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Approaching Zero: The Extraordinary Underworld of Hackers, Phreakers, Virus Writers, and Keyboard Criminals Paul Mungo and Bryan Clough. New York, Random House, 1992. ISBN 0-679-40938-6. $22.00.
I had to read this book twice to understand it. The problem is not with the authors' style. Mungo, an American journalist specializing in business and computers, and Clough, a British expert on computer security, write easily enough. They begin with the story of a hacker, Fry Guy, who appears again midway through the book, thus obeying the old principle of story-telling, in medias res. No, the problems arising from this text are these: for this reviewer, who came in his late fifties to the world of personal computers, much of the lingo is only partly familiar (the book could have used a glossy, one more up to date than Martin Ouverson's Glossary of Computer Terms [Menlo Park, CA: People's Computer Company, 1983] ). Secondly, the plot of the book unfolds in "cyberspace" (from "cybernetics] "+"space"-the invisible area, without flags or frontiers, depth or height, inhabited by computer users (whether in-laws or outlaws) connecting with each other across telephone lines. Finally, although undoubtedly the Shadow knows "what evil lurks in the hearts of men," this lawabidin', go-to-Meetin' citizen has not had, up to now, the foggiest idea.
The story begins with the telephone, the handy little device that enables your elderly sister-in-law to inform you that she simply must come up for a visit. Some years ago-perhaps in the Miocene, it seems that long-the telephone company (before it separated into several long-distance carriers)-decided to automate its long-distance dialing system. No longer would the ordinary user have to call up a special operator and ask to be connected to a number in New York or San Francisco. Or perhaps the story starts with the world of science-fiction, a world scrutinized largely by teenagers (mostly male) possessed of dangerously little knowledge of science and engineering (and none at all of ethics), who decided to explore the world of the telephone system, now automated and controlled by a systems manager (in "cyberspeak," "sysman") whose role could be usurped by a lad who had learned to break into the telephone system by clever dialing. The person could then telephone a friend in another...