Start Reading Малкия брат Created By Cory Doctorow Accessible From Bound Copy

that had a whole lot of 'splaining throughout which, whilst necessary, made for some long dull moments in this YA dystopia.


I know this has been very popular but I honestly feel like it hasn't aged well, The main character makes lots of pervy comments about girls and says he can't hug his kidnapped, injured and traumatised male friend because guys don't hug each other.
I think we have moved past that mentality as a society right On the positive side, I really liked the way the dystopic elements developed and how things became quite brutal quite quickly.
Just okay

for me.
I have to admit that the first couple pages or so had me rolling my eyes and wondering if I would be able to actually finish this book.
There's so much technoslang that it seemed to me to be trying too hard, even though it is a book about hackers and technokids.
. . Like, "Spending Fridays at school was teh suck anyway, and I was glad of an excuse to make my escape.
" Teh suck Really. Ugh. Although, to be fair, at least he spelled out "suck" and didn't write "teh sux" or something, I probably would have just had to close the book right then and there, shudder Another example is using "vibe" rather than "vibration" when talking about receiving a text message, or "hwt" for "hot", which doesn't make sense to me anyway, because it's longer and more cumbersome to type "hwt" than it is to type "hot".
But then later, the full and unabbreviated word "tarpaulin" is used rather than just "tarp", which felt out of place considering the shortening/slang usage of other stuff.
I don't understand the stupidifying slang netspeak anyway, but then I'm older than, so I'm probably a lost cause,

Add to that that there is a lot of hacker exposition and explanation that I didn't really think was necessary, and you have the only two reasons that I couldn't give thisstars.
I appreciate the author/narrator explaining the technical aspects of the story for those of us who aren't technologically supersavvy like the characters in the book, but it seemed like there was a lot that could have been contextualized like gaitcams rather than explained for pages.


But these are small nitpicks, Other than these two things, the book was brilliant, relevant and prophetic, I want to buy copies and hand them out at schools, I want my library to pick upmore copies and I want them to just magically appear in people's checkout stacks.
I want people to read this book, I want people to learn from it and take away the knowledge that our freedom is more likely to be taken from us by Americans than by anyone else, and to fight against it when it happens.


This book is set in the notverydistantatall future, after a "terrorist" attack in San Francisco, which essentially results in SF being turned into a vicious datamining police state.
. . Now with even more "With us or against us" mentality per square mile! Used car salesman smile It's frightening, because it's already happening right now.
Innocent people are being held without trial, without representation, without anything, in the name of "security", This terrifies me more than anything, because there's no limit, no boundary, When there's a nameless, faceless, general "threat", "security" must by necessity become ever more pervasive and intrusive in our lives to find it.
And the only people who suffer are us,

Benjamin Franklin said "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
" The characters in this book understand this concept and they go about fighting for their freedom and their rights as American citizens even when the people they are fighting are the very people who are supposed to defend their rights as American citizens.
Color me proud. Considering that this book is told from the point of view of ayear old, I can only hope that REALyear olds think about this stuff, like prejudice and fearmongering and overzealous uniformed officials, among others.
. .

Anyway, I loved Marcus's character, Most of the time, probably because of the technoslang and the gaming, he felt younger to me than, More like. But in a way, that only made him more impressive to me, I loved that he was smart, and willing to stand up for himself and do the right thing, and learn from the world around him and from his own mistakes.
When I have kids, I hope that they are something like Marcus, . . only minus the skipping school to play games stuff, Marcus carried the book well, and was believable as both a smart, mostly responsible teen, and a freedom fighter, I liked his honesty, and how he was unsure of himself but didn't let that stop him,

I expected certain things to happen as the story progressed, and I was right about many of them.
The escalation of the security/policestate, the defenders of the security measures, the dissidents, etc, They were done in a more hightech way than we have now, but they aren't far off, RFIDs are already gaining popularity and there arecameras that I can see from my house without leaving my porch.
But I was wrong about some predictions and suspicions that I had as well, which always makes me happy, because I really hate knowing where a story's twists will be.


