(Part 2) Best internet & social media books according to redditors
We found 337 Reddit comments discussing the best internet & social media books. We ranked the 80 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 21-40. You can also go back to the previous section.
The book "LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media" goes DEEP into this subject and came out last October. It's written extremely well and I would highly recommend it if you're looking to learn more about this.
The long and short is 'Memetic Warfare' is EXTREMELY important these days and has changed war as we know it.
Here what I've picked up
On War by Clausewitz
MCDP 1 Warfighting
FMFRP 12-18 Mao Tse-tung on Guerrilla Warfare
FMFRP 12-13 Maneuver in War
On Grand Strategy
The Art of War by Baron De Jomini
Just and Unjust Wars (apparently it's on the Commandant's reading list too)
Soviet Military Operational Art: In Pursuit of Deep Battle
Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla
Seapower: A Guide for the Twenty-First Century
The Bear Went Over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan
Blitzkrieg to Desert Storm: The Evolution of Operational Warfare
Why Air Forces Fail: The Anatomy of Defeat
Deep Maneuver: Historical Case Studies of Maneuver in Large-Scale Combat Operations (Volume 5)
JP-1 Doctrine for the Armed Forces of the United States
DoD Law of War Manual
The Soviet Army: Operations and Tactics
Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS
Napoleonic Warfare: The Operational Art of the Great Campaigns
The Air Force Way of War: U.S. Tactics and Training after Vietnam
Strategy: A History
LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media
The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World
MCTP 3-01C Machine Guns and Machine Gun Gunnery
Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis
The U.S. Army in the Iraq War – Volume 1: Invasion – Insurgency – Civil War, 2003-2006
The U.S. Army in the Iraq War – Volume 2: Surge and Withdrawal, 2007-2011
Illusions of Victory: The Anbar Awakening and the Rise of the Islamic State
Concrete Hell: Urban Warfare From Stalingrad to Iraq
The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy
Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime
This is all I can name off the top of my head right now
http://www.amazon.com/We-Are-Anonymous-LulzSec-Insurgency/dp/B00EBFJ5SI
I recommend reading (or listening to) Clint Watt's description of Edward Snowden in his book:
spoiler: Edward Snowden is not somebody to look up to.
He's now a divisive wedge to spark debate about privacy, information warfare and espionage. It's dangerous to romanticize him, and to forget his role in the Wikileaks/Russia disinformation pipeline.
He is currently in asylum in Moscow, Russia.
A default assumption is that every team will contain a warrior so supreme that they got their name from the ability to defeat entire gangs, which usually have more firepower than the local police department, solo.
Runners go out of their way to make themselves as distinctive as possible and never bother to wear masks on runs because the idea of you getting hunted down in a sprawl is a laughable impossibility even if you make it easy on someone. We can't find people in modern cities using modern databases that are arguably set up better than SRs, forget about a sprawl with a population the size of all of California using 12 different databases in a setting where sifting through data is significantly harder than in real life.
My boss is ex-navy (and a shadowrun player, he enjoys riggers, the poor guy) who pointed out that Kane is the most realistic runner of the Jackpointers in that by going to the scale he goes to he can trivially snipe at anyone he wants to with no one ever having any ability to retaliate. Kane could go anywhere he wants to in the world, not just 'hellholes' because the scope of where he could be is impossible to search. You will not find Kane essentially ever. Like I will reiterate that Kane is his favorite because in his real world expert opinion "he is the most realistic" because if your a super criminal a good way to mask your presence is to force your opposition to search the entire god damn ocean for you.
Runners in setting are seen as supremely badass anti-heroes and counter cultural icons. While a given PC may not live up to this, the default assumption for SR was always that if you had talent and wanted to actually stick it to the man, the shadows were a great place to do that.
These are heavily established setting elements that are reiterated pretty constantly and they don't become less true because reality is unrealistic and it feels more real to do the less real thing and pretend that modern society is remotely secure.
