don't really care.

*also known as The Tower That May Kill You Or At Least Hurt You A Lot If It Falls On You.

59 thoughts on “Computerwelt”

  1. Did you read/love Pattern Recognition? If so, how would you compare/contrast it to Spook Country? I still haven’t read Spook Country but Pattern is my favorite book of his ever and I think it’s in the same sort of neighborhood as Spook.

  2. I recently got Pattern Recognition as a gift, but I haven't started it. It's near the top of the pile, though. I understand that some characters from Pattern Recognition carry over into Spook Country.

  3. Hey Wil,
    You are sounding all ‘the IT guru guy’. Very cool. If you ever get sick of writing, and acting, and going to cons, and doing wootstock, and uh… well… perhaps you will never grow tired of those things…
    But if you do, send me your resume, and we’ll put you to work in our IT Department.
    Michael

  4. Hey Wil, just curious, I know you worked at NewTek, and was into the whole Amiga scene for a while, I hate to say it, but we Amiga Sysops (Not all but SOME of us) who had BBS’s back in the day did a LOT of pirating of software, frankly, I think between the Fly By Night BBS and the crack teams, we kinda killed the format (Poor Jay Miner!) Were you ever into any of that? I know we used to have all out partys at Pizza places, take all our Amiga’s and swap like crazy. It was a weird era..I don’t know if your aware, but Gary Coleman, and Mac Culkin were also pretty big pirates of the era. I don’t condone what we did, and would never do it now, but back then when you were paying $80.00 for a game and found it LAME it would really piss you off. Did YOU ever do any of that or run a BBS? -Ethan Tudor W.

  5. I’m glad I’m not the only one this happens to. Those are some excellent choices. And now it seems I have more to add to my LIST_OF_BOOKS_TO_READ.

  6. See I’d have thought you’d be running WilIX. I heard WheatonIX was responsible for some weird sub-routines involving chaotic rogue hacking, malware involving card games and bowling and an earlier version memory creep that would capture and torture other processes. (Tried to work in smarmy comic guy from Numb3rs but couldn’t think of a workable metaphor.)

  8. I have read Pattern Recognition and really enjoyed and recommend it but stalled out with Spook Country, due to both a slowish start and the inability to read in long stretches to really get into it. Pattern Recognition was a slow start as well, so when I get back to Spook Country when I have some serious reading time, I’m hopeful that it will keep my interest. And yes, there are some character overlaps from Pattern to Spook.
    If I can throw out a little Canadiana reading option, since you were just up here, seek out some Guy Gavriel Kay for some excellent historical fantasy. My personal recommendations are Tigana and Lions of Al-Rassan, but you can’t really go wrong with anything he does, except maybe his first trilogy, the Fionavar Tapestry, which was more traditional fantasy than his later work.

  9. Connected at 14.4? damned kids and their newfangled toys. You never knew the rest and relaxation of waiting for a screen to fill with a 300 baud acoustic coupler!

  10. Off topic, but I am so looking forward to Wootstock Portland! Fear not the killer fungus, that’s just GlaDos doing Science on those who are still alive. 🙂

  12. I miss the sounds that my modem used to make, watching the little lights blink..2400, than 14.4…yea that was cool, also it gave ya time to drink beer while things loaded!!! -Ethan

  13. I’m there too GeekyMom, I hope to get some interviews with the guys before or after the venue for the Neverhood show, nothing in stone from Wil or Adam yet if they will, but maybe if they have time, I put the word out, we’ll see..it’s going to be a GREAT show, I’m REALLY looking forward to it. -Ethan

  14. As a *nix Sysadmin by trade, I’m looking with great curiosity at the cloud that’s coming. All my experience is in the web industry end of things and that’s something the cloud can do very well. Stuff like Google’s AppEngine could pretty much replace 90% of my servers (and possibly do me out of a job too), but it is awesome and potentially worthwhile.
    The downside is that security aspect though. How much do you trust the third party you’re storing your data with (and who they’re storing it with themselves?) LA started using Google for apps and storage, and whilst Google had to demonstrate the level of security and responsibility for data that they have, LA took out insurance. Which is kinda crap really. “Oh hey, we trust you with very important data… more or less”.

