Crack99

The Book in 1 Sentence

Listen to the story of the investigation and prosecution of the largest software pirating website and largest intellectual property theft trial of US history.

Brief Review

In this book you follow the investigation from David Hall and his team as they navigate the first real case of cyber theft. David does a great job of taking what could be a VERY technical and legalese filled book and breaking down each portion to make it digestible to the everyday reader. This is a book that can be read by any person without any previous knowledge in US law or cyber technical information.

Why I Read this book

I work in the cyber industry and the use of pirated software was massive when I started my career and so it was interesting how much of this I would recognize/how much has changed.

In-Depth Review

So I should be honest, and now that I am well beyond that statute of limitations, years ago, I pirated software (not the ones in the book specifically or from this site or others specifically like it), and used them/collected them because I might use them. Like yours or your dad's box of cables. After listening to these book, I recognize some of the techniques, problems, and instructions provided.

When you are young in your career/young in general/new to technology the idea of the level of effort, time spent, R&D that goes into software development. Knowing how much time and effort I spend on my own programs and because of that, people feel that this is a victimless crime.

This book does a fantastic job of pointing out all the opposites of those thoughts and feelings, the amount of damage to people and companies that software piracy does. David takes a great amount of time explaining all of this as well as the entire legal process that they went through. The idea of attempting to get a Chinese national into a country for extradition is by itself a tremendous weight to lift legally. Let alone attempting to try a case for a law that has never been tried before this.

There are a couple of times in the book that I felt the additional stories not related to Crack99 were explained in more detail than required, but at the end of the story and book I completely understand the additional threading. Specifically you can point toward the introduction of malware into the cracking process and the geopolitical implications of cracking.

How my life / behavior / thoughts / ideas have changed as a result of reading the book.

Not because of this book, but I no longer pirate software and haven't in a VERY long time. This book really just puts a lot of perspective onto the evils of that activity.

Rating

As I said in the Brief Review, this book at the potential to be highly technical and full or legal jargon that would have been made the book excessively hard to read. However, David does a great job of explaining those items and making realistic examples to why it is important to prevent this in the future especially with the open threat from Chinese PLA Policies about theft of foreign digital assets. 8/10

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