Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker

Kevin Mitnick's story is a riveting, can't put down read. You just know he will manage to work himself out of a difficult situation (until he doesn't.) The book moves quickly, yet provides plenty of details. I could easily relate to some locations (such as those in Seattle) as well as different times and events.

Mitnick started out learning more and more about phone technology. He got a HAM radio license at a young age. He learned various special "codes" for getting free calls and doing other things within the phone lines. His primary method of gaining knowledge was through social engineering. He would often exude confidence and get somebody to give him information or access he was looking for. He had used this to learn more about the phone company and later computer systems.

Eventually his snooping caught up with him. He was imprisoned as s juvenile. There was a great deal of exaggeration and  trumped up charges. (Cybercrime was something new and the authorities just didn't know how to proceed.) After being free, he led a relatively normal life until things caught up with him again. He had suspicion of a hacking friend he met. He used his skills to learn more information and learned that he was going to be busted. He fled, used social engineering to obtain fake identities and tried working regular jobs. On the side, he led a sport of obtaining source code for major operating systems. He had a mobile phone that he could change at will as well as many other tricks of the trade. Eventually he was caught jailed and then set free.

It is interesting what has changed as well as remained the same. A lot of the information that he had gone through great trouble to obtain is now available online. Phone companies are pretty much "old news". There are probably still plenty of the hacks that can be done, but it is also easy to just grab a bunch of burner phones. Phone and internet usage is also so cheap that a lot of the free calling features are not worth the effort. (I do remember having a friend get "busted" after using some codes to get free long distance dial-up back in the days when a 9600 bps modem was blazing fast.)

Social Engineering and hacking is become even more powerful today. People are trusting. At one company, I called the helpdesk from home and had no problem getting a password reset. Social engineering is often the lead entry point for many attacks today. We continue to be just as vulnerable as we were in the past - despite more knowledge of attacks. Unfortunately there are also a large number of malicious players out there, making the scope of damage worse. How can we manage a society that relies on trust without letting the bad players ruin it?

Steve Jobs

I've never been a big fan of apple. I was more a Commodore 64 or an Android guy. Apple seemed to be all about style and marketing rather than technology. After reading Steve Wozniak's autobiography, I had a little more respect for him on the technology side. However, reading Jobs' books drills in the fact that he is a jerk. Without Apple, he would probably be some unknown artist or maybe even a homeless guy wandering around. However, without Jobs, Apple would have probably never been the big behemoth it is today, and Wozniak would probably still be working at HP as a highly respected, distinguished engineer. They happened to have the right skills to complement each other and came together at the right time. This gave Jobs the position of influence and allowed him to use his ruthlessness to launch the pirate raid on the computer industry.

Steve Jobs was born to graduate students in Wisconsin who put him up for adoption in California. If he had grown up as Steve Jindali with an intellectual family in Wisconsin, he may be an obscure poet or intellectual today. Being adopted by a working class family in California put him in a position to be surrounded by an innovative industry as well as the drive to do something with his life.

In reading this, part of me says "this guy is a doofus." But, the other part says, why didn't I do this? Why didn't I take the big gambles at a younger age. Use the youth to flop more. If you fail, oh well. If not, you may have a giant company.

His parents did take a "reasonable gamble" in moving to south Los Altos so he could go to school there. If they didn't, well, he may not have made the connections that would have helped him found Apple. At that time, the area was expensive, but still in the realm of middle class. Today, there is nothing for less than a million dollars. (Though you can catch the old residents by the low assessed value (max of 2% increase since the 70s for unsold houses leaves a lot of assessments around $100,000).

Jobs may have lead to his own death by refusing cancer surgery early, and letting his cancer spread. He had motivation to try many weird diets. The strength and accomplishment of doing it led to his motivation for accomplishing many things, yet it may not have helped his health.

He left Apple, founded NeXT, did a lot of cool things there, but didn't really sell much. Yet, he was able to sell the company back to Apple for a few billion and end up taking over the company he helped found.

At the time, he also bought Pixar. There John Lasseter worked as an animator after getting canned by his dream job at Disney animation. Pixar eventually went from making computers to making movies. It got bought by Disney for a few million, and now Lasseter gets to be an animation boss there.

Jobs' wife gets to stay at home with the children, garden and do charity work. The joy of having money and being able to do meaningful work, rather than working for the "man". (Similarly, Jobs Apple money let him do all sorts of other stuff.)

In his end-note, Jobs said his goal was to create great products. Money helped enable, but was not the ultimate goal. Without money, he would not have been able to do squat. However, when the company focussed to much on money, the product faltered and money started to fall. He also couldn't name another "fully integrated" hardware/software company like apple that did cool stuff. What will happen to Apple now? It is a behemoth. Can it be creative as a large company and without the leadership? We are also in an era where operating system doesn't matter as much as it did. What new features are in the newest IOS? Does anybody really care? The power and performance of electronics are exceeding our ability to do stuff with it. Most innovation now is in new form factors (Google Glass, tablets, watches, etc.) Content is now more cloud based. We could be nearing the end of the "integrated" era, and moving into something new. What will happen to Steve's company?

The book ends with Jobs on his deathbead in Palo Alto. Yet, we don't get a final obituary. (I guess it finished a bit too soon...)

iWoz

iWoz is Steve Wozniak's "brag" book. Humility is not one of his strong points. As a kid he was an "engineering nerd" who was way ahead of everybody else in math and technology. However, he was not so advanced socially. He saw himself as somebody who was interested in both people and technology. (Hmm... Don't all engineers think they have the "human touch", while others are dedicated engineers?)

At the start, we get the kids riding his bike around the orchards in southern Sunnyvale. He went to the (now shuttered) Serra school and Homestead high school. Most of the kids had stay at home moms and were free to do creative antics like create a local electronic intercom system. (Could all the programmed children activities be hurting the creative and education of children?) This silicon valley of the past most have been very different from that of today.

We hear about the science fairs he won, the pranks he pulled, his telephone phreaking, electronic gadgets and plenty of other "nerdy" activities that he did. Then he goes to school, does some pranks, decides to return to De Anza college, gets involved in the home brew computer scene and builds the Apple I. He was lucky to find stores that wanted it. Jobs was lucky to hook up with him and have a knack with people. He was lucky HP (his employer) didn't want part of it. They also tried to sell to Commodore, who didn't want it. He was serendipitously in the right place at the right time. Had he finished school in Colorado, he would probably be just another nameless engineer working at some big company. Had he and Jobs not hooked up, they would both be anonymous dudes. Another one of the many computer startups may have been the one that hit it big. Had they not emphasized quality over price, the ground would not have been set for the current premium model of iOS and mac devices. One thing he mentions is that "marketing" took over Apple pretty early in the company's history. This had started to alienate the "engineer" in him. (But it has ultimately led to the success of the company.) Even during the "dark days" when apple wasn't doing well, they were designing iPods, etc.

Woz wants you to think that he was a uber-engineer who was destined for engineering greatness. In reality, however, he seemed to just be lucky. After Apple, there none of his inventions had really caught on. (Who has used the CL-9 universal remote?) The Apple computer was revolutionary at the time. But he even mentions that he had created the equivalent of the Altair 5 years before it was released. If the Apple I (and Apple II) had not found the right customers, investors and partners, they could have been in the same place. His closing message is to encourage people to go solo and invent without the bureaucracy of a large corporation. However, the "behind the scenes" message is that invention itself isn't worth diddly-squat. You need to make sure the device gets out there and gets sold. Working for a company can leave you rather nameless, but more able to see the fruits of your labors. (Who knows who Jonathan Ive is? Yet, he is responsible for the design of most modern Apple products.)