Digital Fortress
I just finished Digital Fortress by Dan Brown. Same guy who wrote Da Vinci Code.
The book is a techno-thriller set in the NSA and centered around cryptography.
It sucks. Awful. Barely good enough to light a charcoal grill.
What kills it isn’t the writing or, even, the story line, but the technical details surrounding the NSA, cryptography, computer security, and related technology.
I like techno-thrillers (along with many other genres) and can overlook the occasional bit of techno-stupidity in an otherwise well told tale.
Digital Fortress is just too technically moronic. In particular, the stupidity is at the center of the plot.
How stupid? Passwords in the NSA are only 5 letters… and never have spaces in them but are still super-secure. The NSA uses FTP as a secure means of transferring files. The NSA uses wireless keyboards and allows employees to come and go with equipment at will. Random computer viruses will infect custom system architectures and OSes that exist nowhere else in the world. All of this while portraying the NSA as the most advanced computing center in the world. It was so poorly done that even my Mom saw through it (she is not technically inclined).
Sadly, one of the key characters within plot is an expert in romance languages and that particular angle is played well within the book. But not well enough to overcome the rest of it.
Don’t waste your time on this book.
March 13th, 2007 at 12:01 pm
[...] DaVinci Code was a remarkably successful work of fiction by an author that doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to technology. The X Files were not the government’s way of disclosing secret events to the illuminati [...]
March 7th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
[...] In short, it computer oriented, current themed, science fiction that is the polar opposite of Digital Fortress. [...]