"Bruce Sterling - The Hacker Crackdown" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

Information *wants* to be free. And the information inside this book
longs for freedom with a peculiar intensity. I genuinely believe that the
natural habitat of this book is inside an electronic network. That may
not be the easiest direct method to generate revenue for the book's
author, but that doesn't matter; this is where this book belongs by its
nature. I've written other books — plenty of other books — and I'll
write more and I am writing more, but this one is special. I am making
*The Hacker Crackdown* available electronically as widely as I can
conveniently manage, and if you like the book, and think it is useful,
then I urge you to do the same with it.

You can copy this electronic book. Copy the heck out of it, be my guest,
and give those copies to anybody who wants them. The nascent world of
cyberspace is full of sysadmins, teachers, trainers, cybrarians, netgu-
rus, and various species of cybernetic activist. If you're one of those
people, I know about you, and I know the hassle you go through to try to
help people learn about the electronic frontier. I hope that possessing
this book in electronic form will lessen your troubles. Granted, this
treatment of our electronic social spectrum is not the ultimate in acade-
mic rigor. And politically, it has something to offend and trouble almost
everyone. But hey, I'm told it's readable, and at least the price is right.

You can upload the book onto bulletin board systems, or Internet nodes,
or electronic discussion groups. Go right ahead and do that, I am giving


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BR U C E S T E R LI NG — T H E HA C KER CR A CKD OWN NOT FOR COMMERCIAL USE
 you express permission right now. Enjoy yourself.


You can put the book on disks and give the disks away, as long as you
don't take any money for it.


But this book is not public domain. You can't copyright it in your own
name. I own the copyright. Attempts to pirate this book and make
money from selling it may involve you in a serious litigative snarl.
Believe me, for the pittance you might wring out of such an action, it's
really not worth it. This book don't "belong" to you. In an odd but very
genuine way, I feel it doesn't "belong" to me, either. It's a book about
the people of cyberspace, and distributing it in this way is the best way
I know to actually make this information available, freely and easily, to
all the people of cyberspace — including people far outside the borders
of the United States, who otherwise may never have a chance to see any
edition of the book, and who may perhaps learn something useful from
this strange story of distant, obscure, but portentous events in so-
called "American cyberspace."