Archive for Bookosphere

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Sep15

Review of “Takedown” by Tsutomu Shimomura and John Markoff

by tdaxp on September 15, 2012 at 5:34 am and modified on September 15, 2012. at 5:37 am
Posted In: Bookosphere

Several weeks ago I read Ghost in the Wires, Kevin Mitnick’s autobiographical accounts of his hacking exploits, discovery by security researcher Tsutomu Shimomura, and reformation. Yesterday I finished Takedown, Tsutomo’s book about tracking down Mitnick.

Generally the accounts agree. The framing or emphasis, however, changes. So, for instance, Shimomura (who had the time worked at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, emphasis his own personal skills and generally dismisses Mitnick as copying others or using trial-and-error techniques. Mitnick’s book actually agrees with this, where he is dismissive of the press’s wilder claims, and instead emphasizes the greatest tool he had was social engineering — that is, being a con-man.

This pattern — both books largely agreeing on facts, but differeing in the interpretation of facts — even extends to Hollywood. Both Shimomura and Mitnick have mentioned Mitnick’s fascination with the 1992 Phil Alden Robinson film, Sneakers, starring Robert Redford, Dan Akroyd, Ben Kingsley, River Phoenix, and Sidney Poitier.

Shimomura chalks this up to Mitnick’s fixation on Robert Redford. Mitnick, in a talk to my employer, described Sneakers as the most realistic movie about hacking every filmed. After re-watching it, I agree. The protagonists of Sneakers are not especially amazing when it comes to technology. They are great at social engineering — being con men.

The whole topic of “social engineering” lets me talk about one of the most disorienting things about reading these two books. Kevin Mitnick was a social engineer — a con man — but one who did not seek to profit from his work. So he writes in a friendly (if manipulative) way that makes you sympathize with him. Shimomura, by contrast, is a jerk. The book is filled with criticisms of anyone who has helped him or any place that was good to him. Reading Takedown is an emotionally exhausting experience, while reading Ghost in the Wires approaches the experience of having a massage — you’re no longer observing the world quite as objectively, but that’s not the point.

To illustrate, here’s an example. Mitnick is an intelligent and well spoken individual. But pay attention to use his use of words:

I had seen some of the security bugs that Shimmy [Tsutomu Shimomura] had reported to Sun and DEC and been impressed with his bug-finding skills. In time I would learn that he had shoulder-length straight black hair, a preference for showing up at work wearing sandals and “raggady-ass jeans,” and a passion for cross-country skiing. He sounded every bit the kind of Californian conjured by the term “dude” — as in, “Hey dude, howz it hangin’?”

Mitnick is manipulating the reader by adopting several traits associated with a stereotype of the loveable hackers, including
1. An admiration for technical skill
2. An admiration for California generally
3. An admiration for non-conformists
4. An almost child-like view of the world, especially in the last sentence. [See my review of Veins for the power of his imagery]

Now, here’s a passage from Shimomura’s book

“I have no idea why Andrew [Shimomura's mentee] told you to start cleaning up,” I said, incredulous.

Seiden, who is a computer security pro, was angry at having been misled at such an error. “Last time I take orders from Andrew,” he muttered. His task was no, we agreed would be to resume monitoring Mitnick’s activities on Internex for indication of how deep his supsicions now ran. Seiden was still fuming with indignation as we ended our call.

I punched in Andrew’s numbers. “What the hell’s going on?”

A good leader makes others great. Even cantankerous perfectionists like Steve Jobs can get excited in people. Shimomura instead criticizes and denigrates those close to him, to make himself appear brighter.

In keeping with this trend, Mitnick even gives Andrew’s family name twice, while in Tsutomu it is only given once, in Tsutomu’s co-author‘s acknowledgements.

I’m glad I read both books, but Ghost in the Wires is both more up to date and less grating.

