Internet Security by Nel Yorntov

Rating: WORTHY!

Subtitled “From Concept to Consumer” this officious-sounding title is actually aimed at children. This is in a simialr vein to the book I just reviewed, but it was written by someone who understands the actual meaning of 'pithy'.

According to the book, job opportunities in Internet security are rife, and kids would do well to consider this as a career opportunity. If that’s the case, then this book is well-written to interest children in the Internet, in security, and in what hackers get up to, and what opportunities to make a difference a young person has available.

Illustrated with lots of photographs and color, and replete with small digestible text sections, this book will give a good overview of things without weighing down young readers with copious technical stuff. It discusses the history and rise of the Internet, and how vulnerabilities which were never an issue in the very early days, have come now to be seen as sources of mischief, profit, and retaliation.

In this era of trillions of web pages and billions of individual Internet forays into a bewildering variety of areas and topics from surfers all over the world, a person could easily get lost or entranced, or deceived, so this book helps map things out and also serves as an important warning to young users as to how they can become used if they’re not careful.

I commend this as a worthy read.

Countdown to Zero Day by Kim Zetter

Rating: WARTY!

I came to this book via a TV documentary from Nova: Cyberwar Threat that I saw on Netflix. The author was one of those interviewed during the show and my library happened to have her book. I was pleased to be able to read it, but the author insisted on larding it up with excessive detail that wasn't necessary and got int eh way of the real story.

Her problem, I think, is that she's a journalist and journalists were traditionally taught to make stories human interest stories, so every time a new person was introduced, we got a potted biography and it was both irritating and boring to see this pop up every time a new name did. I quickly took to skipping these.

The book was also not quite linear. It kept bouncing back and forth, and was often repetitive, reiterating things which had already been fully-iterated. There was a lot in it to interest me and a lot that was good material, but you really have to dig through the fluff to get to it.

The book was some 400 pages and I really felt for the trees that had been sacrificed unnecessarily to the God of Excruciating Detail to produce this thing. I felt better about that knowing that the last reader had recycled this book back to me and I had in turn recycled it back to the library after my use, but still! It was too much detail. Far too much!>

I cannot commend this unless you're really anal about excessive detail, and enjoy wasting your time reading all this stuff instead of getting to the story you thought the book contained. I really do not like authors who insist you make your life revolve around their inability to edit themselves then when all you really want to do is read a good book.

Trouble and Her Friends by Melissa Scott

Title: Trouble and Her Friends
Author: Melissa Scott
Publisher: Tom Doherty
Rating: WORTHY!

India Carless, who used to go by the handle of 'Trouble' in her hacking days, is now retired and running the e-network for a group of artists. She's been forcibly retired: the heat became too much with a new law (the Evans-Tindale Act) aimed directly at cyber-crime, and it just wasn't worth the risk to her anymore. The only problem is, someone has begun using her handle and her code on the Nets and it's up to Trouble to uncover who it is before she goes down for the trouble the fake Trouble is creating.

Trouble walked out on her partner and lover, and her entire cyber life, when she retired, without a word to anyone, which has left bad blood between herself and Cerise, who has since become a cyber-cop for big business. Now this new trouble has caused both of them to seek the other out, Trouble to clear her name, Cerise to find who hacked her employer. Once again, they're a team.

Trouble has an illegal 'brain worm' installed in her head which allows her a much more sensual experience of the net. How this works, Scott shrinks from attempting to describe. It's just as well, because the idea is impractical. If the net doesn't support this (which it currently doesn't), then you would need some software installed which would translate signals from the net into sensations, and which would slow the whole thing down - a big no-no for a hacker.

Even in the future, when this novel is set, retrieving and processing data in this way would still be slower than ordinary text input. Trouble isn't a very practical hacker and doesn't behave like real hackers do, unless your idea of a hacker is that depicted in the movie of the same name (which I happened to really like). Scott does anticipate The Matrix with her writing, but no one in their right mind would have a brain worm implanted that could kill its owner if things went wrong, let alone upgrade it as Trouble does by going to her wet-work friend Michelina!

Another impracticality is that Scott turns cyberspace into a shopping mall, where you walk from place to place and meet people, and explore stores, but this, again, and for a hacker in particular is entirely ridiculous. When you "move" from web site A to web site B you don't actually move - you don't "walk" anywhere. It's almost instant - although sometimes it runs very slowly. This would be entirely impractical for a hacker since you would have to actually slow down your data input rate to represent it the way Scott does.

Those impracticalities aside, and forgiving her shameless lifting of some cyber ideas and terms ( such as Intrusion Countermeasures (Electronic) - IC(E) ) from other novels in the genre, I really loved this novel because it's so solid and real and practical overall. Yes, it's very dated now, but I didn't read this for the hi-tech. I read it for the relationships, which Scott does extremely well. She's very prescient and warm in her depictions, and the interaction between Trouble and Cerise was priceless. I love the kind of person India is, and how she and Cerise slide back into a relationship together. I like their joint hacking attempt at the end, despite how impractical (and impossibly slow!) it is.

I liked that fact that Seahaven was both a fictional place on the web, and a real place by the sea, in this novel, a place where hackers and geeks hang out. By having such a place, Scott is able to have Trouble move around in both virtual and real space.

I don't claim that this novel is brilliant. I don't actually require that a novel be brilliant. I don't even care if it has flaws. All I require is that it tells a story which engages me, in a language which speaks to me, and this one did very much. I've read many of Scott's novels, but none of them carried the same power that this one did, so if you like LGBTQ novels which have somewhere to go other than (or at least in addition to) the purely carnal, then this one might just drive your bus as nicely as it did mine.