Reddit Reddit reviews CYBERPUNK: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier, Revised

We found 3 Reddit comments about CYBERPUNK: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier, Revised. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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CYBERPUNK: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier, Revised
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3 Reddit comments about CYBERPUNK: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier, Revised:

u/GlamRockDave · 4 pointsr/videos

I remember reading this book when I was a kid and was fascinated by the early hacker stories about guys like Kevin Mitnick and VGM

u/m_bishop · 3 pointsr/Cyberpunk

If you want to know what it was really like, from two perspectives, read this http://www.amazon.com/CYBERPUNK-Outlaws-Hackers-Computer-Frontier/dp/0684818620 and http://www.amazon.com/CUCKOOS-EGG-ebook/dp/B0083DJXCM/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1381774834&sr=1-5&keywords=cuckoos+nest


I didn't know many women into it, but mostly it was just guys, sitting around Denny's all night, trading disks and showing eachother tricks all night. After the movie, it seemed like everyone was interested, but they all wanted it to be like a video game. My friends, for decades, got together once a year or so and watched the movie making fun of it. Some of the stuff is close ... but either exaggerated, or just 'hey, they just opened a copy of Phreak and took it verbatim'. Lot's of that stuff was bullshit.


It's weird to have to explain to someone, but back in the day, with BBS systems, people could write up entire 'zines, and never really have them fact checked. You would see one Zine that would swear playing tones from a mincro-recorded into a phone would work, but it almost certainly never did. The tones were nearly inaudible, and needed to be generated at home, on a tone generator, and recorded digitally, to have the volume and quality to have any effect. Even then ... well, it would have been more realistic if they'd shown them doing it several times to get it to work once.


They had 'phone couplers', what we called them, but the way they were used in the movie was fiction.


Phreaking was mostly about boxes, but by the mid-ninety's, most phone companies had pretty much figured out how to fix those problems.


If you wanted to see phreaking, you should have seen weird boxes soldered together and a few guys nervously standing around a phone line. Seldomly a payphone, which was seriously overused in the movie. You know, most buildings phone wires just ran out through a hole in the wall, to a box that MIGHT have a padlock on it. If you wanted a line, all you had to do was walk in an alley, late at night, and strip some wires. Payphones would be stupid to use, by comparison.


I could go on, forever it seems, but the bottom line is that it wasn't very realistic. It got the details all wrong, no one wore clothes like that, there was no 'cyber-club' that anyone knew about, the only realistic 'hacking' scene is in the bedroom where they have five people pouring over one keyboard, trading ideas and fucking around all night. Hell, if the whole movie had been just THAT, it would have been the most realistic old school hacking movie ever made.

u/moar_distractions · 2 pointsr/Cyberpunk

I'm guessing this isn't exactly what you had in mind, but I really enjoyed this book when I was in high school:

CYBERPUNK: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier

My parents found it at a garage sale and I was just starting to get really into computers. It tells the true stories of Kevin Mitnick, Robert T. Morris, and the Chaos Computer Club. I had never really heard anything about true hacking at this point and it was riveting.