Digital Fortress : A Thriller

Rating:
Summary: Another Dan Brown thinker/thriller
Review: Not as good as "Da Vinci Code" or "Angels & Demons", but still excellent and almost impossible to put down. The other two novels got me planning a trip to Europe, this DID NOT prompt me to go to Fort Meade, Maryland! Maybe it's because I'm an engineer and not a Catholic, but I was able to solve more of Brown's riddles in this book. That did not, however, detract from the enjoyment.

Rating:
Summary: Not As Good As Angels & Demons
Review: I disagree with the previous woman, if you like Dan Brown's writing you will like this book. Its interesting and suspense filled. It will never compare to his best work Angels & Demons but thats not saying much.

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Summary: Interesting plot, pale characters and technologically flawed
Review: The book has an interesting plot, and the story takes some surprising twists, so it is in no sense boring. The problem is, the main characters stay pale throughout the story. And the book is also quite flawed from a technical point of view, which really confines the reading experience for the average techie with some basic knowledge about cryptography.

The leading character, IQ-170 wonder-mathematician Susan Fletcher does not even grasp the most obvious coherences. The final showdown is quite unrealistic as well, when a software worm takes down the NSA's security tiers one by one, and the agency's director decides to take the risk, instead of simply shutting down the system. Or the fact that their massive-parallel miracle-system goes up in flames due to overheating (No heating ventilation? No emergency shutdown? And no backups and no redundant datacenter?). Listing all the book's flaws when it comes to cryptogaphic issues would take hours - nearly all statements regarding this topic are just plainly wrong [...]In the book's foreword, the author says thanks to "the two faceless ex-NSA cryptographers who made invaluable contributions via anonymous remailers". Makes me wish they would have proof-read it once.

Rating:
Summary: Not on par with The Da Vinci Code
Review: At the beginning of this book, Brown thanks a couple anonymous ex-NSA agents for their assistance with its creation. Since the NSA (National Security Agency) is a covert gov't organization for which very little public information exists, it's impossible to tell where their contribution ends and Brown's imagination begins. In the interest of national security, I sincerely hope their contribution was largely replaced by Brown's imagination. There are so many problems with this book I hardly know where to begin.

The basic plot is that a disgruntled ex-NSA agent has developed a method of cryptography that the NSA's $2B electronic eavesdropping supercomputer will be unable to break, and is offering this information technology to the highest bidder in the name of personal privacy rights.

Dangling pieces of the puzzle before the reader, Brown challenges them to attempt to solve mysteries which baffle the "best cryptographic minds of their time". This is part of the problem; if these problems were too challenging for them, why did I have such an easy time solving them?! You don't need to be a world-class mathematician or trained in cryptography to see through these puzzles; they're more like attempting the Jumble in the newspaper than the problems in the back of the average Scientific American. The glaringly obvious solutions will be apparent to most adult readers the moment he mentions them. This might make the problem-solving accessible to the greatest number of readers, but it undermines the competency he's attempting to create for his "brilliant" protagonists.

Furthermore, the computer hardware and data safeguards Brown sets in place to protect the NSA's comprehensive federal-agency-spanning database of classified information (and the aforementioned $2B, 3 million processor supercomputer) are so woefully inadequate as to be laughable. His villains make such obvious mistakes as to make them laughable. Furthermore, the ex-NSA agent was supposedly selling his new crypto technology to the highest bidder, but Brown only introduces one firm in the bidding competition and only slightly ties this in to the rest of the story. He would definitely have created a better book by exploring this branch of the story further.

The very end of the book was even more disappointing. Brown chose to make a belated, half-hearted attempt at tying in the head of this firm with the technology's creator. After reading The Da Vinci Code, I expected a gripping page-turner, but I never experienced a moment of tension or suspense while reading this book. It was more like watching a lackluster made-for-TV movie-of-the-week.

Having said all this, I was curious enough about what was going to happen next, and sufficiently entertained, to finish this short book (which took somewhere in the ballpark of 6 or 7 hours). Obviously not his best work, but no one hits a home run every at bat.

Rating:
Summary: digital fortress review
Review: Digital Fortress is the techno-thriller of the century. It explodes in a fiery burst of action from the first as former programmer Ensai Takando tragically dies trying to convey a message. At the same time, Susan Fletcher is called in by her boss at the National Security Agency to inspect the building's algorithm breaking computer, TRANSLTR. Meanwhile David Becker a professor of languages and Susan's Fiancée, is called by his fiancé's boss to go to Spain to retrieve Takando's possessions, all the time being tailed by the deaf assassin, Hullhot.
This book kept my attention from the start to the very end with edge-of-your seat action spread evenly between real-life descriptions of settings and computer functions. The detail to which the settings are described is phenomenal. Weather it be the Heart of Spain, the bowels of the NSA, or a Sid Vicious Punk Rock Concert, Dan Brown manages to place you there in such a way that you couldn't leave if you tried.
This and all of Dan Brown's works are very accurate, both historically and technologically. I've been to Spain. I've seen the Cathedrals and the thin winding streets. And all the time I was thinking of how accurate Digital Fortress. The sights where just as Dan Brown had been described in the book. I also am in the field of computer programming. I don't care what the other nerds who review this book say. I found Digital Fortress Technically correct. I under stood the rotating clear text based algorithm. I feel it is possible that if you have 6 million processors working together, you can crack an encrypted email using the brute force method of cryptography. I've even tested it. It worked.
This book is wonderful, maybe the best I've ever read, if not on my top 10 list. This is definitely a book that most people should read. the more people that know about the NSA and governmental power to intercept email, the better.