A book I recommend to anyone who thinks Pink Mohawk is unrealistic and Black Trenchcoat is realistic is "The future of Violence" which, along with pretty much any experience in any security related field, should dispel that notion right quick. The short version is: as technology improves and cities become more dense and more interconnected, violence and extreme crimes become easier to commit with complete anonymity, not harder, because things like surveillance states don't actually scale well at all and the technology for defeating attacks pretty much always lags behind. SR actually was crazy ahead of the curve back in the day for accidently predicting this when it went out of its way to make "That guy with the rocket launcher shooting at cops" a viable PC pregen that was seen as so basic they made it twice for two different metatypes. If anything, its a wonder the game doesn't point out and run with the ramifications that smartgun platforms and common weapons that come from an entirely black market controlled supply chain completely trivialize anonymous high profile mass shootings and murder. Forget about assassination drones.
Though that of course doesn't service a fun game, which is ultimately the primary concern for any RPG setting, and its a bit bleak and too real to think about.
Furthermore if you don't want to play that way a really simple way to ensure that is to just ask that no one makes a street samurai, who strongly color how a team views violence. Without a samurai (or buff focused mage able to get crazy soaks) teams merely will be 'rather durable' rather than 'gods of war' and combat becomes slow enough its not generally a viable plan A. But, again, remember that one of the CRB story sections literally had plan A be "Drive up right next to the target and have the adept leap out of a car while half naked covered in lightning to punch a ton of spirits out on a crowded street" and this was presented as a fine plan. There are people in setting unarguably capable of pulling stuff that seems a bit much off.
You should read Dark Territory.
It goes both ways. Finding exploits means the NSA can use those exploits against foreign actors. Obviously, the existence of those exploits means, those same foreign actors can work against us.
It's a major debate in the intelligence community.
The one side is, pass along the exploits so, they get fixed... makes us safer. The other side is, keep quiet so we can use those exploits against the other side.
Me? I'm on the side of openness. But, I understand the counter argument.
Here is the mobile version of your link
http://www.amazon.com/Cyber-Reader-Critical-Writings-Digital/dp/0714840718
Here's what I found.
@nick, but the deal was for other people's tweets (authorized): Twitter Wit
Oh look, you can get it for a penny now on Amazon!
It's on amazon too. https://www.amazon.com/Messing-Enemy-Surviving-Terrorists-Russians/dp/0062795988 (note the wording in the link).
Would you call it... A friendly orange glow ?
The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age
By David Sanger, national security correspondent and a senior writer for the New York Times.
(Okay, at this point, I'm really just suggesting books on my to-read list, but I did hear the guy speak and he had some pretty good anecdotes.)
Here's my two cents about being anonymous online:
Here are all the local Amazon links I could find:
amazon.co.uk
amazon.ca
amazon.com.au
amazon.in
amazon.com.mx
amazon.de
amazon.it
amazon.es
amazon.com.br
amazon.nl
amazon.co.jp
Beep bloop. I'm a bot to convert Amazon ebook links to local Amazon sites.
I currently look here: amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.ca, amazon.com.au, amazon.in, amazon.com.mx, amazon.de, amazon.it, amazon.es, amazon.com.br, amazon.nl, amazon.co.jp, if you would like your local version of Amazon adding please contact my creator.
This is fascinating. If you're into this stuff I highly suggest reading/listeninng to Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War by Fred Kaplan https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Territory-Secret-History-Cyber/dp/1476763259
A Little History of Science, by William Bynum. (Link) It's a little newer than Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, but on par with it in most respects. Covers the histories of medicine, astronomy, chemistry, the discovery of plate tectonics... pretty much all areas of science. Highly entertaining (particularly the section on anatomy and how early artists were painters by day and grave-robbers by night).
I also liked The Blogger Abides, by Chris Higgins (Link), which is an extremely practical guide to managing a freelance career. It's written for writers but is applicable to most freelance professions (photographers, consultants, etc.), and includes sections that most "be a writer" books wouldn't, like how to manage self-employment taxes and give pesky publicity people the brush without looking like an asshole.
For more traditional nonfic, I liked Deep State (link) about the government's secrecy industry; Agent Garbo (link), about a farmer who just decides to be a spy and ends up helping the Allies bring down the Nazis (it's insane); and literally anything written by Mary Roach -- even her tweets are great.
The Alphabet of Manliness, TwitterWit, Sex: A Users Guide, Darwin Awards: Evolution in Action
A long time has been spent in that bathroom. It's my throne.
