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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
10 yrsa old and well worth a read, 25 Nov 2003
I found this book recently in a second hand bookshop in the UK and thought it looked 'interesting'. I had no idea how interesting till I blew out a day at work and one evening reading it!As someone involved in the broadband industry in the UK in 2000+, finding out the US telco/hacker/political background from the US certainly gave a lot of food for thought. Much seems to still to be relevant in Europe today. And one certainly feels the need for "a decade on" book to bring us all up to date...... I've been on the Net since around the time this book relates to and can recall much of the culture though not the US centric side of it all, (just the phone bills - my first Net bill was some $2500 thanks to BBS!). Although if I had not had the luck to be connected back then, then just grasping what a BBS was and some of the ground-breaking that went on back then may have left me floundering a little during my unstoppable read of this book. (Cyberspace has come a long way in 15 short years) Too many bells (bad pun, intended) rang during this book for me to be entirely comfortable with the 100 yr+ historical power of telcos which is still in existence today and which they seem reluctant, seemingly at any costs according to this book and to the current situation, to give up. Also, the political and policial agenda is still of concern in a world which should be more devoted to its citizens than the denizens of power. I recommend this book as a read for anyone involved in the Net to discover some of the history of cyberspace, the legal issues which have surrounded it, some recent history of the telcos, and to see how much has and hasn't changed since the cyberspace era began. One of those books you want to pass on but daren't in case it doesn't come back for a re-read!!
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