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Computer/Info
Free E-Books - Ebooks Free |
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Content
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Discover how America chose Happy Meal toys over copyright, why Facebook is taking a faceplant, how the Internet is basically just a giant Xerox machine, why Wikipedia is a poor cousin of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, and how to enjoy free e-books.
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Author |
Cory Doctorow |
Format |
Ebook
Free PDF - 404 KB |
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Approaching Zero
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The Extraordinary Underworld of Hackers, Phreakers, Virus Writers, and Keyboard Criminals.
The culture of the technological underworld was - formed in the early sixties, at a time when computers were vast pieces of complex machinery used only by big corporations and big government. It grew out of the social revolu- tion that the term the sixties has come to represent, and it remains an antiestablishment, anarchic, and sometimes "New Age" technological movement organized against a background of music, drugs, and the remains of the counterculture.
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Author |
Paul Mungo |
Format |
Ebook
Free PDF - 476 KB |
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A Brief History of the Internet
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For the first time in the entire history of the Earth, we have the ability for EVERYONE to get copies of EVERYTHING as long as it can be digitized and communicated to all of the people on the Earth, via computers [and the devices a person might need to make a PHYSICAL, rather than VIRTUAL copy of whatever it might be. . . Think about what you have just read for a moment, please, EVERYTHING FOR EVERYONE. .
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Author |
Michael S. Hart |
Format |
Ebook
Free PDF - 416 KB |
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E-books and e-publishing
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UNESCO's somewhat arbitrary definition of "book" is: ""Non-periodical printed publication of at least 49 pages excluding covers". The emergence of electronic publishing was supposed to change all that. Yet a bloodbath of unusual proportions has taken place in the last few months. Time Warner's iPublish and MightyWords (partly owned by Barnes and Noble) were the last in a string of resounding failures which cast in doubt the business model underlying digital content. Everything seemed to have gone wrong: the dot.coms dot bombed, venture capital dried up, competing standards fractured an already fragile marketplace, the hardware (e-book readers) was clunky and awkward, the software unwieldy, the e-books badly written or already in the public
domain.
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Author |
Shmuel Vaknin |
Format |
Ebook
Free PDF - 448 KB |
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Free as in Freedom
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The work of Richard M. Stallman literally speaks for itself. From the documented source code to the published papers to the recorded speeches, few people have expressed as much willingness to lay their thoughts and their work on the line. Such openness-if one can pardon a momentary un-Stallman adjective-is refreshing. After all, we live in a society that treats information, especially personal information, as a valuable commodity. The question quickly arises. Why would anybody want to part with so much information and yet appear to demand nothing in return? As we shall see in later chapters, Stallman does not part with his words or his work altruistically. Every program, speech, and on-the-record bon mot comes with a price, albeit not the kind of price most people are used to
paying.
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Author |
Sam Williams |
Format |
Ebook
Free PDF - 464 MB |
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Free Culture
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At the end of his review of my first book, Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace, David Pogue, a brilliant writer and author of countless technical and computer-related texts, wrote this: Unlike actual law, Internet software has no capacity to punish. It doesn't affect people who aren't online (and only a tiny minority of the world population is). And if you don't like the Internet's system, you can always flip off the modem.1 Pogue was skeptical of the core argument of the book--that software, or "code," functioned as a kind of law--and his review suggested the happy thought that if life in cyberspace got bad, we could always "drizzle, drazzle, druzzle, drome"-like simply flip a switch and be back home. Turn off the modem, unplug the computer, and any troubles that exist in that space wouldn't "affect" us
anymore.
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Author |
Lawrence Lessig |
Format |
Ebook
Free PDF - 692 KB |
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Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution - Chapters 1 and 2
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Who's Who The Wizards and their Machines - Bob Albrecht Found of People's Computer Company who took visceral pleasure in exposing youngsters to computers. Altair 8800 The pioneering microcomputer that galvanized hardware hackers. Building this kit made you learn hacking. Then you tried to figure out what to DO with it. Apple II ][ Steve Wozniak's friendly, flaky, good-looking computer, wildly successful and the spark and soul of a thriving industry. Atari 800 This home computer gave great graphics to game hackers like John Harris, though the company that made it was loath to tell you how it worked.
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Author |
Steven Levy |
Format |
Ebook
Free PDF - 304 KB |
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Open Source Democracy
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The emergence of the internet as a self-organising community, its subsequent co-option by business interests, the resulting collapse of the dot.com pyramid and the more recent self-conscious revival of interactive media's most participatory forums, serve as a case study in the politics of renaissance. The battle for control over new and little understood communication technologies has rendered transparent many of the agendas implicit in our political and cultural narratives.
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Author |
Douglas Rushkoff |
Format |
Ebook
Free PDF - 276 KB |
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Zen and the Art of Internet
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The purpose of this booklet is two-fold: first, it's intended to serve as a reference piece, which someone can easily grab on the fly and look something up. Also, it forms a foundation from which people can explore the vast expanse of the Internet. Zen and the Art of the Internet doesn't spend a significant amount of time on any one point; rather, it provides enough for people to learn the specifics of what his or her local system
offers.
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Author |
Brendan P. Kehoe |
Format |
Ebook
Free PDF - 304 MB |
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Underground
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Why would an author give away an unlimited number of copies of her book for free? That's a good question. When `Underground''s researcher, Julian Assange, first suggested releasing an electronic version of the book on the Net for free, I had to stop and think about just that question. I'd spent nearly three years researching, writing and editing the nearly 500 pages of `Underground'. Julian had worked thousands of hours doing painstaking research; discovering and cultivating sources, digging with great resourcefulness into obscure databases and legal papers, not to mention providing valuable editorial advice. So why would I give away this carefully ripened fruit for free? Because part of the joy of creating a piece of art is in knowing that many people can - and are - enjoying
it.
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Author |
Suelette Dreyfus |
Format |
Ebook
Free PDF - 1.00 MB |
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