dhtns

In the spirit of the fact that a few of these book suggestions have been made available online for free, I feel obligated to point out that Cory Doctorow has chosen to make both Little Brother and Homeland (the sequel to Little Brother, mentioned by another commenter) available in a few different formats on his website. [1] [2]

[1] https://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/

[2] https://craphound.com/homeland/download/

"The Right to Read" by Richard Stallman[1] is certainly not a novel, but it is a short bit of fiction about cybercrime (or rather, what would happen if certain day-to-day developer activities were made criminal) and is certainly worth the <20 minutes that it takes to read.

I seem to recall that it received a bit of hysterical "oh that could never happen" reaction when it was released but I can't seem to find a source for that recollection. It may have mostly been a reaction that was generated by the somewhat emotive backlash that tends to appear whenever Stallman makes a statement about "freedom" though, and the story certainly is allegorical, so anyone who disagreed with him may have posted about it online and skewed the discussion in that direction. I can't recall much about the specific reaction at the time (it was more than 10 years ago now) though so much of the above is really just poorly-informed speculation on my part.

It is, unfortunately, disappointingly prescient and it's something that I think everyone working in the tech industry should read, regardless of whether they think they agree with RMS's views on software freedom and intellectual property.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

Edit: I just re-read it and my initial estimate of "<20 minutes" was way off. I had forgotten just how short the story actually was, so perhaps my recollection about the reaction to the allegory isn't entirely accurate either. Nonetheless, I'm leaving this comment here as witness to the fallibility of my memory.

I'm not sure which specific Kevin Mitnick book you're actually referring to or looking for but the book "Underground" is actually by Suelette Dreyfus and is about the nascent hacker/cracker subculture of the late '80s and early '90s. It was researched by/with Julian Assange (not written by him as another commenter has stated) who is known in the book as "Mendax". [1]

Interestingly, the book was released for free online in 2001, at the suggestion of Julian Assange, and the author credits this online release for expanding both the quantity and range of different people that would end up reading the book. [2]

The book can be read online (in HTML) at [2] or various ebook formats can be downloaded from Project Gutenberg at [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_(Dreyfus_book)

[2] https://suelette.home.xs4all.nl/underground/justin/preface.h...

[3] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4686