"Ghost in the Wires" by Kevin Mitnick

Unlike his other books, this one is pretty much an autobiography of Mitnick.  The book starts when he's a teenager who doesn't really fit in the common social groups and starts to do HAM radio chats to find friends.  HAM radio leads to phone "phreaking" which leads to computer hacking.  He starts small, hacking free long distance for his mother, then hacking school computer systems - "just for fun", then moving onto hacking commercial companies like DEC and downloading source code for their top paid Operating Systems, like VMS. All for fun, of course, he claims that he never sold any information or code, and never used any credit card numbers that he obtained.  This might as well be true, as he pretty much lived most of the time around the poverty line standard, and if he really made a huge amount of money with his hacks there would be no need for him to beg his mother and grandmother to sponsor him from their meager savings.

His hacker friends have pretty much all betrayed him to the authorities, and even though some of them he forgave (why?), he does claim that the ancient proverb "There's no honor amongst thieves" is still very true and valid.  His best friend not only betrays him to the feds, but also becomes his wife's lover, which is a really shitty thing to do.

The feds come off as some horrible people, and so do pretty much all law enforcement people in the book, with a few honorable exceptions.  Sometimes these things ring true, like Mitnick being put in solitary and in top security prisons with uber-violent offenders, while in reality he was never aggressive or violent towards anybody.  Seems that his reputation and rumors have scared law enforcement people and judges and they wanted to err on the cautious and punitive side, because they really did not understand the subject matter and did not want to be played for fools.

Mitnick is amazing in what he calls "Social Engineering" which most people would call "lying" and passes himself for a variety of different people, even cops and FBI officers, and extracts all kind of information from unsuspecting patsies who should have known better.  Mitnick is very proud of his Social Engineering skills, and often describes the meticulous research with which he approaches every such situation.

Eventually he does get caught, despite having piles of birth certificates (from South Dakota!), false identities and all kinds of phone faking equipment.  He spends some pretty rough time, a couple of years, while waiting for trail, and is so broke he cannot even afford his own lawyer.  He gets sentenced to a couple of years, after which he becomes a security consultant where the book ends.  This book is published much after the "Takedown" book which describes his case from the POV of the law enforcement people, because the judge ordered that Mitnick is not to profit from his story for a certain amount of years afterwards.

Today, some people even forgot Mitnick - I read a review on Amazon claiming that Julian Assange (!) is a bigger hacker.  Newsflash: Assange is a journalist, not a hacker.  I guess time destroys everything, which is why even bloodthirsty tyrants are seen in a positive light after a few centuries have passed.

The book is written in a very easy, conversational style and is monotone and repetitive at times, but still a good read.  At some points the reader wants to yell "Kev, don't do it! Why would you do that Kev, when you know you're sure to get caught?" but I guess there's some compulsion at play here, so we cannot assume a totally logical actor.

"Red Mars" by Kim Stanley Robinson

I had this book on my reading list for a long time, but deprioritized it multiple times, as stories about Mars never much interested me.  Mars has always seemed mundane, and little green Martians never stroke any kind of connection to me, neither did stories of Mars colonization (why waste all that money, time and resources when we can just build generation ships like Clarke's Rama, or make asteroids inhabitable).  On the other hand, this novel has won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and that is usually a good indicator of an amazing novel (to think I'd never discover The Wind-Up Girl or The Three Body Problem if I didn't scour the Hugo and Nebula awards - two best Sci Fi works of modern times!).

Not in this case.  The novel is pretty average; the science is OK, but nothing special, the characters are paper thin, hollow shells, uninteresting and devoid of complexity, basically just reciting replicas without any real feeling.  John Boone, the wild west super hero that's addicted to drugs, Frank Chalmers, the bad guy who is really just incompetent and petty, and Maya Toitovna (I can't help but reading her last name as Hoyti-Toytovna each time :) the materialistic Russian chick who uses her vagina to achieve her goals, and of course the all-mysterious Hiroko Ai (Ai is love in Japanese), who is supposed to add exoticism to the story, especially with her relation to The Coyote (another useless character), and her acting as the Queen Mother Bee to an army of children later.  Why do Western authors think Japanese are exotic?  Japanese cultural tropes are a mainstay in the Western World, only if you take a little time to look.

The "First 100" get over to Mars on Ares, the long-haul ship assembled in space.  Once they get there, the primitive primate brain takes over and they fuck (a lot!), cheat each other, kill each other, split in petty little groups, based on petty beliefs and become a sort of the Wild West for Earth, which is overpopulated and ran by huge corporation (TransNats).  Eventually there's a rebellion because the TransNats keep sending more immigrants to Mars and the local infrastructure cannot support it, many people are killed, most infrastructure is destroyed, but not everybody and not all, because, of course, we have a sequel coming!

Overall a very boring and disappointing book - I will not be reading the sequels.