After having finished DVC yesterday, I read Dan Brown's interview and other stuff on his website. Soon I was hunting Digital Fortress (DF). Somehow, his website content on DF wasn't very impressive, but nonetheless it was about cryptography. I managed to find myself a downloadable and started a few pages yesterday before dozing off. It started off pretty interesting, so I continued it this morning. I finished it a while back, but it is not half as good as DVC. Of course, it gets a lot interesting till midway, but Dan has it all over the place, mixing things up with too many flaws.
He stretches the story too far beyond the truth of North Dakota and DF. I think the story would have made quite okay without the twists that followed later. I was upset with the "Susan! Susan! Susan!" twist... it was really cheap. There would have still been flaws but the novel would have not crossed into the arena of desperate movies! Some of the flaws were too stupid to ignore: in a novel based on digital cryptography, the no. of bits of encryption for the longest time taken to crack a code were exaggerated, not to mention the diagnostic run bits were downright ridiculous, and to contrast these flaws, the practical codes that feature in examples and the storyline were child's play! To worsen things, the codes obvious to the reader are shown to be things that NSA giants are breaking heads over! And about the intelligent lots in the book, I'd some doubts... what about DF copies downloaded by many that was made publicly available before DF was cracked, tweaked and replaced by Strathmore? But thats much later.... how could Tankado who's so smart announce something publicly in such a way as to invite his killers (agreed, not NSA or software companies, but definitely terrorists) in the first place?
The following four words sum up the book: Jtal uona soyw tmfs! :)
4 comments:
Do you mean "Just too many flaws!" ?
Precisely; wasn't that easy? Thats as far as cryptology in DF goes to. :)
I am surprised by ur response bro frankly that was the first novel i read of dan brown ....leave apart all the flaws u have told ..i foud the book to be very fast paced..page turner it was a wh8le ago that i read it but then i did not find as bad as u mentioned in your review.....might be coz i was new to reading when i read the book ..or am not so knowledgeable as u guys are ..but ti seriously suggested it to everybody as a book to be read in case they like fast paced novels.
Hey don't get me wrong here. Just because there are flaws in the book doesn't mean it doesn't make interesting reading. Imagine a great movie with a pathetic ending; would you regret having watched the movie? I wouldn't. I'd say the ending sucked but the movie was very much watchable if you remove the ending. Similarly, I'm just trying to be technically critical, especially on a topic such as cryptography.
So, yes, go ahead and read, thats what I'll tell my friends too. But keep your expectations on technicality low, thats all.
I can't assume something about your background here, but you may want to look up no. of bits in encryption techniques and compare that with the novel to see what I'm saying; moreover, NSA guys not being able to crack a simple encrypted msg at the end is an insult to the avg reader, not to mention NSA itself! Chill it out bro, first novels are almost always interesting, but only emotionally! :)
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