#1 Hacker: I feel surprisingly… unrocked

Cyberman with an electric guitar… So incredibly random…  so nerdy…  but yet, I cannot look away.

Of course, I had an entirely opposite to the  “World’s No. 1 Hacker” crap that’s been making the rounds.  The Register says the security community is “rocked” because of the allegations of plagiarism, racism, and general chicanery contained in the ebook.  I, at least, remain totally, completely, verifiably… unrocked.

Full disclosure: I only read about 10 pages at random from the ebook, so maybe I’m not the best judge.  But the few pages I skimmed seemed…  well, like a security book (maybe because it’s plagiarized from other security books.)   The only thing different about it seem to me to be the wall of text in the beginning about the awesomeness of Greg Evans:

“Innovator,” “leader,” “visionary”—just a few of the terms that describe Gregory D. Evans, andthe extraordinary range of talents and expertise that distinguish this multi-faceted author and cyber-security expert.

Sigh.  Really?  Anyway, I really didn’t want to spend too much cycles on this other than to ask who is reading this?  If you are a security practitioner, wouldn’t you read one of the (innumerable) other books out there?  If you are legitimately a youth trying to learn how to be a reet haxor or whatever, why would you read this rather than the ocean of data available on the internet that isn’t chock-full of self-aggrandizement?  I mean, is it just me?  Why, for example, would someone choose to read this book over something with a similar dearth of hacker cred – say for example Carolyn Meinel’s, “Überhacker II“?

Anyway… generally speaking, I’ve found that this kind of stuff tends to go away if we all just ignore it. But in the meantime, I would ask what market we in the mainstream security community aren’t serving that a book like this is able to gain any traction at all.

Edit:  As Diana mentioned yesterday, don’t forget to check out this awesome writeup by Ben Rothke about the plagiarism angle.