Quote:
Originally Posted by kacir
than I have made a mistake by starting to read The Digital Fortress http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Fortress.
Holy $DEITY!
Such a piece of total, utter, absolute, mind-boggling, ULTIMATE technical illiteracy!
If you know something - anything - about cryptography, computers, or technics in general, DO NOT READ THE BOOK.
And this is not just about lots and lots and lots (all of them!) of small details that author obviously does not understand at all. The base of the plot itself - that you can somehow "poison" the chipher breaking supercomputer and to destroy it *physically* just by feeding it a specially crafted "bad" input data.
I have totally lost any respect for anything Mr. Brown might ever write again. |
I did not read that book but I've come across such things often enough, sadly. If I really liked the book thus far I try to file such stuff under 'plot devices'. If it gets too much, I may simply have to drop the book.
Typical examples are magically breaking encrytion (Lt. Leary Series), magically hacking systems (Lt. Leary Series again,
lots of TV series) and simple, stupid, completely unrealistic luck (Lord of the Isles).