Humble Bundle Announces 'Hacker' Pay-What-You-Want Sale (humblebundle.com) 52
An anonymous reader writes: Humble Bundle announced a special "pay what you want" sale for four ebooks from No Starch Press, with proceeds going to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (or to the charity of your choice). This "hacker edition" sale includes two relatively new titles from 2015 -- "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python" and Violet Blue's "Smart Girl's Guide to Privacy," as well as "Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering" by Andrew "bunnie" Huang, and "The Linux Command Line".
Hackers who are willing to pay "more than the average" -- currently $14.87 -- can also unlock a set of five more books, which includes "The Maker's Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse: Defend Your Base with Simple Circuits, Arduino, and Raspberry Pi". (This level also includes "Bitcoin for the Befuddled" and "Designing BSD Rootkits: An Introduction to Kernel Hacking".) And at the $15 level -- just 13 cents more -- four additional books are unlocked. "Practical Malware Analysis: The Hands-On Guide to Dissecting Malicious Software" is available at this level, as well as "Hacking: The Art of Exploitation" and "Black Hat Python."
Nice to see they've already sold 28,506 bundles, which are DRM-free and available in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI format. (I still remember Slashdot's 2012 interview with Make magazine's Andrew "bunnie" Huang, who Samzenpus described as "one of the most famous hardware and software hackers in the world.")
Hackers who are willing to pay "more than the average" -- currently $14.87 -- can also unlock a set of five more books, which includes "The Maker's Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse: Defend Your Base with Simple Circuits, Arduino, and Raspberry Pi". (This level also includes "Bitcoin for the Befuddled" and "Designing BSD Rootkits: An Introduction to Kernel Hacking".) And at the $15 level -- just 13 cents more -- four additional books are unlocked. "Practical Malware Analysis: The Hands-On Guide to Dissecting Malicious Software" is available at this level, as well as "Hacking: The Art of Exploitation" and "Black Hat Python."
Nice to see they've already sold 28,506 bundles, which are DRM-free and available in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI format. (I still remember Slashdot's 2012 interview with Make magazine's Andrew "bunnie" Huang, who Samzenpus described as "one of the most famous hardware and software hackers in the world.")
Hahaha (Score:1)
""The Maker's Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse: Defend Your Base with Simple Circuits, Arduino, and Raspberry Pi"."
Step 1: Try to use this book to fight zombies using mass produced consumer electronics starter kits
Step 2: Run screaming as the zombies overwhelm your position
Step 3: Find a real engineer
Step 4: Die to a zombie, unmourned for your uselessness and narcissism.
Re: (Score:3)
That one sounds good, but then they bundled a bunch of black-hat crap that is going to get people on the no-fly-list along with freakin' maker books. Because, "hackers," I guess. Fucking clueless, and not even harmlessly clueless.
Andrew Huang's book is probably good. Too bad they had to bundle him with that crap.
Re: (Score:2)
Boo!
Re:Hahaha (Score:5, Funny)
Don't forget to include an idea with your comment next time, ideas are a critically important part of any exchange of ideas.
Re: (Score:1)
The day I get put on a no-fly list for simply purchasing a widely available book, I'll consider our freedoms completely lost. I don't want to fly to a country that would treat me that way, anyway, and I sincerely doubt any modern nation would do that. I could be proven wrong, but so be it. Not going to live my life under someone's boot.
Re: Hahaha (Score:1)
Insallah brother, and a good Mohammad to you
Re: (Score:1)
Your communications are all logged, because you post on slashdot, and *I* (and others here) have visited the Linux Journal website, which is flagged as a radical dissident publication.
Being flagged as a potential radical dissident will not, alone, get you on the no-fly-list.
But being on existing lists increases the chances that you will also get placed on other lists.