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Jul31

Review of “Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker,” by Kevin Mitnick with William L. Simon

by tdaxp on July 31, 2012 at 12:17 pm
Posted In: Bookosphere, Software

Several weeks ago Kevin Mitnick spoke at the research arm of my employer. He is a funny guy, knowledgeable, a great public speaker. He was also hawking his book. During the Q&A Kevin was asked what the most realistic movie about computer hackers was. He replied, “Sneakers,” a 1992 film starring Robert Redford, Dan Aykroyd, Ben Kingsley, Mary McDonnell, River Phoenix, and Sidney Poitier, which I had remembered watching as a teenager. This answer seemed so bizarre it made me want to know more — hence several hundred pages later, I’ve read Mitnick’s book.

After re-watching Sneakers, I was struck that it did not use the Hollywood trope of a computer whiz sitting down on a keyboard, hitting random buttons, and getting into the system. Or Mission: Impossible high tech wizardly or suspension cables. Instead, in Sneakers access is gained by talking to people, calmly and persuasively lying to them, and getting them to do what you want. This was Mitnick’s method. That was why he liked the film.

Kevin’s story begins as a boy “hacking” the L.A. mass transit system to get free rides, thru getting his mom free long distance, to finally an increasingly complicated web of compromised systems to evade the growing number of enemies who was looking for him. Mitnick’s adventures take him from California to Las Vegas, Seattle, South Dakota, and North Carolina, before finally being arrested.

Kevin’s spoken a lot about his former life. Here’s a 60 minutes report:

And an hour-long talk he gave at Google

Shortly after his release his prison, he was called to testify before a Senate committee headed by Joe Lieberman and Fred Thompson.

If technology, “social engineering” (which Mitnick calls “lying on the telephone”), and security interest you, I strongly recommend Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker. I read Mitnick’s book in the Nook edition. It is also available for Kindle.

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Jul26

Review of “The Accidental Time Machine,” by Joe Haldeman

by tdaxp on July 26, 2012 at 1:07 pm
Posted In: Bookosphere

The Accidental Machine, which was nominated for the Nebula Award in 2007 (it lost, unlike Haldeman’s Forever War and Forever Peace novels) is a tricky book review. It is very close to being a very good mix of humor and hard science fiction. It’s close to being trash that was barely worth reading. All in all, the writing quality is very uneven, and the good parts (barely) make it worthwhile to finish.

The protagonist of The Accidental Time Machine is Matthew Fuller, a laboratory technician at MIT, who accidentally ‘breaks’ a complex piece of lab equipment and turns it into a time machine. The time machine goes only one direction — into the future — with jumps of exponentially longer duration. So jump-time goes from about 1 second, to about 12 seconds, to about 144 seconds, to nearly six hours, and so on. As Matthew goes farther and farther into the future, life is always an exagerated version of what we’re familiar with (religious conservatism, or materialism, or bureaucratism, etc.).

Unfortunately, Haldeman sabotages his own work with pointless (in the truest sense: with no intellectual cut or heft) attacks on religion. I’ve read works by atheists who care deeply about their viewpoints, and argue them coherently and logically. Haldeman can’t be bothered. Instead, Haldeman could have cut the exposition sharply, included some reddit threads in an appendix, and everyone would have been happier.

The ending is clever.

I read The Accidental Time Machine in the Nook edition. It is also available for Kindle.

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Jul25

Review of “A Canticle for Leibowitz,” by Walter Miller

by tdaxp on July 25, 2012 at 6:45 am
Posted In: Bookosphere

It is amazing that I have not read A Canticle for Leibowitz until recently. I enjoy classic Science Fiction, and Canticle won the Hugo Award in 1961 (placing it between 1960′s Starship Troopers and 1962′s Stranger in a Strange Land). I enjoy reading about the Dark Ages (Before France and Germany and Muhammad and Charlemagne being two of my favorite histories), and this is a retelling of the rise of Europe from the Dark Ages to the modern era. I’ve had tremendous luck with books recommended to me by my favorite high school teachers (Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Marx’s The Communist Manifesto, Quinn’s Ishmael, etc.), but I ignored this recommendation.