  15. I’ve enjoyed pretty much everything William Gibson’s written. However, Spook Country is the first book in a long time where it felt like the author was comfortable in his own skin/voice. It has a grace that I find immensely compelling.

  17. I started with a 1200 baud that was so loud I had to tape a wad of paper to the bottom of it to keep from annoying my family. I miss those sounds too along with the opening music for the Computer Chronicles with Stewart Cheifet.

  20. It's no pile … it's a space station.
    (But there's ALWAYS room for GeekDad, which for the purposes of this parenthetical will be delicious literary Jell-O)

  22. I couldn't afford a modem until acoustic couplers were just on their way out, so I started out with a 1200 baud Hayes Compatible modem, so I could call my friend Guy, hardware handshake, and make the resulting network think that it was twice as fast as it actually was.
    Ahhh, those were some great days, waiting for a modem to connect and rejoicing when it finally did.

  24. I never got into that scene when I was a kid, but it's not because I was Johnny Honestface. I went from an Atari 400 to a TI 99-4/a to a Mac 128. I didn't have a floppy drive until the Mac, and games weren't passed around on cassettes (at least among the kids I knew) like they were on floppies. I didn't even get a modem until I had my Mac II, and by that time, I could afford games, so I didn't want to steal them.
    I knew lots of kids who had Apples, Commodores, or Amigas, and whenever I went to their houses to play games, I never saw a single loading screen without the phrase "Cracked by [some d00d]" or "Call [BBS]!"
    I called too many BBSes to count, but I never got access to any hacker or phreaker boards. The closest I ever came was being a relatively early user on Mindvox, but we never did anything illegal or piratical there; mostly we talked about sharing information, how lame the f3dz were, and fawned all over Lex, Lord Digital, KL, Phiber, and those guys. To their credit, they were all really, really nice to me, especially KL, who I hung out with quite a bit in the DC area during the NewTek years.

  25. That is the single greatest TNG-related thing I have ever seen in my life, online or otherwise.
    I *must* make an archive of that page, and put it with my glasses and my shoes, so I have them.

  29. Second that opinion of Pattern Recognition. I read it in a day, then had to blog about it, then had to think about it. Great thought provoking read.

  30. Dammit Evil Will Wheaton. You just added a couple of books to my stack’o dooooom. Then I went on an Amazon ramble from one of your links and it got even worse. I’m going to have to get scaffolding for the pile if this keeps up.

  31. Yea, I ran the Fly By Night BBS for Amiga users, and it was a curious era..I was in with Diamond, Mephistopheles, Dr. Dude!, Nightmare, Mirror shades, natas (Who also had a BBS). We worked with Team 17, DMA (Blood Money) Capt. Bly’s BBS was cool(John Lerner)..and of course we all coded our names into demos on our warez..I kinda miss the partys..flying a big pirate flag, and watching demos with KIKI in them, eating pizza drinkin beer, gosh one of our crack team even went on to work for CNN, I miss wine crates full of 3.5 floppys….ten deep..warze…Lonmg Live FidoNet!

  32. If you enjoyed MASTERS OF DECEPTION, I highly recommend the comic WIZZYWIG by Ed Piskor (http://www.edpiskor.com/). It’s a quasi-fictional-hybrid story based on hackers Kevin Mitnick and Kevin Poulson. The artwork is razor sharp, and as far as the script, Ed Piskor has done some serious research. And, in the spirit of indie publishing, Vols. 1 and 2 are on his site for free! Vol. 3 just printed, too.

  33. …And so slow that you could sometimes grab the handset, talk and put it back.
    Usually the line dropped (hell it was hard to keep the couple from hanging up anyway with extraneous noise) but every now and then we could pull it off.
    Yah, I was a dork… and it was 1981…

  34. We should release SnoWheaton V1.0 for the MAC it’s an OS where Wil’s ClownSweater/Avatar is the pointer icon,
    or VideoToasterWheaton..(I still have one of those toaster T shirts!)..how come people don’t make cool demo reels anymore? I could really go for some lightwave 3d shit about now…

  35. You should have seen our “Dynobyte” (No REALLY that was it’s name!) System, our server for our BBS was ripped out of a clean room, and gator clipped together with a Sage Unit, and running 4 screens (all Amiga Stereo Of course), on a T1 frame relay…yea man..I liked running a pirate board, But I have a lot more respect for people today, they deserve to get paid for their work, but it was so different back then, back in the day you buy a game like “Dragons Lair”…well,,ya KNOW it’s going to be a hit! But the little ones…”Jumping JACKSON”…Pirates!, The Settelers, they got pirated, and we pirated our own assess right out of the format…pirates killed the amiga.

