Cult of the Dead Cow
How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
The shocking untold story of the elite secret society of hackers fighting to protect our freedom – “a hugely important piece of the puzzle for anyone who wants to understand the forces shaping the internet age." (New York Times Book Review)
Cult of the Dead Cow is the tale of the oldest active, most respected, and most famous American hacking group of all time. With its origins in the earliest days of the internet, the cDc is full of oddball characters – activists, artists, and musicians – some of whom went on to advise presidents, cabinet members, and CEOs, and who now walk the corridors of power in Washington and Silicon Valley.
Today, the group and its followers are battling electoral misinformation, making personal data safer, and organizing to keep technology a force for good instead of for surveillance and oppression. Cult of the Dead Cow describes how, at a time when governments, corporations, and criminals hold immense power, a small band of tech iconoclasts is on our side fighting back.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a well-told if sometimes overreaching history, technology journalist Menn (Fatal System Error) chronicles one of the longest-established hacking groups, Cult of the Dead Cow, presenting it as a valuable antithesis to the military-internet complex. Also known as cDc, the collective has long been at the forefront of "hacktivism" as well as government cybersecurity efforts, with members lending their technological gifts to both the creation of anti-government surveillance software and the Defense Department's DARPA agency. Menn offers authoritative insights into the organization's inner workings, drawing on emails from and interviews with cDc members. He also spins an engaging tale about the group's origins, among several disaffected teenagers in Lubbock, Tex., in the mid-1980s, but occasionally gets bogged down in side-stories, such as in an entertaining but unilluminating digression about one hacker's family connections to the late '60s San Francisco counterculture. Menn's book covers almost too much ground for a relatively compact text. He elicits intriguing reflections from the hackers on various topical issues, such as the coopting of the internet by repressive governments, but only skims the surface of cDc's many endeavors. Despite these drawbacks, Menn's work does serve as a spirited examination of the art of hacking and how it might be used for good.
Customer Reviews
A riveting accounting of our present
After learning about the individuals and groups associated with the Cult of the Dead cow, readers will come to appreciate the ways in which a select group of people have had outsized impacts on the digital worlds we inhabit today.
By showing how different members worked in unique ways to shape the present, readers can better understand the history of lulz and activism, and potentially even learn how to similarly affect emerging technical domains through the exercise of culture, politics, and technology.