Cult of the Dead Cow: the untold story of the hacktivist group that presaged everything great and terrible about the internet

Back in 1984, a lonely, weird kid calling himself Grandmaster Ratte' formed a hacker group in Lubbock, Texas. called the Cult of the Dead Cow, a name inspired by a nearby slaughterhouse. In the decades to come, cDc would become one of the dominant forces on the BBS scene and then the internet -- endlessly inventive, funny and prankish, savvy and clever, and sometimes reckless and foolish -- like punk-rock on a floppy disk.

Joe Menn (previously) is a veteran tech reporter whom I've known since the Napster wars, and he has always had a knack for digging into the human backstories behind his stories -- without falling into the trap of ignoring the big picture in favor of cheap and sentimental biography. His new book, Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World, is his best reporting so far -- a beautifully researched, engrossingly told story about how cDc and its members and offshoot groups invented much of what has become normal in the modern practice of tech and security, from coordinated disclosure policies, to hacker cons that welcome in the press and even feds, to hacker spaces, to proof-of-concept-based security disclosures, to less savory practices, like promulgating fake news and allowing toxic cultural pockets to fester where misogyny, abuse and racism all fester.

I read the book with great interest, not least because I was present or nearby when many of the events described in the book took place, and many of the principal characters are old, present or former friends of mine, including a few very dear friends indeed. Read the rest