This book should be a must read for everyone, right along with sitelinkNineteen EightyFour, Go read it. Look past the slang, and the technical explanations, and read this for the snapshot of our future if we aren't wary and vigilant with this so called "War on Terror".
See you on Treasure Island, . . I really wanted to like this book, but am a bit baffled at all the acclaim it's getting, I can see what Doctorow is trying to do, but he gets too preachy far too often and that kills any point he was trying to make for me.
Marcus is too talented, too perfect at everything that needs to be done to be a legitimate portrayal of a teenager.
I've seen other reviews say that he reads like Doctorow created a version of what he wished he was like at that age, and I agree completely.
Throw in the most one dimensional villains I've seen in a long time they stop just short of rubbing their hands and cackling gleefully over their schemes, leave the interesting subplots with almost no resolution, and the sum is not a compelling read.


It's a shame, there really is a good book in here trying to get out, I was tempted to give it one star, but I threw in a bonus one just for the fact that Doctorow got his tech right and uses it realistically.
I'm a sucker for that kind of thing, Yes, I put a book that was publishedyears ago on my 'Classics' amp 'Historical' shelves, It's NOT on my 'Science Fiction' shelf, I read a fair amount of history amp SF, This book is very important historically amp will be acknowledged as a classic, I've been fiddling with computers since before the Internet was public amp have been administering networks foryears now, There's nothing in this book that takes the science into the realm of SF,

One of my basic duties is dealing with security against both internal amp external threats, along with some basic database amp other programming skills.
What I can know about my users just by running a few quick routines against the Internet traffic is scary.
Thankfully my current job doesn't require me to monitor Internet usage like my last one did, I don't want to know that much about my coworkers, When put together with even a cursory knowledge of their personal life it's far, far worse, I don't really want to know amp yet I do, sometimes just because I've had to look up something else.
I try hard not to see amp forget quickly, What if I didn't

What Doctorow has written is real, folks, Unfortunately, instead of a big blow up, it's happening in little, almost unnoticeable stages with a facile logic to them.
A bit of privacy loss here amp there taken away in the name of safety, 'Safety' is becoming a curse word to me, News dumbed down, skewed by special interests, lost in all the babble, amp/or spun out into a fantasy amp another law gets passed, so there is one more way the authorities can look at us.
And, just like Doctorow said, few norms understand it, Most people don't understand the paradox of the false positive amp just how badly it impacts our society amp security.

If you missed that reference, read it here: sitelink wikipedia. org/wiki/Falsepo

Read this as a cautionary tale, Read the afterwords. They're very good. Even the bibliography is of great interest amp pretty good, I will add sitelinkHackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by sitelinkSteven Levy to the reading list, This book focuses on the early hackers that started in the's at MIT in the Train Club amp continues to follow the history of hacking for a couple of decades.
Yes, it's a lot more primitive in some ways, but it shows the growth of the system, the mindset of hackers, amp will make a great deal more sense to older norms.
Imagine making free phone calls using a whistle from a box of Captain Crunch, an iconic hack by John Draper.

Read more here: sitelink wikipedia. org/wiki/JohnDraper

Obviously, I think it's a great book, Supposedly it's YA, but don't let that throw you, Yes, there's a simplistic bad guy Probably the only thing I didn't care for much, He was too simple amp bad, amp some romantic stuff, but it's not a huge part, It's also FREE. Yes, Doctorow is giving it away, One version I have seems to be a shorter version, but that's OK, Get it here: sitelink com/littlebrother/do

It was really interesting listening to this in the middle of sitelinkThe Killer Angels by sitelinkMichael Shaara, a classic account of the Battle of Gettysburg.
As General Longstreet noted, war had changed, It has again amp, like during the Civil War, the issues amp the enemy are complicated, Far more complicated now, I think,

UpdateOct: Some more reading, sitelinkHas Big Data Made Anonymity Impossible Well, yes, it has, but that's not the biggest danger to democracy, Try to ignore politics amp focus on what Cambridge Analytica is doing in sitelinkthis article They're mentioned about/of the way through.
Long article. It's plain scary.
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