One of my new interests Cory Doctorow read a book (which is just as much in interest) called The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling. If you're curious why a bunch of kids playing on computers have an entire culture to work with then you should probably read this book. If you're curious about why in the beginning of the movie Hackers an entire SWAT team was allowed to storm a house (and presumably took every computer, electronic device, and piece of paper in the house for an indefinite period of time) then you should probably read this book. If your curious how the first and largest network in America came about and why it's owned by AT&T (and still is) then you should read this book.

In fact let me help you out. I have an edited podcast of Cory Doctorow's reading and a Gutenberg PDF of the book. Both perfectly legal as Bruce not only let his book be distributed for free electronically (since 1992!) he also gave Cory permission to read it as long as he distributed his reading for free. See where I'm going with this? Cory publishes all his work under The Creative Commons License which says as long s I mention it's his work then I can share it as much as I like.

So have it it. I made a torrent, you can download it right here.
DOWNLOAD TORRENT OF THE HACKER CRACKDOWN

What's a torrent? Well I can't blame you it's sorta new, and not everyone knows what it is yet. Go download uTorrent or azureus and read up on how torrents work. Both utorrent and azureus have documentation on how to use them but you basically take my small file and use it to get the set of files for the Hacker Crackdown. It's a large mp3 and a pdf. I'd give you the files right here but they're big and I have to pay for my server's bandwidth! In fact I have a large enough audience that if I offered both files up for download and paid for all the bandwidth that you would all use I'd be in the poor house pretty quick.

So as long as people will "seed" the torrent (as I do at home, but as of this writing so do 15 other people so I don't even have to anymore.) then anyone can download the files free of charge. And it frees me of charges too, because you're getting the file mostly from each other instead of me.

I'm glad technology like this exists.