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Copyright Notice:
2 The text may not be held available for public download from
any site without the express permission in writing of the copyright
holder - contact details below.
4 The file or any part thereof may not be included in any CD-
ROM or similar electronic publishing medium, whether for payment
or otherwise
peter@pmsommer.com
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While writing the book I was always aware that within me was an
editorial fight between prudence and the accusation of punch-
pulling. Most of the time prudence won and shortly before
publication I was afraid that most readers would regard it as
rather feeble. However the coincidence of the news-stories,
quite unco-ordinated by any professional hype-merchant, sent the
book off to a flying start. The publisher's first print run was
modest and the bookshops very quickly ran out. A reprint was
rapildly ordered but the temporary non-availability created the
myth that the book had been banned. A London evening newspaper
announced I had been arrested. That wasn't true either; I was
never at any stage even interviewed by the police and all my
meetings with the UK's specialist computer crime cops have been
quite cordial. But all the stories helped helped the book's
reputation. It remains one of the few computer titles ever to
appear in a main-stream best-seller list - the London Sunday Times,
for 7 weeks in a total of 8.
Four editions appeared in all, of which the last was written not
by me but by Steve Gold, one of the hackers accused of the Prince
Phillip stunt - he and his colleague were eventually acquitted in
a case which went all the way up to England's highest court, the
House of Lords.
By 1990, public alarm at the activities of some hackers lead to
the passing into law of the Computer Misuse Act which explicitly
criminalised any form unauthorised access to computers. To
continue publishing the Hacker's Handbook thereafter might have
constituted an incitement to commit an offence. I would like to
think that, should the occasion arise, I would be willing to
stand up against an overmighty government which trampled on free
speech, but I really didn't believe that the Hacker's Handbook
quite fell into that category. The Fourth Edition was allowed to
go quietly out-of-print and was not reprinted.
Hugo Cornwall
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