
Steven Levy is editor at large at Wired, and author of eight books, including the new Facebook: the Inside Story, the definitive history of that controversial company. His previous works include the legendary computer history Hackers, Artificial Life, the Unicorn 's Secret, In the Plex (the story of Google, chose as Amazon and Audible's best business book of 2011), and Crypto, which won the Frankfurt E-book Award for the best non-fiction book of 2001. He was previously the chief technology correspondent for Newsweek. He lives in New York City.
by Steven Levy
Rating: 4.0 ⭐
• 4 recommendations ❤️
“The most interesting book ever written about Google” ( The Washington Post ) delivers the inside story behind the most successful and admired technology company of our time, now updated with a new Afterword.Google is arguably the most important company in the world today, with such pervasive influence that its name is a verb. The company founded by two Stanford graduate students—Larry Page and Sergey Brin—has become a tech giant known the world over. Since starting with its search engine, Google has moved into mobile phones, computer operating systems, power utilities, self-driving cars, all while remaining the most powerful company in the advertising business.Granted unprecedented access to the company, Levy disclosed that the key to Google’s success in all these businesses lay in its engineering mindset and adoption of certain internet values such as speed, openness, experimentation, and risk-taking. Levy discloses details behind Google’s relationship with China, including how Brin disagreed with his colleagues on the China strategy—and why its social networking initiative failed; the first time Google tried chasing a successful competitor. He examines Google’s rocky relationship with government regulators, particularly in the EU, and how it has responded when employees left the company for smaller, nimbler start-ups.In the Plex is the “most authoritative…and in many ways the most entertaining” (James Gleick, The New York Book Review ) account of Google to date and offers “an instructive primer on how the minds behind the world’s most influential internet company function” (Richard Waters, The Wall Street Journal ).
He has had unprecedented access to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg for three years. And now renowned tech writer Steven Levy delivers the definitive history of one of America's most powerful and controversial companies: Facebook.In his sophomore year of college, Mark Zuckerberg created a simple website to serve as a campus social network. The site caught on like wildfire, and soon students nationwide were on Facebook.Today, Facebook is nearly unrecognizable from Zuckerberg's first, modest iteration. It has grown into a tech giant, the largest social media platform and one of the most gargantuan companies in the world, with a valuation of more than $576 billion and almost 3 billion users, including those on its fully owned subsidiaries, Instagram and WhatsApp. There is no denying the power and omnipresence of Facebook in American daily life. And in light of recent controversies surrounding election-influencing "fake news" accounts, the handling of its users' personal data, and growing discontent with the actions of its founder and CEO, never has the company been more central to the national conversation.Based on hundreds of interviews inside and outside the company, Levy's sweeping narrative digs deep into the whole story of the company that has changed the world and reaped the consequences.
by Steven Levy
Rating: 4.0 ⭐
If you've ever made a secure purchase with your credit card over the Internet, then you have seen cryptography, or "crypto", in action. From Stephen Levy—the author who made "hackers" a household word—comes this account of a revolution that is already affecting every citizen in the twenty-first century. Crypto tells the inside story of how a group of "crypto rebels"—nerds and visionaries turned freedom fighters—teamed up with corporate interests to beat Big Brother and ensure our privacy on the Internet. Levy's history of one of the most controversial and important topics of the digital age reads like the best futuristic fiction.
A mere fifteen years ago, computer nerds were seen as marginal weirdos, outsiders whose world would never resonate with the mainstream. That was before one pioneering work documented the underground computer revolution that was about to change our world forever. With groundbreaking profiles of Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club, and more, Steven Levy's Hackers brilliantly captured a seminal moment when the risk-takers and explorers were poised to conquer twentieth-century America's last great frontier. And in the Internet age, the hacker ethic-first espoused here-is alive and well.
by Steven Levy
Rating: 4.0 ⭐
The creation of the Mac in 1984 catapulted America into the digital millennium, captured a fanatic cult audience, and transformed the computer industry into an unprecedented mix of technology, economics, and show business. Now veteran technology writer and Newsweek senior editor Steven Levy zooms in on the great machine and the fortunes of the unique company responsible for its evolution. Loaded with anecdote and insight, and peppered with sharp commentary, Insanely Great is the definitive book on the most important computer ever made. It is a must-have for anyone curious about how we got to the interactive age.
A Newsweek technology columnist traces the creation and popularity of the iPod, discusses such topics as Apple's unlikely position at the forefront of the technology, the iPod's role in changing the face of recorded music, and the contributions of CEO Steve Jobs and his team. 100,000 first printing.
This enthralling book alerts us to nothing less than the existence of new varieties of life. Some of these species can move and eat, see, reproduce, and die. Some behave like birds or ants. One such life form may turn out to be our best weapon in the war against AIDS.What these species have in common is that they exist inside computers, their DNA is digital, and they have come into being not through God's agency but through the efforts of a generation of scientists who seek to create life in silico.But even as it introduces us to these brilliant heretics and unravels the intricacies of their work. Artificial Life examines its subject's dizzying philosophical Is a self-replicating computer program any less alive than a flu virus? Are carbon-and-water-based entities merely part of the continuum of living things? And is it possible that one day "a-life" will look back at human beings and dismiss us as an evolutionary way station -- or, worse still, a dead end?