The Guy Fawkes masks started not long after V for Vendetta (2005) which coincidentally is around the scientology thing.
If you are interested in the history of anonymous, this is a good book about it.
And it is just not true that interest ever dropped. There were constant stories about them in the mainstream media. Some bigger than others but there has never been a time in the last 30 years that "Scientology wasn't really something people cared about. It was a silly religion made by a sci-fi writer so movie stars could feel smart."
Stories about Scientology sell magazines so they have never really gone away.
https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Cryptocurrency-Beginners-Blockchain-Introduction-ebook/dp/B078FRS2F7
Submission Statement: In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Benjamin Wittes about both volumes of the Mueller Report.
Benjamin Wittes is a legal journalist who focuses on issues of national security and law. He is a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, where he is the Research Director in Public Law. Benjamin is also the co-founder of Lawfare, a blog devoted to discussion of U.S. national security choices, and a cohost of the Rational Security podcast. His books include The Future of Violence: Robots and Germs, Hackers and Drones—Confronting A New Age of Threat (coauthored with Gabriella Blum), Detention and Denial: The Case for Candor after Guantánamo, and Law and the Long War: The Future of Justice in the Age of Terror.
	
	
	
> # How does a big company full of smart people miss a revolution?
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> The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture (Brian Dear 2017; Pantheon) tells a story of business blindness.
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> The programmers of the powerful CDC mainframe had all of the technical knowledge, and more, of the PC pioneers, but they didn’t want to drop everything and rush to the PC. The business folks behind the mainframe were similarly mentally locked into their well-trodden paths of sales and applications.
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> The CDC/PLATO folks actually built a modern distributed system, with a microprocessor in every terminal (“desktop PC”) and communications lines back to a server.
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> > Instead of orange pixels, they were grayish white. The new terminal, called the IST (short for Information Systems Terminal), looked more like an early personal computer. A big, wide, heavy base, with a black grille in front, to which a detached keyboard was connected via a thick cable. On top of the base was a monitor, a special elongated CRT with a square display featuring exactly 512 x 512 black-and-white pixels and, mounted directly over the surface of the CRT’s glass, a reflective, acrylic touch screen with barely visible gold wires crisscrossing across the display. During the nine months of development, the price of CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) memory chips had plummeted even further than Hill had anticipated. “According to the really long-haired predictions,” says Hill, “it was going to come down, by six or eight to one, and it came down about ten to one, right when we were doing our development. The result was that we could produce a memory-mapped video terminal, which as far as I know had never been done before, because it was cost-prohibitive.
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> > “We produced what in effect was a PC,” says Hill, “in 1975.” When one considers the year this machine was developed, and compare it to what else was available at that time, it is suddenly apparent that CDC had just leapfrogged over the entire microcomputer field. Here is Hill describing his machine: “[ It had an] 8080 microprocessor, it had plugin cards, it had a separate monitor, with a cable going to the main box, it had a separate keyboard, it had plugin modems, plugin memory, plugin communications, and we even had a plugin disk driver, that wasn’t part of the standard stuff, but we had it networked, so it was revolutionary. And our big problem was producing it at low cost. And we did that. That terminal came in with something like a $ 1,300 cost, in the first few terminals. And that was beyond everybody’s belief.” By the time the IST was ready to be sold to consumers, the marketing people had marked up the price to over $ 8,000, says Hill. It was the beginning of a long line of very bad decisions at CDC. Hill believed the terminal should have been sold for $ 100 above cost. “If we’d done that, we would have flooded the market because people knew they could use it for other things. It would take loadable programs— we could load programs down from the mainframe into that terminal.”
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> Note the last sentence. The system had the same capability as a modern Web browser that may download a Java or JavaScript program from the server.
