Free (Post-)Cyberpunk Book online

Cover of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother NovelCory 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:

Cyberpunk today: Netrunners

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.