CodeClinic.com
Title
Code Clinic
Description
Books
I had a recent trip out of town and picked up "The Digital Fortress" at the airport based on rave recommendations I'd heard for "The DaVinci Code" by the same author. It was awful. My wife had just borrowed "The DaVinci Code" from a friend and I had to call her to ask if it had anything to do with computers. Because I'd have to forbid her from reading it if so. The story is about some superstar cryptographers at the NSA and their suspense-filled race to break the unbreakable code!!! Obviously, there are going to be technical simplifications and errors in an interesting work of fiction, but they were so big and so central to the entire premise of the book that I would like to smack the author. In his intro, he thanks "three former NSA employees who communicated via anonymous remailers". Before even starting the story I said to myself "That's pure bs to artificially claim credibility". After reading the story, I wonder if the author may have been hoodwinked by some school kids during their summer vacation.
The central plot point is the prospect of this 'unbreakable' code, which gains its supernatural powers via "mutation strings". The general idea is that before encryption, the "plaintext" is "scrambled", so that even when the "encryption" is "broken", the "reader" has nothing but "gibberish". Now, I will confess to briefly considering multiple compression passes on data in my youth (...if it zips to 50%, then zipping that will shrink another 50%! Then I'll put it on a Stacker drive and rule the world!), but I didn't go write a book with my name on it before figuring out that was stupid.
I could really rant for a while, but I'll try to leave it at that. But let me just add, "That's not how computer viruses work, either."
Languages
English
Contact
- Pfeiffer
-
- Denver Colorado
- United States 80224-2749
-
- (303) 756-9639
Additional Information
Related Domains