But I’m glad I read it now. What a book!.

Canticle can be thought of as a play on a Latin phrase that appears in Chapter 26, in the section “Fiat Voluntas Tua” (Thy Will Be Done):

Reminiscentur et convertentur ad Dominum universi fines terrae. Et adorabunt in conspectu universae familiae gentium. Quoniam Domini est regnum; et ipse dominabitur…

Which is translated as:

All the ends of the earth shall remember, and shall be converted to the Lord: And all the kindreds of the Gentiles shall adore in his sight. For the kingdom is the Lord’s; and he shall have dominion

Canticle takes place largely in the American southwest, and primarily at four different times: following the collapse of literate society after a nuclear war, later, during the redawn of science, and still later, in a technological society. The fourth time is our own, expressed largely in the notes and recollections of “Leibowitz,” an electrical engineer whose writings are rediscovered in the first pages of the book.

Miller has a unique gift for building empathy for characters who are very different from the reader. In the first chapter a monk discovers a “Fallout Shelter,” with a maximum capacity of 50. After slowly reading the inscription, he is terrified: everyone knows that “Fallouts” were dragon-like incubi (because they were born in fire, and lead to deformed children), so this must have been a home to 50 of them! Throughout the book an inventor, a scholar, and many others are introduced to the reader, and always with humanizing descriptions and writing.

Miller’s view of the relationship with science and religion is wry. In one scene monks (who have read St. Augustine) ask a visiting scholar if it is possible that humans had evolved from earlier creatures, in accordance with Augustine’s theory of natural development. That is impossible, the scientists retorts — the oldest surviving pieces of paper describe a world merely centuries old! (It’s implied the most ancient physical manuscripts is an awful science fiction story about a robot uprising!)

Canticle is hard science fiction with epistemological, scientific, and religious overtones. An amazing book, I received my copy from a friend, and quickly mailed it to my brother. This is one of those books you “can’t put down,” and need to share. Read it!

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Jul20

Review of “Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream,” by John Derbyshire

by tdaxp on July 20, 2012 at 9:31 am and modified on July 20, 2012. at 9:33 am
Posted In: Bookosphere, History

Mr. Derbyshire admits to sharing many of his narrator’s thoughts. The author, too, becomes obsessed with “dead thinkers” from time to time. His latest is Bellini, the 19th-century composer of opera, which is one of Mr. Derbyshire’s passions and the subject of his next novel.
- The New York Times

Try to kill it all away,
but I remember everything.
What have I become,
my sweetest friend?
- Johnny Cash, “Hurt“

I’ve read through all the reviews of Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream I could find. I think my impressions of it are different from theirs. Because I read it an order different from theirs.

John Derbyshire’s “Bellini” novel, teased in the New York Times review of Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream, is Fire from the Sun. Calling it a “Bellini” novel is like mentionin that Ayn Rand’s follow-up to Night of January 16th (The Fountainhead) was going to be about architecture.

The difference between Rand and Derbyshire, though is that Rand is an idealistic and ideologue who presents a pathway to an ideal society. Derbyshire’s view of life is less romatantic:

I can remember being profoundly shocked, around age 25, reading James Boswell’s London Diaries, the bit where Bozzy encounters a very old aristocrat and asks him whether, looking back on life, he can discern any pattern or purpose to it. No, says the old boy, it has all been “a chaos of nothing.” I’m not quite ready to agree with that, but it doesn’t shock me any more, not at all. Perhaps the old nobleman was right.

Fire from the Sun is about two Chinese immigrants, Weilan and Yuezhu, who experience that chaos of nothing. Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream seems to revolve around the same two characters, with only minor changes in their back-stories, lead less chaotic (and less meaningful?) lives. But instead of the sweep of history — instead of a book I described as “Heartbreaking. Inspiring. Moving. One-thousand pages.” — in this earlier iteration the characters star in a quite clever domestic comedy.

