Andre Amorim wrote the following on 1/14/09 9:49 AM: > Hi all, > > Anyone knows what's is fact (real) and what is fiction in Dan Brown > novel, Digital Fortress ? > > Kind Regards, > [s]
I read it years ago. I believe it's the worst book ever written by Dan Brown. Some excerpts from: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Fortress>. I believe the following list of Mr. Brown's errors (or delusions) is not exclusive, to say the least. Still, it's my opinion, only. Charly ---------- "Although the book's website cites reviews lauding Digital Fortress for being extremely realistic, the book contains a number of technical errors and misunderstandings in computers, math and technology. * Brown mentions a Hungarian mathematician, Josef Harne, who in 1987 proposed an encryption algorithm that, in addition to encrypting, shifted decrypted cleartext over a time variant. However, neither Harne nor the concept of rotating-cleartext ever existed.[1] * Brown says the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki was fueled by the uranium isotope U-238. The Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki was fueled by plutonium 239, and U-238 is not an easily fissionable isotope of uranium (needing a fusion reaction to initiate fission in the U-238). * Brown also inaccurately portrays the leadership of the NSA. As part of the Department of Defense, the NSA director - by law - must be a three-star Lieutenant General or Vice Admiral. * Brown confuses bits with bytes, describing a 64bit string as containing 64 alphanumeric characters. In fact it would be just 8 assuming the most basic 8bit character encoding, each character being a byte or 8 bits. * Brown suggests that TRANSLTR, a machine capable of breaking a 64bit key in 10 minutes would take just an hour to break a 10,000 bit key. This is a gross misunderstanding of the relationship between key lengths and the time required to brute force them. Such a machine would take over 80,000 years to break a 96-bit key and over 350,000 billion years (nearly 30,000 times the current age of the universe) to break a 128-bit key. The number of years it would take to break a 10,000 bit key isn't even practical to write down - it has 2,987 digits. * Brown repeatedly confuses storage or processing of data with execution. For example, TRANSLTR is threatened because it has tried to crack Digital Fortress, which is actually a virus, and the database is similarly threatened because Digital Fortress is sent to it by TRANSLTR. Databases and password crackers do not execute the information presented to them, so it wouldn't matter that Digital Fortress contains harmful instructions. * Characters who are supposedly experts in cryptography seem to think there is no such thing as an unbreakable encryption scheme. See one-time pad." ---------- _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users
