Just finished reading Bruce Sterling's newest novel. I enjoyed it and suggest it will interest hard sci-fi fans. Its a very much post cypherpunk world he writes about, e.g.: " ... It all had to do with unbreakable encryption, digital authentification, anonymous remailing, and network untraceability. These were all computer networking techniques that had once been considered very odd and naughty. They were also so elementary to do, that once they were in place, they couldn't be stopped without tearing the whole Net down. Of course once these techniques were in place, they conclusively destroyed the ability of governments to control the flow of electronic funds, anywhere, anytime, for any purpose. As it happened, this process had pretty much destroyed any human control at all over the modern electronic economy. ..."