It’s hard to imagine a better subject than the life and times of Steve Jobs—charismatic and difficult, mysterious and inspiring, with a biography that might have been plucked from Greek myth. In the wake of his death WIRED presents Steve Revolutionary, an eBook featuring our best stories about him. The anthology begins with a remembrance by Wired senior writer Steven Levy, who interviewed Jobs many times over the last two decades. We continue with six other stories that track Jobs on his uncanny rise, his dramatic fall, and his spectacular, unlikely return to Apple.
Offers a portrait of Ira Einhorn, who preached alternative living in the sixties, ushered in the New Age in the early seventies, and who disappeared while awaiting trial for the murder of his girlfriend
by Steven Levy
Rating: 5.0 ⭐
シリコンヴァレーのスーパースターを夢見る名もなき起業家たちに必要なものはただひとつ─「Yコンビネーター」。シリコンヴァレー最強のITスタートアップ養成所だ。Twitter、Facebookに続く、新しいビジネスが生み出される怒涛の訓練生活をスティーヴン・レヴィがレポートする。
by Steven Levy
Qui aurait cru qu’une poignée de hackers binoclards seraient à l’origine de la plus grande révolution du xxe siècle ? Le livre culte de Steven Levy, histoire vraie de l’équipe de geeks qui ont changé le monde.Précision : un « hacker » n’est pas un vulgaire « pirate informatique ». Un hacker est un « bricoleur de code ». Son truc : plonger dans les entrailles de la machine.Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Mark Zuckerberg ont commencé leurs brillantes carrières comme hackers…La plupart ne paient pas de mine mais tous partagent une même philosophie, une idée simple et élégante comme la logique qui gouverne l’informatique : l’ouverture, le partage, le refus de l’autorité et la nécessité d’agir par soi-même, quoi qu’il en coûte, pour changer le monde.C’est ce que Steven Levy appelle l’Éthique des hackers, une morale qui ne s’est pas exprimée dans un pesant manifeste, mais que les hackers authentiques ont mise en pratique dans leur vie quotidienne. Ce sont eux qui ont œuvré, dans l’obscurité, à la mise en marche de la révolution informatique.Depuis les laboratoires d’intelligence artificielle du MIT dans les années 1950 jusqu’aux gamers des années 1980, en passant par toutes les chambres de bonne où de jeunes surdoués ont consacré leurs nuits blanches à l’informatique, Steven Levy les a presque tous rencontrés. Voici leur histoire.
by Steven Levy
by Steven Levy
by Steven Levy
The true story of Ira Einhorn, the Philadelphia antiwar crusader, environmental activist, and New Age guru with a murderous dark side.During the cultural shockwaves of the 1960s and ’70s, Ira Einhorn - nicknamed the “Unicorn” - was the leading radical voice for the antiwar movement at the University of Pennsylvania. At his side were such noted activists as Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. A brilliantly articulate advocate for peace in a turbulent era, he rallied followers toward the growing antiestablishment causes of free love, drugs, and radical ecological reform.In 1979, when the mummified remains of his girlfriend, Holly Maddux, a Bryn Mawr flower child from Tyler, Texas, were found in a trunk in his apartment, Einhorn claimed a CIA frame-up. Incredibly, the network of influential friends, socialites, and powerful politicians he’d charmed and manipulated over the years supported him. Represented by renowned district attorney and future senator Arlen Specter, Einhorn was released on bail. But before trial, he fled the country to an idyllic town in the French wine region and disappeared. It would take more than 20 years - and two trials - to finally bring Einhorn to justice.Based on more than two years of research and 250 interviews, as well as the chilling private journals of Einhorn and Maddux, prize-winning journalist Steven Levy paints an astonishing and complicated portrait of a man motivated by both genius and rage. The basis for 1998 NBC television miniseries The Hunt for the Unicorn Killer, The Unicorn’s Secret is a “spellbinding sociological/true crime study”, revealing the dark and tragic dimensions of a man who defined an era, only to shatter its ideals (Publishers Weekly).
by Steven Levy
by Steven Levy
by Steven Levy
アマゾンのジェフ・ベゾスは虎視眈々とこの機会を狙っていた。2011年9月28日、創業以来15年間にわたってやってきたことのひとつの到達点である「キンドル・ファイア」を発表した。タブレット市場で大きなシェアを占めるiPadとは異なる、アマゾンならではの戦略の核心は一体どこにあるのか?「なぜそんなことをやるの?」という質問に「なぜやってはいけない?」と常に返してきたベゾスは、目下ホスティングから宇宙旅行までをそのビジネスの射程に捉えている。希代のテクノロジストの軌跡と、その知られざる夢と野望。(US版「WIRED」2011年12月号掲載)