Think of the characters of Schindler’s List. In the UK version of The Office.

(For the curious, most American sitcoms can be classified as “domestic comedies.” All feature the adventures of a male lead who desires to get up to mischief, and a more intelligent female lead who appears to be walked all over, but in fact controls the unfolding of events. The Big Bang Theory, Family Guy, and The Simpsons, are examples of domestic comedies. It was fascinating to read this set-up in book form though, especially this well done.)

I also learned a lot about Calvin Coolidge — or at least more than I did before! — from this short novel.

I read Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream in hardback. I bought my copy from Barnes & Noble, but it is also available from Amazon.com.

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Jul17

Review of “Ancient Shores,” by Jack McDevitt

by tdaxp on July 17, 2012 at 1:59 pm
Posted In: Bookosphere

First, get past the horrible cover-art of Ancient Shores. Perhaps this is attractive to a subculture of readers, but it is not to me. If Ancient Shores had not been recommended to me by my favorite high school teacher, the cover art alone would have dissuaded me from buying it.

OK, now that’s out of the way.

Ancient Shores by Jack McDevitt was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1997. It is best thought of as an answer to The Tommyknockers by Stephen King, which had been published a decade earlier. Here’s the first line of The Tommyknockers:

For want of a nail the kingdom is lost — that’s how the catechism goes when you boil it down. In the end, you can boil everything down to something similar — or so Roberta Anderson thought much later on. It’s either all n accident… or all fate. Anderson literally stumbled over her destiny int eh small town of Haven, Maine, on June 21, 1988. The stumble was the root of the matter; all the rest was nothing but history.

The beginning of Ancient Shores reads like it could be the very next paragraph:

“If that ain’t the damnest thing.” Tom Lasker had to raise his voice to be heard over the wind. Will paused with his spade full of black earth to see what had drawn his father’s attention.

A triangular plate, not unlike a shark’s fine, stuck out of the ground. It was tough. Metal, apparently, but not corroded.”

Both The Tommyknockers and Ancient Shores concern the discovery of an ancient vessel in a field near a small town in an out of the way state. The difference is what the author chooses to focus on. Stephen King focuses on the person of Roberta Anderson, her emotional and physical well-being, and her relationships with her neighbors. Jack McDevitt writes much flatter characters, but focuses on the political and economic consequences of such a find.

McDevitt’s weak description of characters contrasts nicely with his beautiful description of place. Ancient Shores is probably the most realistic description of life in the Dakotas I’ve ever read in a work of fiction. Likewise, the relationship between the Sioux reservation and the white town near the objects is painted vividly, without the bathos such a setting would normally draw out.

Rapidly the reader learns the “shark’s fine” is part of a yacht made of trans-uranic elements that seemingly sailed on the dead Lake Agassiz. What happens next, of course, is the story.

Ancient Shores is also only a third of the length of The Tommyknockers, making it much quicker to get through!

I read Ancient Shores in the Nook edition. It is also available for Kindle.

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Apr25

Review of “Fire from the Sun,” by John Derbyshire

by tdaxp on April 25, 2012 at 5:57 pm
Posted In: Bookosphere, China, History

“O God of Progress, have you degraded and forgot us?”
- Sufjan Stevens

“Do you want to make me hate you?”
- French Teen Idol

Heartbreaking. Inspiring. Moving. One-thousand pages.

Fire from the Sun is the best historical fiction I’ve read in more than a decade,  since Aztec, by Gary Jennings. . Extrapolating forward, this means there will only be a handful of books in that genre as good, as memorable, or as important before I die, if I make it into old age. Given the quality of this book, that seems fair.

