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Hacker’s Delight

Hacker’s Delight
Author: Henry S. Warren, Jr.
Pages: 306
Published: 2003

You may think that I have become obsessed with books about hacking but this book is totally different from any of the others. In this book the term hacker is meant in the traditional sense (before the negative definition was popularized) of someone interested in understanding how things work and how to solve problems efficiently. Although the hacker term can be applied to whatever domain, in this book the domain is computing technology.

‘Hacker’s Delight’ is a book about bits and small programming tricks applied to machines. With ’small’ I mean that you won’t find here a description of the Merge sort or Radix sort but, for example, you will learn to determine in constant time if an integer is a power of two or not.

In more that 300 pages and with a mixture of pseudo assembler and C you will find all kind of tricks for arithmetic bounds, counting bits, searching bits, multiplications, elementary functions, floating point, etc. Even wondered if the base2 used by computers is the most efficient? This question and a lot more are covered in this book.

Although the book is a little bit oriented towards compiler developers, every ‘real’ programmer can get a huge benefit from reading and thoroughly understanding this book.

I read this book on several flights and really enjoyed this little gem book of tricks. I would definitely recommend to have it in your bookshelf.

Rating: 8 / 10

The Art of Intrusion

The Art of Intrusion
Author: Kevin D. Mitnick & William L. Simon
Pages: 349
Published: 2005

Kevin Mitnick is one of the most famous hackers in the world. In the 80’s he was able to break the most secured systems and computers getting lot of private information. In 1995, with lot of controversy, he was arrested.

After five years in prison and as a logical maturation process, he changed sides and became a computer security consultant. A “white” hacker.

This book is about “real” hacking stories that have been contrasted by Mitnick himself. Although all the stories are presented as real, all the relevant details are altered so that nobody can try the same hack again.

This book got to my hands, months ago, while I was in a library. A first look at the book revealed interesting technical details of each episode and lots of external web links with more information. So I decided to buy it. This book can be perfectly read by a person without computer knowledge although the book is targeted to techy readers.

The book is structured in ten episodes about hacking, cracking, phreaking and social engineering. Some stories are greatly exaggerated to be believable (for example, I think that the story about social engineering is absolutely 100% fiction) but others (like the one about cracking) are incredible believable with lots of technical information about the details. It is hard to believe that those details are being invented. Working in a big Video-Game Studio (at least when I wrote this article), one detail that made me smile was in the episode about cracking. In that chapter the hacker being interviewed reveals that their team was successfully able to break most of the big Video-Game companies. Probably there are lots of fantasy elements in all of this, but my intuition tells me that there is something real under the hood…

The book is very easy to read and if you have spare time I recommend it. Probably I will read the book Mitnick wrote before this: The Art of Deception. It is getting quite good reviews.

Rating: 7 / 10

Linux in NintendoDS

I bought a SuperCard for my NintendoDS. I will be playing with the free SDK for the next weeks. Investigating the DS Scene I discovered DSLinux: a linux distribution for Nintento DS. You can’t do great things at the moment (I have been unable to mount the SD card nor connect to my router using then WiFi connection) but the project is friki enough to be commented.

Hacking the Xbox360’s HDD

I was bored tonight, and after discovering the Xplorer360 I decided to plug the xbox360’s HDD I bought months ago into my PC.

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