Steven Levy Archives - Don Kasprzak

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy. The former chief technology correspondent for Newsweek, today Steven is an editor at Wired and author of eight books including Crypto, which won the Frankfurt ebook award for best non-fiction book of 2001.

So, the best way to introduce this release from 1984 is to simply define the term Hacker as ‘a person skilled in information technology who uses their technical knowledge to achieve a goal or overcome an obstacle, within a computerized system by non-standard means.’

How times have certainly changed. Today popular culture has certainly morphed this term into someone who is able to subvert computer security for malicious purposes. This person should be more accurate defined as a cyber criminal. Needless to say there is a big difference since it will surprise many to discover the first computer game was written in 1961.

In fact, Steve provides a historical view of hackers dating back to 1946. At MIT, an on-camps model railroad club, the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) was the first hacker club in America.

Indeed, a model railroad club on campus allowed talented introverts access to a locked room to construct HO scale railroad layouts. This makes the model railroading of my childhood seem like Dorthy in the Wizard of Oz.

Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government—Saving Privacy in the Digital Age by Steven Levy. He is the former chief technology correspondent for Newsweek. Today he is an editor at Wired, and author of eight books. Crypto, won the Frankfurt E-book Award for the best non-fiction book of 2001.

If you’ve ever made an e-commerce purchase with your credit card, then you have used cryptography.

Steven guides the reader into learning about the history of cryptography. This book begins with Whitfield Diffi e. He authored initial developments of cryptographic key s. He was then joined by Martin Hellman in 1976.

From this point, Steven reveals how Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman, teaching at MIT also furthered cryptography research. Their development led to the formation of their company, RSA.

The National Security Agency (NSA) certainly interpreted these cryptography developments as a threat and began working to thwart their developments.