Books related to technology keep getting my attention. Here’s two that you might want to take a look at:
- A follow-up to the best-selling Gray Hat Python, Justin Seitz’s Black Hat Python (No Starch Press, Dec 2014, 192 pp, $34.95) explores the darker side of Python programming. In Black Hat Python, Seitz shows readers how to write network sniffers to intercept traffic, create stealthy trojans to monitor (and disrupt) targets, manipulate packets to perform sophisticated attacks, infect virtual machines with malware, and more.
Readers learn how to:
- Create a trojan command-and-control using Github
- Detect sandboxing and automate common malware tasks, like keylogging and screenshotting
- Escalate Windows privileges with creative process control
- Use offensive memory forensics tricks to retrieve password hashes and inject shellcode into a virtual machine
- Abuse Windows COM automation to perform a man-in-the-browser attack
- Exfiltrate data from a network most sneakily
- Now that the World Wide Web has been with us for twenty-five years, no one can doubt that it has transformed the world forever. But, in The Internet Is Not The Answer (Atlantic Monthly Press; January 6, 2015), Andrew Keen, the writer that The Guardian calls “the man Cyberspace loves to hate,” argues that on balance the web has done more harm than good except for a tiny group of young, privileged, white male Silicon Valley multi-millionaires.
Rather than making us wealthier, he writes, the unregulated digital economy is slowly making us all poorer. Rather than generating jobs, it is contributing significantly to rising unemployment. Rather than fostering equality, it is creating a chasm between rich and poor. Rather than holding our rulers to account, it is turning the world into a brightly lit glass cage in which everything is recorded and privacy no longer exists. Rather than promoting democracy, it is empowering mob rule. And rather than fostering a new renaissance, it is encouraging a culture ofdistraction, vulgarity, and narcissism.
How did we get here? Keen reminds us of the innocent beginnings of the Internet as he traces its evolution from World War II to the Cold War and then to the early nineties when Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web began its remarkable rise. It was then that the U.S. government handed over the publicly funded network to the commercial forces of start-ups like Netscape & Yahoo. The turning point was the meteoric rise of multibillion dollar Web 2.0 companies like Google and Facebook, which set in motion an increasingly exploitative and monopolistic Internet economy that in no way resembles the values the World Wide Web was founded upon.
By 2039, almost everyone alive will be online. Before it’s too late, it’s up to us to stop the corruption of the Internet and return it to its founding principles to foster creativity, self-expression, small business and personal freedom. What we have now, Keen writes, is a “top down winner takes all economy run by a plutocracy of lords and masters.” What we need, he explains, is a networked society that enriches citizenship, not consumption
Have you got any other books that you think would be of interest to readers, drop me a note or post a comment below.
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This entry was posted on December 7, 2014 at 4:45 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Books And More Books For The Holidays
Books related to technology keep getting my attention. Here’s two that you might want to take a look at:
Readers learn how to:
Rather than making us wealthier, he writes, the unregulated digital economy is slowly making us all poorer. Rather than generating jobs, it is contributing significantly to rising unemployment. Rather than fostering equality, it is creating a chasm between rich and poor. Rather than holding our rulers to account, it is turning the world into a brightly lit glass cage in which everything is recorded and privacy no longer exists. Rather than promoting democracy, it is empowering mob rule. And rather than fostering a new renaissance, it is encouraging a culture ofdistraction, vulgarity, and narcissism.
How did we get here? Keen reminds us of the innocent beginnings of the Internet as he traces its evolution from World War II to the Cold War and then to the early nineties when Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web began its remarkable rise. It was then that the U.S. government handed over the publicly funded network to the commercial forces of start-ups like Netscape & Yahoo. The turning point was the meteoric rise of multibillion dollar Web 2.0 companies like Google and Facebook, which set in motion an increasingly exploitative and monopolistic Internet economy that in no way resembles the values the World Wide Web was founded upon.
By 2039, almost everyone alive will be online. Before it’s too late, it’s up to us to stop the corruption of the Internet and return it to its founding principles to foster creativity, self-expression, small business and personal freedom. What we have now, Keen writes, is a “top down winner takes all economy run by a plutocracy of lords and masters.” What we need, he explains, is a networked society that enriches citizenship, not consumption
Have you got any other books that you think would be of interest to readers, drop me a note or post a comment below.
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This entry was posted on December 7, 2014 at 4:45 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.