And black hat stuff is evil and illegal shit. People doing that stuff are dangerous. Buying books on criminal subjects will not alone get you
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Actually it's a shame they described the book that way, as that's not all that it contains. It also has details on how to scavenge useful parts out of existing devices (car alternator, disposable camera capacitors, etc.) It's not just Pi and Arduino stuff.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually it's a shame they described the book that way,
Actually, it's a shame that when you order from them they demand an email address that they tell you they will use to "Notify me about upcoming promotions", but not that this is the only way they will tell you how to get the books you just bought. It's only after you pay the money that they tell you about some "download link" that you are supposed to get, apparently by email, since there is no download link that appears after purchase.
A nifty way to gather validated email addresses for future marketing, th
Re: (Score:2)
While there is a lot of truth in that, occasionally (say 1 in 100 cases) people actually get started on real engineering this way. You can recognize them by them eventually developing a strong disdain for these toys that essentially cater to the stupid. While Arduino hardware has some merit, in particular if you have a clue what you are doing and can read a data-sheet (quite unlike the typical "maker"), the Raspberry Pi is an unmitigated disaster, with not a single competent engineer involved in the design
Re: (Score:1)
Or the fact that they chose the worst possible SoC with no valid upgrade path and a secret data-sheet and very limited interfaces. (In a machine targeted at _education_! It really does not get worse than that: You may run pretty little programs, but if you want to look under the hood, you are out of luck...) The networking and USB is unreliable, has bad performance and is generally one big disaster. (Comparable offerings from, e.g., Allwinner, have on-the-chip GbE, USB, Audio, and even SATA...) The original
Re: (Score:2)
In a machine targeted at _education_! It really does not get worse than that: You may run pretty little programs, but if you want to look under the hood, you are out of luck...
You have to want to get pretty far under the hood, given you can look at the source code for all of the software, and recompile and run any of it. Perfect? No, but much better than you're making out.
Comparable offerings from, e.g., Allwinner, have on-the-chip GbE, USB, Audio, and even SATA...
So? It was never meant to be a performance
Re: (Score:2)
Now you are just disgracing yourself, and obviously so. Your knowledge is all surface, no depth, and it shows.
Right. So far, you've posted claims with no argument, I disputed them and that's the best you can come up with?
So go on tell me, O wise one of the deep knowledge, what's so awful about using a cheap linear regulator when you're not in a power or thermally limited situation?
Re: (Score:1)
Still funny. Because I know it is not true. I got to admit that Eben Upton managed to sucker millions of people into buying badly designed hardware and praising him for it, but my aspirations in life do not run to "con-man". Incidentally, nobody is ever more irrelevant than an AC.
Re: (Score:2)
Are you sure you've ever read your own signature?
Re: (Score:2)
AC nailed it.
Plus, Marathon? That takes me back...
But yes, there's a reason the RPi is popular despite not being the cheapest, most powerful or most capable. And it's not because everyone else is the most appaling hipster who can't recognise the glorious TRUTH of gwehir.
Re: (Score:2)
You can recognize them by them eventually developing a strong disdain for these toys that essentially cater to the stupid.
Yeah well, snobs abound. Nothing that can be done about that.
While Arduino hardware has some merit
Arduino hardware has plenty of merit. It's a like a cheaper, more widely available, standardised pinout version of vendor's devkits. Useful little devices.
the Raspberry Pi is an unmitigated disaster,
Except, no it isn't. For what it's for, it does the job well. I have one and it runs OctoPi t
Re: (Score:2)
I have a box full AVRs, and no Arduinos. I do things the way the snobs want. But they're mostly full of shit; this way is better for me, and perhaps better for engineers, but that doesn't tell me about what is good for other people. And I sure as heck am not going to pay $50, or $250, for a dev kit. If I was worried about providing the correct amount of power or whatever, or wanted a pre-installed bootloader, arduino would be a good starting place. You can use normal non-arduino AVR code on them, anyways.
Bu
Re: (Score:2)
I have a box full AVRs, and no Arduinos.
The raw chips? Or other dev kits.
I do things the way the snobs want. But they're mostly full of shit; this way is better for me, and perhaps better for engineers,
Indeed. I think I do too: I tend to use g++ and a Makefile directly. I don't use the Arduino environment for a variety of reasons, some good some not. Sometimes I need more precise timing, so that rules it out. Otherwise, I'm not really a fan of IDEs, I quite like poring over microcontroller datasheets and t
Re: (Score:2)
Chips, and a couple bags of crystals. Plain C. Emacs.
