Dan Brown - Digital Fortress book

[Robert J. Hansen]

Andre Amorim wrote:
> I'm in the midle of this book rigth now, so let me try to finish it LOL...
> by the way... is there any other book, for a guy like me that find
> pleasant read about neuromancer, crypto, computers and fiction ...

Off-topic, but hey, we all need to unwind and relax sometime, right?
All these books are, IMO, absolutely excellent, and all connect in one
way or another -- in intelligent and accurate ways -- to computer security.



Charles Stross, _The Atrocity Archives_.
  This one's an excellent mix of Len Deighton spy thriller and
  _Dilbert_.  It's also rife with mathematical in-jokes for people
  astute enough to notice them.  Bob Howard is one of geekdom's
  great characters: he's every single tech nerd who's ever worked
  in a large, faceless bureaucracy.

Neal Stephenson, _Cryptonomicon_.
  It's a little dated now, but when it came out this book was an
  excellent slice of the Zeitgeist of the dot-com boom.  Most of
  the crypto holds up relatively well; the algorithms have been
  broken, but the principles are sound.

Rudy Rucker.  Just about anything, really.
  Rucker is a mathematician and computer scientist.  It shows in
  his writing.

Greg Egan, _Permutation City_.
  Words fail me when I try to describe it.  I guess you could say
  it's one long discourse on Nick Bostrum's simulation hypothesis,
  or maybe the implications of the 't Hooft holographic hypothesis.
  No matter how you slice it, this book will bend your mind.

Daniel Keys Moran.  Just about anything, really.
  Moran is a database geek in Los Angeles.  In the late '80s and
  early '90s he published a trilogy of books.  Trent's discourse on
  the root causes of network failure, and the consequences of
  widespread network failure on a networked society, is one of the
  best technology-explained-for-the-layman things I've read.




... For movies, the best one is hands-down _Sneakers_, a 1992 crime
caper starring Robert Redford and Ben Kingsley.  In 1992, Kingsley
talked about how he might be able to crash the entire world economic
system with the aid of computers and some carefully chosen bad
information.  We laughed at it then: what he was talking about was pure,
utter science fiction.

In 2009, we're seeing that happen all around us, and few of us are laughing.