The Human Hacking Field Guide

An unlikely female computer hacker (= software enthusiast, not a computer intruder)-wannabe is getting taught by an even more unlikely female computer hacker. It takes place in Los Angeles, California and is written in English.

The story is original and complete and is made available, along with its source code under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike-License (Unported), either version 3.0, or at your option, any later version. Share, build upon, even sell, and Enjoy! (As long as you keep the derivatives under the same licence.)

Update: (12 April, 2011) there’s now a new version 2 of the story with some improvements to the plot and style, and it’s now written using version 5 of DocBook/XML. I’m planning some smaller future improvements, but it will be OK as it is.

The Text

Version 2 (Most recent)

• HTML to read online
• DocBook 5/XML source
• Adobe PDF (intended as a self-contained document - please don’t print it.).
• Word RTF.

Hebrew Translation

• Translation to Hebrew - by the author - work under progress.
• Sources:
  
  • Source in text format (requires XML-Grammar-Fiction’s Fiction-Text processing, in order to render)
  • XSLT stylesheet to post-process the resultant DocBook 5/XML source.

Arabic Translation

• Translation to Literary Arabic - by Vieq.
• OpenDocument Text Source

Acknowledgements

The stylesheet and images used for the text are based on the Twin Triangles style from Open Source Web Design.

Thanks go to Uri Bruck, Gai Borshack, Omer Zak, Drew Dexter and others who have read and reviewed early, incomplete, drafts of this story.

Conclusions and Reviews

Read these only after you have finished reading the story.

Spin-offs and Derivative Works

• The Human Hacking Field Guide Wikia - a community attempt to improve the original story, under the CC-by-sa.

  For context see the discussion when I mentioned the story on the LiveJournal.com Linux community and the post about “Remixing The Human Hacking Field Guide”. I’m not sure I liked the direction this spin-off / remix had initially taken but you may still like it.

• Arabic translation by Vieq.

If you enjoyed the story, but still think you can do better, I would love to see more spin-offs, from making the story a little different, to writing sequels, prequels, etc. to video or audio versions of it. If you find the CC-by-sa too permissive, then drop me a line and we may be able to negotiate a better, commercial, licence.

Old Versions

Version 1 (Old)

• HTML to read online
• DocBook/XML source