Top 25 Quotes by Charles Platt

Merchandise from Wal-Mart has become as ubiquitous as the water supply. Yet, still, the company is rebuked and reviled by anyone claiming a social conscience and is lambasted by legislators as if its bad behavior places it somewhere between investment bankers and the Taliban.

In the early 1970s, phone phreaks manipulated the long-distance system using blue boxes that they built from sketchy photocopied schematics that were often riddled with errors. Not many had the skill to do this. Phreaking was restricted to a select few.

Unsurprisingly, an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) - once a luxury for room-sized computer installations - is now a standard item both in home offices and all the networked tiers above, protecting servers and online service providers, Internet backbones, phone companies, and even cable TV networks.

The public is eager for stories of True Cybercrime, and the media is happy to glamorize the subject. But when teenagers take the bait and live out our fantasies for us, we punish them for frightening us too much.

The idea of an e-book has been around since the late 1970s, when researchers at Xerox PARC got on the case. Their prototype used millions of little magnetic particles, black on one side and white on the other, loosely embedded in the surface of a soft sheet of rubber.