Steal This Computer Book 4.0: What They Won't Tell You about the Internet: What They Won't Tell You About the Internet (Paperback)

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.

Unfortunately, after just the first two chapters (at which point I gave up and returned the book), it became obvious that the writer (who appears to have excellent credentials including writing for BOARDWATCH magazine) just threw this together with no thought whatsoever.

Examples:

*He talks about free E-mail (such as Juno) then totally skips over web based free email (Mailexcite, USA.net, Yahoo, etc) when talking about accessing e-mail from cyber cafes and the like. In fact, he states on pages 64-65 that receiving e-mail at cyber cafes is not possible!

And this book was (allegedly) written in June '98 at the height of the spree to put these free e-mail sites up.

*Mo mention of access to the web via the public library system (though local freenets are mentioned).

*A discussion on obtaining upgrades of software by trading in old versions (obtained from outlets that specialize in outdated versions) plus a modest charge failed to point out that those outdated versions may be more than adequate for the user on a budget (I'm still running some DOS programs for cryin' out loud).

Finally, I tried to contact the author and found that there is no e-mail address in the book.

A usenet search (dejanews) using his name ironically came back with a similar recent complaint from some people who wanted to complain about a recent BOARDWATCH article. I at least have the guts to take any flames/spam for =my= comments...

It was obvious that this was thrown together in hours for a fast buck. Unfortunate, because a well written book of this type is needed.

So save your bucks. This book is a dog.