Since I’m by far to lazy to create some meaningful posts, today you’ll get just a few (AMAZING!!!) links.

• Killjoy Cooking With the Dungeons & Dragons Crowd
  It ain’t funny, its so true.
• Denial-of-coffee attacks
  Cyberpunk NOW can make you laugh yourself to death.It used to be a joke from the netrunner i played. “Behave, Solo, or I hack your coffeemaker and you’ll reduced to drink tea!” But then, in those times a coffeemaker was 15 € and nothing fancy at all.
• Melee-weapons: Who would think they advance in the age of guns? William Gibson talked about this one, the Wasp, in his blog. Look at it, its crazy.

PS: Sorry for yesterdays post. It was so bad I deleted it.

Cory Doctorow has put his new book, “Little Brother” online. He’s so good I had to add him to my list of Cyberpunk writers (see sidebar).

It’s a

young adult novel about hacker kids who use technology to reclaim the Bill of Rights from the DHS after a terrorist attack on San Francisco.

Also to be found on the website:

• Creative Commons licensed downloads of the whole book
• An easy way to donate copies of the book to school classrooms
• Links to buy the book from various etailers (and an offer to get a signed, inscribed copy shipped direct to you by Borderlands Books in San Francisco)
• A place to put your remixes of the book

Netrunning is allready a business. Big business. Reuters reports that in a trial Christopher Tarnovsky, a hacker, received quite a few handfulls of dollar to hack a rival satellite tv system. The victim claims that the software was to be used to diminish the gain of the victim by selling or distributing a pirated copy of the smartcard. The attacker, News Corp, claims it was only “reverse-engineering” to “look how it works”.

News Corp is a massive corp, owning tv stations like FOX, newspapers, movie studios and book publishers.

I used exactly this setup in a game back in the ’90s. Now I’m feeling both prophetic and old.

But reality -unlike our game- doesn’t stop where it gets ridiculous (taken from the same article):

Tarnovsky said[:] “Someone is trying to set me up.”

DISH attorney Chad Hagan asked, “This is all a big conspiracy?”

“Yes,” Tarnovsky answered. He conceded that he constructed a device called “the stinger” that could communicate with any smart card in the world.

Julia Stiles

Click for full-sized image