Wil Wheaton's Reviews > Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace

I followed this story as it unfolded in the early 90s through the pages of Phrack, cud, and other philes and ezines. I talked to Bloodaxe and Phiber on #mindvox back in the old days, but other than Emmanuel Goldstein, I never really *knew* the people who were central to this story, so it was interesting to relive it all through a journalist's eyes.

Like all of the stories written about the LOD/MOD feud, the subjects contest the facts as presented in the book, and like all of the stories written about hacking in the 80s and early 90s, it's difficult to tell what's fact and what's myth, but even then, when it was happening, the only people who knew what really happened were the guys who dialed into Tymnet, and then as now it was in their personal interest to make themselves seem a little taller, their conquests a little more epic, their accusers a little more dastardly.

In other words, you have to take everything in this book with a grain of salt ... just like we did when we telnetted into some long-forgotten BBS and read The History of MoD back in the old days.

This book probably deserves between 3 and 3.5 stars. The authors frequently switched between present and past tense, in what I think was an effort to make readers feel like they're listening to 18 year-olds talk, but I found jarring and distracting. Ultimately, though, I graded it on a curve and rounded up to 4 because I loved the subject, and the opportunity it gave me to revisit a time when I explored what would become the internet, 80 columns at a time, at 14.4k, dreaming of connecting at 56k some day.