It isn't all rainbows and unicorns, I do have one 328 stuck at 32khz. Which would be great, except for a software bug in the timer; it is supposed to have a bicycle blinker controller, but it waits 3 minutes to toggle instead of 1 second. I didn't realize that without a fancy expensive programmer, I had to have the code perfect before setting the fuses for that speed.
But it's worth an occasional bricked $3 chip to have the pleasure of working directly on
Re: (Score:2)
As somebody who mostly agrees with the sentiment, I think you're overstepping by slagging on the stuff that you don't respect.
I'd rather use an AVR directly than use the Arduino, probably because I would have read the data sheet either way, and the Arduino C code doesn't appear to provide any benefits other than not being compatible with other AVR code.
But the pi is only intended to be an educational toy. They weren't trying to make an engineering platform. It sucks in various ways, but they needed it to be
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As to AVR, that is why I wrote Arduino "Hardware".
My impression is just that a student that actually wants to learn more about the RPi and then finds they cannot even get a decent datasheet and in addition find that most of it does not follow good engineering practices, then that is exactly the wrong message to send. My other impression is that unreliable network and USB is not something that will make working with this thing fun at all. Sure, by now there are enough work-arounds that it is mostly reliable.
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Kids are not usually trying to find a datasheet, and even if they're nerdy enough to have read about them in internet forums they're not going to have even the technical vocabulary to understand them. They aren't complete, they don't have glossaries; even for adults who read a lot and understand jargon from related industries they can be rather opaque at times because of the low quality of the writing. Often there are formulas with variables that are not explained anywhere on the sheet, and they're not cons
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Indeed, the book has quite some reasonable stuff in it, but every other sentence is "especially for women, which are often a target ...".
"Hacking" the word that means nothing now (Score:1)
Half of this stuff isn't hacking. I wish the mainstream would stop co-opting the culture for its own ends. I mean automate stuff with python? A privacy guide? Fuck that.
Re:"Hacking" the word that means nothing now (Score:5, Insightful)
It is meant for people that want to see themselves as "hackers" or "makers" and as superior to any actual engineer
Well, the important thing is that you've managed to feel superior to them.
Bunny is pretty good though, definitely deserved than engineering PhD for hacking the xbox.
It's cool and he's a very smart guy, but that's not the sort of thing that PhDs are generally awarded for.
I know several people (including myself) that could likely have done it
Talk, as they say, is cheap.
Re: (Score:3)
You are wrong. And this nicely shows you have no idea what you are talking about.
Except you said youself that you and serveral people you know could have done it. In other words, the tools and techniques while tricky are already in existence and so no new research is required.
But what do I know? I've only supervised and examined a few engineering PhDs. It's not all that much of a surprising claim either: I used to be an academic and that's part of the standard duties.
Re: (Score:1)
You have no clue what people I know and what _they_ did for their engineering PhD work or what they are now doing in academic and industrial research. Not everything gets published. And where did I actually imply that I was talking about _recreating_ Bunny's work? I rather obviously talked about doing the initial research. But you are probably so full of yourself that you cannot grasp that.
Re: (Score:3)
Not everything gets published.
No, but for a PhD it usually needs to be of publishable quality. It's a rare PhD with no published papers, and it's usually important to find rather easygoing examiners who owe you a favour for those cases.
I rather obviously talked about doing the initial research.
No, you really didn't.
Proceeds are the same as always (Score:2)
I don't want to denigrate that, that's good, but the Humble Bundl
Thanks (Score:1)
for the list. I went to kickass.to and paid what I wanted for the books. Even got the $15-tier books.
Re:Thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
You've got a 4 digit account, so presumably you're old enough that you're making decent money and you're still pirating books when they're being nearly given away? The authors' time and effort is really worth so little to you?
You want to pirate them, pirate them. But don't come back and boast about it, that's just an asshole move.
Designing BSD Rootkits (Score:2)