I remember when Fire from the Sun came out, more than a decade ago. I remember reading this post, and quickly beign intimidated by the number of volumes required (3!, more than $100 at the time) to read the book. So I put it off until the author, John Derbyshire, made the news for something completely different, and saw that Fire from the Sun was available in an affordable and easy-to-carry Kindle edition.

Fire From the Sun begins in south-west China in 1965, the last year of China’s “long 1950s” (1949-1965) and the year before the Cultural Revolution. As I was in tears the last hour of reading the book, it’s not surprising I find the beginning incredibly moving, looking at it again:

Chapter 1
New Costumes at the Swimming Pool
We Have Friends All Over the World!

The first time Weilin ever saw foreigners—real foreigners, not just National Minorities or Chinese people from another province—was at the swimming pool in South Lake Park.

The scope of Fire from the Sun is incredible, and incorporates multiple stories and perspectives of the period. If you’ve seen Chinese cinema of the period, the following themes from famous movies are also reflected in Fire from the Sun. 24 City, From Mao to Mozart, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Summer Palace, and Mao’s Last Dancer have clear parallels to the adventures in the book. Non-fiction readers of The Man Who Stayed Behind or I Choose China will recognize the descriptions of Beijing and other towns.

It struck me after finishing Fire from the Sun that the main characters are symbolic of the yellow earth / blue sea debate — though in complex and unexpected ways. In other words, what is the true China: Beijing or Hong Kong? Finishing a work this massive, the first day was spent thinking of the characters and all they went through. With a little more time to think of the book, though, the symbolism behind the story is just as meaningful. But it was the characters that made me cry.

Derbyshire uses the book’s thousand pages to emphasize the patterns behind behavior. This is perhaps most obvious given the two incidents involving different pedophiles, one of which paints the predators in a ghastly light, the other very sympathetically. Additionally, the sees surrounding the Tiananmen Massacre, both involving students being shot and soldiers being burned alive, emphasize how terrible that tragedy was. The same variations on a theme, the same drawing out of the substantial reality under the happenstances, are woven meticulously through the book.

A personal note: my wife is a native Beijinger, and through my marriage I have relatives I will never see because they studied abroad, chose the wrong side, and got shot. I also have relatives who did well under the Chinese Communist Party, and because of specific Communist policies had a much more humane life than they would have otherwise. My wife visited the protest as a child, and older relatives had their education cut short by the Cultural Revolution and were then rusticated. I’m aware that the emotional force of this book for is mediated through those experiences.

I read Fire from the Sun on the Kindle edition.

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Mar27

Impressions on Re-Watching Battle Royale

by tdaxp on March 27, 2012 at 10:12 am
Posted In: Bookosphere, Films

Lady of tdaxp and I re-watched the film Battle Royale last weekend. This is the first time either of us have seen it in nearly a decade (!).

It holds up pretty well, but the experience of watching farther removed from high school is different. Young watchers are clearly supposed to project themselves into Shuyu Nanahara. Watching it now it’s clear that in many ways Shogo Kawada and Teacher Kitano are more interesting characters.

Talk about making someone feel old…

The book’s pretty good, too.

Both the book and film are less shocking than United Red Army, which actually happened.

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Feb27

Review of “God is Red” by Liao Yiwu

by tdaxp on February 27, 2012 at 3:03 pm
Posted In: Bookosphere, Faith, History

The “mythic past” of China in the 20th century probably looks something like this:

  • Weakness & Chaos (fall of the Qing, Revolution and Civil Wars, Whampoa, Yenan, Song Dynasty, Invasion by Japan)
  • The New China of 1949
  • Peaceful and Orderly mid-1950s
  • Disaster of Great Leap Forward
  • Peaceful and Orderly early and mid 1960s
  • Disaster of Cultural Revolution
  • Economic reform & prosperity

References to foreigners in this mythic past are pretty scarce. Unlike the anti-Western years of the Cultural Revolution, it’s probably fair to say that foreigners play as much a part of the Mythic Past of 20th Century China as they do in the Mythic Past of 20th Century America: Russians are sometimes friends and sometimes enemies, Europe’s weak, troublesome, and far away, sporadoc wars with Pacific neighbors. Foreigners are not an essential part of the mythic story of China, and more than they are an essential part of the mythic story of 20th century America.