  36. Yea, then you could play a game “OnLINE”..remember THAT, well..untill someone picked up the phone in the other room…then it was “What’s all That Screeching Sound!?!?! On The Telephone?!@#$%?????”

  38. Thanks Wil 🙂 It’s always nice to get some good recommendations! I can imagine you have whole shelves of books about your place. I used to have that too but changed after visiting the local library and seeing that they had such a poor range. Hence, nowadays when I’m done reading, I usually donate to the library.
    Consequently, my library is lucky enough to have Just a Geek and Memories of The Future Vol 1!! (I’ve kept the audio/e-book versions of course.) Sandy(the librarian) says they are extremely popular!
    I like the idea of amassing a portable e-collection. I’m really waiting on the notion ink adam, an android device with a Pixel QI screen that can switch between black and white/colour – it promises be a nifty books+COMICS reading device. Then I can have my collection with me wherever I go.
    Keep up the amazing work you do!
    H

  39. As much as I enjoyed Pattern Recognition, I was kind of sad to find Spook Country kind of boring and impenetrable. I’m looking forward to the third book in the series, though.

  40. Reading keeps your brain healthy. I need to catch up on some reading, too. This is off subject, but what do you think about Leonard Nimoy retiring from acting? I just read that the other day. Anyway, hope all is good for you. Oh, and I received my special edition of “Happiest Days”….LOVE it! Your writing is out of this world, Wil. Keep up all the great stuff you do. Your fans really appreciate it all.

  41. I just got a subscription to Wired earlier this year, mostly because every single Wired story I’ve read online has been fanTAStic. I even got my father a gift subscription, despite the fact that his “to-read” pile is over three hundred books deep.
    No, I’m not kidding. I’m a voracious reader, but he’s a reading singularity, devouring every book that comes within his event horizon.
    Have you read The Name of the Wind yet? I picked it up on PA’s recommendation, and it blew me away- if you’ve already read it, I’d be interested in your opinion. And have you read any of the Vlad Taltos books? (I started reading those back when you were rocking the rainbow striped jumpsuit.)

  42. If you do wind up feeling like doing some output, Ficly would love to have you do a cameo appearance for the site blog, just something about writing, either technical, philosophical, or inspirational. I know the current blogger-in-residence would welcome the input…cause that’s me.

  43. So putting this in terms we all understand, where are you on the IT spectrum:
    1) MCSE – I think they also call them paper MCSEs.
    2) Server Specialist – Self Explanatory
    3) Wired or Wireless Specialist
    4) Old School technology type person – LOL
    I’m more of a product specialist (will delete the word expert in this case)

  45. Wil,
    I had a great day off on Monday. Thanks for showing a great theme. Sometimes, first you write it and then it is seen.
    FG

  46. I knew lots of kids who had Apples, Commodores, or Amigas, and whenever I went to their houses to play games, I never saw a single loading screen without the phrase “Cracked by [some d00d]

  47. Speaking for myself you don’t have to rush on Memories of the Future Volume 2. I’ve had the first one for some time but for whatever reason I’ve been saving it for the beach. So finally after waiting for what has seemed like an eon, in three weeks I’ll be on Topsail Island AND I’ll get to read your book. I’m looking forward to my memories of the future beach and great beach reading. Happy times for me!

  48. Not sure if you’ve seen it already, but you got a mention in yesterday’s vlogbrothers! Hank appears to be excited about w00tstock 😀


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“The library is a safe place.”

In order to survive, I disassociated for much of my childhood, but I clearly remember the books. That's where I found comfort, companionship, inspiration and validation. It's where the imagination that powers everything I do creatively in my life today was born. And it all started in that library, with that librarian. She was one of the first people I can remember asking me, "What do you like? What's important to you? What do you want to know more about? How can I help you find it?"

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