Takedown may be the most boring read in all of geekdom.

[alanp]

While being snowed in this week, I finally go around to reading Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of Kevin Mitnick, America's Most Wanted Computer Outlaw-By the Man Who Did It by Tsutomu Shimomura. 

Well, I was hoping that I was getting a blow by blow of the FBI's quest to find the superhacker, who is also one of my heroes.  This book, not so much.

It's a retrospective of a narcissistic computer science professor who had a cell phone's source code stolen from his computer and had been the victim of a few nasty answering machine messages so he turns his work to aiding the feds at capturing the nuisance.  He reflects on his memories of dating a girl and stealing her away from her boyfriend, skiing, and growing up in the computer world.

Not that we can't follow it, but its very heavy into techno babel.  Like the babel from all TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT combined.  He seems to include every error message, as well as all kinds of unix commands and other extremely irrelevant details.  And not near enough story.  If I hadn't been a linux who had taken programming classes in college, I wouldn't have been able to follow it.  Some of it was interesting, but the problem was he didn't just say that Kevin had gained root access to the computer buy doing this; he says how he spent hours upon hours determing that by reading log files and compiling programs to piece together what was done and finally getting to how he was hacked.  Which isn't really what I was wanting to know. 

The book made me feel like I was sitting at a command prompt in front of a blinking cursor for hours and gave me a headache.  I know Kevin is planning to write a book about those days and I look forward to that!  I'd say only read it if you are a glutton for geek punishment.

I hope they did a better job with the movie.  I will check it out on netflix later this week.  I would have watched it years ago if I would have known there was such a movie.  Anyone seen or read this?

[Dangelus]

I've seen the movie. Not great and apparently pretty inaccurate if sources are to be believed.

[alanp]

I watched the movie and did enjoy it in parts.  Don't think they tried to portray Kevin correctly at all.

I also asked Leo Laporte if he would like to do a roundtable with Kevin Mitnick and Tsutomu Shimomura.  I'd sure like to hear that podcast!  He said he doubted Tsutomu would be up for it because he didn't think enough time had passed.

EDIT:

I don't know Leo in real life.  I mean I chat with other chatters and Leo in his chatroom during breaks and between shows.  He reads the chat and talks to the camera.