A few days ago, I was reading BoingBoing and this post happened to catch my eye, since I've read a bit about Tor and onion routing. I read the thing, and went on and read the actual Instructable, of course. The post mentioned a novel, Little Brother, that it said had inspired not just the one Instructable, but a whole series of HOWTOs. At that point I looked the book up on Wikipedia, and despite the small article size, it had a link to Cory's (the author's) site, right in the middle of a sentence stating that it was available for free there as a Creative Commons download. Obviously, I sought out the download and got it in HTML and started reading the thing. I liked it enough to download the PDF version and put it on my PSP (I use bookr as a portable PDF reader). Over the next couple of days, the only book I read was Little Brother. I finally finished it at 2 in the morning three days after I downloaded it, having gone to bed at 12. And boy, was it good. If you need convincing and you're a Neil Gaiman fan, know that Gaiman himself recommends that book over "pretty much every other book" he's read this year. Now that's something.

Little Brother is about a San Franciscan high school junior named Marcus Yallow whose school constantly spies on its students using gait-recognition cameras and arphids and SchoolBook laptops that watch their every move. Marcus likes to subvert the school's security by nuking arphids, hacking his SchoolBook so he can do whatever he wants on it with impunity, and putting sharp gravel in his shoes so the gait-recognition cameras can't spot him. One day, Marcus and his buddy Darryl ditch school in order to go investigate the latest clue from the current ARG that they're playing. While they're in the Tenderloin looking for clues, a huge explosion goes off, destroying the Bay Bridge. Pandemonium ensues, and Marcus and his ARG team end up nearly getting crushed in the crowd trying to get to the BART station near by. They move against the crowd and make it to the street above, where they realize that Darryl was stabbed by someone in the crowd. Marcus tries to flag down police vehicles to help, but they ignore him, until he jumps in front of a military-looking Hummer full of guys carrying rifles (who turn out to be part of the DHS), who then abduct him and his friends and take him to a secret prison where they interrogate them, thinking them to be enemy combatants. They take a special interest in Marcus because his cell phone is encrypted, and he refuses at first to give them the password for it. Eventually, he gives up all his passwords, and the DHS lets him and his friends go back to San Francisco (sans Darryl), with a warning that they'll be watching him. Marcus and Co. find out that in their absence, SanFran has become a police state, with everyone being surveilled by the DHS. They embark on an epic adventure of awesomeness, using technology and smarts to outwit the DHS and get them out of San Francisco.

The best part is, Cory Doctorow really knows what he's talking about when it comes to computers, so every time the book gets technical, it's all real. Not like all the crap one finds in movies like Hackers (although everyone loves Hackers, especially me), where they somehow managed to get everything wrong despite having 2600's Emmanuel Goldstein on hand as an adviser.

So read that book. You can download it if you'd like to try it before you buy it, because this guy definitely deserves your money.

In other news, I have somehow made some sense of the term "Human Condition", although I'm still no fan of it and I won't endeavour to explain it here.

Reading Bruce Sterling. Listening to Incubus.