Back in 1984, a lonely, weird kid calling himself Grandmaster Ratte' formed a hacker group in Lubbock, Texas. called the Cult of the Dead Cow, a name inspired by a nearby slaughterhouse. In the decades to come, cDc would become one of the dominant forces on the BBS scene and then the internet -- endlessly inventive, funny and prankish, savvy and clever, and sometimes reckless and foolish -- like punk-rock on a floppy disk. Joe Menn (previously) is a veteran tech reporter whom I've known since the Napster wars, and he has always had a knack for digging into the human backstories behind his stories -- without falling into the trap of ignoring the big picture in favor of cheap and sentimental biography.