Liao Yiwu decided to change that.

God is Red is a history of Christianity in 20th century China, told through interviews. The book proceeds chronologically, so while the first interviews are about old people who are persecuted by the Communists in 1949, the latest are about youngsters in our own day. The book appears to be written with the intended audience of young, literate, middle-class Chinese, and from a Chinese perspective is as much an introduction to the horrors of Communist oppression as to Christianity in China.

Liao is not himself a Christian, though he is clearly sympathetic to Christians and hostile to the Communist Party. The most moving part of the book for me was the interview of a blind musician, who lost his site as a small child, had it recovered through eye-drops given to him by a Missionary doctor, and then lost it again when the Communists expelled the Missionaries. (The man’s parents, poor farmers, never thought to ask what was in the eye-drops until it was too late.) The epilogue of the chapter reveals the sight-giving eye-drops, which the man lost access to because of the Communists, almost certainly contained fish oil. Multiple this loss by expulsion of all foreign charities and western investment in China in the years following 1949, and the backwardness that Communist rule doomed China to is staggering.

Because the book is told in the words of Chinese Christians, young and old, God is Red is an excellent example of martyrology. Indeed, the Chinese Communist Party is one reason why more Christians have been martyred in the last century than in the first three centuries combined. Yet, God is Red also blows up the “mythic” history of China, emphasizing the amazing contact with the west that was rapidly liberalizing and modernizing China, until aborted by Mao Zedong and others. The Mythic Past of China doesn’t have to be just an amalgamation of KMT and Communist party history. The works of Christians, including foreigners, can be a part of it, too.

Liao Yiwu was already a well-known Chinese liberal before writing God is Red. In the book, Liao talks about his friend Nobel-Prize Winner Liu Xiaobo and the banned Charter ’08. This past September, Liao walked out of China, as Liu serves an 11-year prison sentence. An article based on the book appears in the Huffington Post.

I received God is Red as a gift from Catholicgauze. I read it on my Kindle.

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Feb21

Review of “The Difference Engine,” by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling

by tdaxp on February 21, 2012 at 3:09 pm and modified on February 22, 2012. at 11:16 am
Posted In: Bookosphere, History, Software

The Difference Engine is a hard book to review. On one hand it is technothriller that asks, “What if Charles Babbage had succeeded in building his programmable computer in the 19th century?” On another it is literary science fiction, with a depth comparable to Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 or Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. On the third it’s a rumination on word processing.

Charles Babbage and Charles Darwin were contemporaries in early 19th century Britain. Both men made great discoveries, and both were perfectionists. Famously, Darwin only published his theories when he heard that Wallace had independently discovered natural selection and was going to release his own version of the theory. Less famously, Babbage designed the Difference Engine (which has successfully been constructed from his plans in our down day), a mechanical computer, but abandoned work finishing it to attempt the Analytical Engine, a computer that was as advanced as the electronic ENIAC that was finally built more than a century later.

No men, if their careers could have been more successful, might have changed our world more than Archimedes and Charles Babbage.

But what would such a world have looked like? Could an information revolution occur at the same time as an industrial revolution? Who would benefit from such a world? Who would oppose it?

The Difference Engine is composed of several “Iterations” and a final “Modus.” Many characters appear again and again, though often the reader’s view of them differ – a character might simply be standing near an event in one iteration, an antagonist in a second, a helper in a third, and the protagonist in the fourth.

The meaning of the ending of The Difference Engine is disputed, and (in the finest literary tradition) there is no need to take the authors’ remarks as the last word. I’m still unsure what finally happens.

I read The Difference Engine on my Kindle.

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