Laptops with Stickers

I don't have a great picture of mine that isn't obscured by other "stuff" in frame, but for an idea of what my laptop looks like, see:

https://fogbeam.com/free-kevin.jpg

I never understood people siding with Kevin. He always struck me as a fraud/pseudo-hacker and never did anything technical or substantial.

Some of those books seem interesting, how were the memory, attention, behaviour ones?

On that particular day I was going through a bunch of different books, trying to work out what my plan was going to be for the next little while. Of those ones, I wound up finishing A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance and the Sensation and Perception one. I also knocked out a pretty good chunk of the one titled just Memory. The rest got bumped down the stack a bit.

I kinda getting back to the place now where I want to revisit The Organization of Behavior. That's the seminal work by Hebb that introduced Hebbian Learning and I'm on this big quest now to revisit a lot of old school approaches to learning & neural networks (in something at least approximating chronological order, although I won't be super strict about it) and code up implementations of each. So basically, some sort of Hebbian Learning system, a "McCulloch & Pitts Neuron", a Perceptron with the Perceptron Convergence Algorithm, Selfridge's Pandemonium Architecture, and so on, gradually working my way up to the current SOTA.

I'm about to finish up the Minsky & Papert Perceptrons book, and once I finish that I will probably read Volume 2 of the Parallel Distributed Processing series, then go back to Hebb.

FWIW, that Memory book was pretty fascinating. The general subject of human memory is, both simply taken for its own sake, and taken as inspiration for approaches to AI. I'm slightly more interested in AI than human memory qua human memory, but in either case it's fascinating material.

I'm not really here to defend OR condemn Mitnick. I was just always fascinated with his story, from the first time I read that Hafner & Markoff book Cyberpunk back in the early 1990's. Anyway, one of the notable aspects of his story was the way he was held for a rather long time without even so much as a bail hearing... something many people believed (and still believe) was blatantly unconstitutional. That was, as I recall, the motivation for a fair amount of the "Free Kevin" rabble-rousing, even among people who acknowledged that he had broken the law and deserved some sort of punishment.

By the time I bought that particular laptop and put that sticker on it, (about 3 years ago now, I guess) Kevin had long since been out of jail, had gone legal and was running his own security consulting company. I put one of those one mostly out of nostalgia and as a conversation starter. Perhaps surprisingly, I've had a modest number of people approach me when I was out in public and ask "Who's Kevin?" or say "Kevin Mitnick, right? Yeah, I remember that guy... I was at DEFCON this one year and ... <conversation ensues>".

Once you understand that everything in this world is a system, then you'll see how he was a true hacker.