Rating: 
Summary: Another glimpse into the underground
Review: If you want a book to teach you about hacking, and the technical information surrounding hacking, this is not your book. If you are looking for a glimpse into hacker culture, and discover what people can do with a little curiousity in this modern wired world, definately read this book. As some of the other reviewers have said, this book is a little fluffy, and the authors seem to attempt to make the book read like a cheesy TV show. If you can look past the writing style you will find an interesting plot with many twists and turns through the phone company, the Secret Service and the legal system.
Rating: 
Summary: Painful to read: cliched and factually wrong
Review: I read this after reading Clifford Stoll's Cuckoo's Egg which is a much better book on the same subject matter. Stoll is just a smart and observant graduate student who simply tries to tell his story accurately. The 2 authors of Masters of Deception are apparently professional writers and they spend too much time trying to liven up what is essentially an account of high school and college kids playing on computers. You get the feeling they writing this with a screenplay in mind. The book is filled with cliches, bad metaphors, contrived rhetorical questions: "Destroy people's lives? Make them look like saints? Is this what hackers do?" There is very little interesting technical info and much of what there is is dumbed down and often wrong. The discussion of tymnet in chapter 13 is completely off. They obviously don't understand it. Cuckoo's Egg is much better and even the Littman books are better books on the same topic.
Rating:
Summary: a great read, even for the non-techies
Review: This is a fascinating journey into the world of international computer networks just before the birth of the Internet. While I do not fully understand the technical aspects of computer hacking in those days (much less now), my lack of knowledge did not hinder my understanding of the tale woven by these two fine authors. Good and evil are drawn with muddy lines, and the boundaries between curiosity and destruction are hard to define. I wavered between sympathy for the hacker protagonists and sympathy for those they hacked. In the end, I felt a little cheated by the sympathetic slant the story took. I think I would have more feeling for those boys if I could have seen how they changed and matured once the whip came down. Paul is the only one I feel could have actually turned himself around and made good, but perhaps the others truly did so. The book was published nearly ten years ago. I wonder if it is possible to find out what happened to the five after this story ended?
Rating:
Summary: "Easy to Understand" Hacking
Review: Michelle Slatalla and Joshua Quittner's Masters of Deception: The Gang that Ruled Cyberspace is about hackers, more specifically hackers that enjoy entering into the telephone companies computers and looking around or as they call it, "research." I recently borrowed this from our library for an assignment, and am planning on purchasing it and reading many times more.
The book follows the path of the MOD boys as the deal with pranks and "pliks" along with some very weird Secret Service raids. Quittner and Slatalla make this possibly boring read come to life by explaining all of the hacker underground in laymen terms.
Rating: 
Summary: Skip this one
Review: If you want a book on computer cracking that you can't put down, that will keep you up past your bedtime -- then skip this one and get The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll. Factual and detailed. The Masters of Deception is more a feelgood fuzzy kind of sociological study, light on facts and correlations. Not one to read a second time.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting... but dated
Review: Back in 1990 a small gang of telephone hackers managed to bring down the entire AT&T long lines network through what was essentially very crude hacking: They found the login and password for a major AT&T switch, and they shut it down. In terms of technical skill, this is about as sophisticated as disabling a car by stealing the battery. But at the time, when AT&T was looked on as the rock Gibralter, it was shocking that a group of kids could manage to bring it down so easily.Since then, both phone switch technology and the skills of hackers have increased, phone and computer technology has exploded in dozens of new wired and wireless services, and the Web has replaced the phone company as the target of many a youthful discordian. Given that, the tales of teenagers poking about in telephone switches and wide-open databases is pretty boring. The real heart of the story of "Masters" isn't the technology, of course, but the sociology and the personalities of the teens involved. When this story first broke, the players were portrayed as young geniuses who had mastered an arcane technology and beaten the giant phone company at their own game. The truth is somewhat less impressive and less interesting. None of these kids were geniuses, although they were for the most part pretty bright. Most of their hacks involved diving in dumpsters for technical manuals or posing as AT&T employees to gain access and information. What they were doing was as much con games as anything, and what they did with the information they gleaned wasn't terribly sophisticated or imaginative. Nor were they themselves particularly sophisticated in hiding their tracks- even after being charged with crimes they continued hacking away at other computer systems. In the end, there really isn't much to tell. A few teens and post teens get prison sentences. And no one seems to have learned very much.
Rating:
Summary: Don't Bother
Review: After reading Cuckoo's Egg, this book isn't even in the county let alone the ball park. Not only could I put it down, but I had to psych myself up to open it. It was a painfully boring read and glorifying of criminals. There were very bright individuals, but criminals nonetheless. This book did NOT convey that message.
Rating:
Summary: Masters of Borification
Review: Have you ever hacked into a telephone company or any computer for that matter? Well if you are really into computer hacking and computer language then the book Masters of Deception by Michelle Slatalla and Joshua Quittner is a book for you. Masters of Deception is about two young boys in Brooklyn, New York in the 1980s that hack into the phone company computer. The MOD (Masters of Deception) is a gang of computer hackers, who just happen to go into a hacking war with LOD (Legion of Doom) another hacking gang. If you are not into computer hacking I would suggest not wasting your time reading this book. Overall I did not like the book. I thought it was absolutely boring and would not suggest reading it unless you know about and are really interested in computer programming. I would not waste my time reading Masters of Deception because it has hardly any story plot. For the first sixty pages or so all it talks about is Paul, one of the kids in MOD, calling random numbers trying to get a hold of another computer so he can hack into it.
Rating:
Summary: Slightly cliched, but a good read.
Review: This book is essentially a slightly jumbled, chronologically organized log of all the events and occurences that lead to the hacking scandal of the early 1990's and the war between MOD and LOD, two rival hacker groups. The book begins with an introduction to all these hacker kids, and continues on through all their hacking exploits, life occurences, and various important events leading up to the cyberspace war, and computer law scandal. The book is cliched in some ways, and attempts to answer the question of what a hacker really is, and what a hacker really does. In the end the book ends up being a bit of a cautionary tale. None of the boys' deepest feelings or psyches are really explored, and it really seems that if they ever get below the surface to show what they're really thinking, it's very brief. In the end it seems a bit like reading a log of events. All in all the book is informative, and there are few, if any, technical mistakes (not that there is much technical dialogue to begin with). I urge you to buy this book, simply to be informed, and if you're up for some light reading on the subject, it's likely you'll enjoy it.
Rating: 
Summary: Highly Entertaining
Review: This book was cool, very interesting and highly entertaining. If you liked Cyberpunk (ISBN 0684818620) you will like this one even better. This book tells the story of old school NYC hackers like Phiber Optic, MOD and others, back in the late 80's hacking around the phone company networks and causing trouble. =) Since I started messing with computers back in the days of the Commodore 64, BBS's, and before the Internet was mainstream, this book was especially cool. Made me nostalgic for the old days. =)
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