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> The author says that CDC had roughly $1 billion in revenue in 1969 ($7 billion in today’s mini-dollars) so it was about one seventh the size of IBM. Management went all-in on computer-delivered education, which meant trying to sell to governments such as the Soviet Union, Iran, and Venezuela. The U.S. government delayed the Soviet sale due to security concerns and then killed it after the invasion of Afghanistan (imagine how many trillions of dollars we could have saved if we had let the Russians support the secular government in Afghanistan and not supported the Mujahideen!). The Iranian deal fell apart due to political instability:
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> > CERL and CDC created Persian-language support in PLATO as part of the demos, and eventually the Shah’s government agreed to a deal. However, it required that the IST terminals had to be made in Iran (or at least have a decal with “Control Data of Iran” and Persian script on it affixed to the screen bezel). In the end, the Ayatollah Khomeni and the Iranian revolution ended CDC’s hopes in that country. Several of the government ministers, including Prime Minister Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, who had attended the demos back in 1975, were executed. CDC personnel had to evacuate the country, and the company lost a lot of money.
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> The Venezuela dream didn’t pan out either…
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> > “Venezuela was more corrupt than Iran, if that was possible…. In South America, the Venezuelans were known as the ‘Iranians of South America’ and not just for their oil reserves. You could get anything you wanted in Caracas— anything. Like many CDC international offices, CDCVEN [the acronym CDC used for its Venezuelan business] had its own guy specializing in local bribery and ours was good.” This was CDC’s fixer for Venezuela, “used for more local practical bribery associated with licenses, permits, getting employees and families out of scrapes, etc.” … “My short version,” Smith once explained in an email, “is the PLATO buy became entangled in Venezuelan politics and did not survive the massive political infighting and jockeying for a bite out of it for all concerned (including two or more of our own guys). I do not believe we lost it because we did not bribe. True there was a corporate public effort to clean up our act (I have seen CDC bribe all over the world— even in places like Germany, supposed to be un-bribable) but HQ never backed off of doing business along those lines (anyway it was very difficult to stop the local CDC folks from making deals HQ did not know about). In a lot of countries it was the only way to do business. When the U.S. government started with pressure on U.S. companies to not bribe they started our downfall in the business world….
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> Are you a big believer in social impact investing? So was the imperial CEO of CDC:
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> > Morris tried to explain to [William] Norris the benefits of pursuing business and education markets at the same time— charging more to business customers so they could charge less to education customers— but Norris did not see it this way. “Norris logically could see it that way,” said Morris. “But his concern was, ‘I’m doing this because I want to make a social impact on education. And if you guys go and turn your attention to selling in the business environment, you’re going to start forgetting about education, and start forgetting about our end goal. I want you to concentrate on education. Okay?’ And so based on that, we did concentrate on education, I still think today if we had sold into the business environment we would have been able to fund more of the stuff that was getting the price down and achieving the educational objectives that we were out to achieve.”
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> > “Addressing society’s major unmet needs” became Norris’s rallying cry, a remarkably progressive mantra for a tech company in the 1970s and 1980s, and one that the rest of the industry and financial world regarded with befuddlement or derision.
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> > In 1984, Randall Rothenberg wrote a profile of Bill Norris and Control Data for Esquire magazine. The article never ran. However, Rothenberg’s recollections of the article’s conclusions shed light on the predicament Norris and CDC were in, particularly with regard to PLATO. “Control Data,” he says, “was an example of what we’d later call industrial policy; its expertise was in seeking government funding for technology projects relating to supercomputing. When the government market for supercomputing for military and economic applications began to dry up (because of, e.g., the advance of minicomputing), CDC, instead of adapting its business model, began to seek new uses within a government welfare structure for its existing supercomputing technology. Using the technology for training, small business development, etc., was a logical extension of this. What CDC could not do was diverge from a model predicated on powerful central control. The whole notion of distributed systems— in computing, in social welfare, in anything else, it seems— was totally foreign to it. So the inapplicability of its technology to the social-welfare aims it was seeking to address was something the company could not work around. Put another way, it had come up with the perfect Great Society solution— twenty years late.”
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> CDC and PLATO were successful in some markets:
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> (continues in next comment)
If you found this interesting, check out the book The Perfect Weapon by David E. Sanger.
Stuxnet, Russia's Internet Research Agency, Chinese corporate espionage, ISIS social media campaigns... it's all there.. and it's VERY interesting.
I don't have anything like that to recommend but if you are interested in more reading (especially non-fiction) take a look at the ones below.
Red Wheelbarrow Journal
I also really enjoyed the following:
The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency
Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous
Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground
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From there, I went on to various sysadmin books (non-fiction) and a few journal articles.