Rating: 
Summary: This one's riding on the broad shoulders of The Davinci Code
Review: This book isn't horrible but it is about 100 pages too long. The characters are gushy, mushy, and maudlin. It had promise but it's a blah. If you would like to read a thriller about government employees run amok, read Stan Lee's "Dunn's Conundrum". If he'd spent a little more time on it Dan Brown could have made "Digital Fortress" as good. The bad guy only needs the diabolical laughter to sound like a saturday morning cartoon character.
Rating: 
Summary: Inaccuracies abound...
Review: I would call this novel an interesting, easy read if not for its plot holes and many factual inaccuracies.The main plot relies on the idea of an unbreakable code, the Digital Fortress. Unfortunately the idea is nonsense -- their 'rotating cleartext' would ensure only that the message couldn't be read. The government's supercomputer could break a code with a 256-character key in 12 minutes, but were able to break a code with a 1-million bit key after only 3 hours... Even if a supercomputer could break a code as complex as the first in 12 minutes, the second would take many lifetimes of the universe to crack. Similarly, if the virus code had a 256-character key, no one trained in cryptology would allow the supercomputer to run for hours on end, since once it failed to recognize plaintext the first pass through, it would simply fail. Despite the fact that the main characters were cryptologists working at the top secret NSA, typical cinematic-style passwords are used frequently - thee major codes are as short as 1-5 characters! Let's not even get so far as to consider the implausibility of a virus in an encrypted message (since the data is treated as data, not an executable). That's too much to expect of a novelist, right... even if the book is "the most realistic techno-thriller" as quoted on the back cover?
Rating:
Summary: Strikingly unintelligent
Review: Digital Fortress" hints at being a thinking man's technothriller - using codes and human intuition instead of fighter jets and nu-cue-ler subs. Instead, it's full of implausible characters and uninspired plot twists, and worst of all, it never stops reminding you how smart it thinks it is. THE PLOT: a disgruntled/now dead programmer has created a seemingly unbreakable code: "Digital Fortress", setting off a fierce hunt for its code key. While the key to DF is distributed on the internet, it's encrypted by the DF. Whoever unlocks the code will have access to the ultimate protection against decryption. Hostile governments, organized criminals or terrorists will be able to communicate freely over the internet completely immune to detection. Fearing this, the NSA (the US agency responsible for signals analysis and cracking codes) sends free-lance genius Dave Becker to Seville, where the programmer died. Strathmore, the NSA's head code breaker hopes that DF's creator left some clue to the code key behind. Unfortunately, Becker isn't alone on his hunt...
Meanwhile, back at the NSA's high-tech HQ, Susan Fletcher, our hero's brilliant and sexy NSA genius of a girlfriend, tries picking up the mystery from her end of the Atlantic, where TRNSLTR, Strathmore's newest codebreaking supercomputer, is busy melting itself down trying to crack DF. Unfortunately, it looks like somebody is after Susan's as well - from the inside - and we get the hint that she shouldn't feel as safe as she does when Strathmore is around. Back in Spain, Becker quickly learns that DF's creator had worn a ring when he died - but it's missing. Quickly guessing that inscriptions on the ring say more than "one ring to rule them all", our hero tracks it across Spain, learning how quickly it moves from owner to owner. Unfortunately, whoever owns the ring (even briefly) is marked for death by a mysterious assassin - a deaf killer who never misses, and catalogs his kills on a Palm Pilot. HOWEVER: This novel was horrible at just about every level, lacking in style or substance. It's not only strikingly unintelligent, but strikingly arch. To read "Fortress", you'd think Brown learned more about cryptography and the NSA than most people cared to hear about, and thus crafted a novel based on his "insider" info about cryptography. (Brown's story heavily relies on a perceived ignorance of what the NSA stands for - an agency, he writes, that only a small percentage of Americans understand. Rather than showing that Brown is a writer who has learnt what most us can't, "Digital Fortress" proves that Brown focuses on remote subjects not likely to have a large number of experts who can effectively challenge his pretensions of realism.) Actually, I learned more about cryptography while writing a paper about the Walker Family Spy Ring in high school, and most will probably learn more about the NSA watching "Sneakers" or "Good Will Hunting". How do you like them apples?) Instead of intelligent clues, Brown's story builds on arcane trivia (the etymology of the word "sincere", certain technical details distinguishing the different a-bombs used against Japan). I was able to piece together some of Brown's clues, not because I'm smarter than most, but simply because I watch a lot of the History channel. Getting past the "thrill" and "techno" aspects of the story, what's left is thin - Brown's ring-plot provides an excuse to send our hero across Seville, hunting the ring, making this less of a novel of any genre than a college-writing version of "Where I Went Last Summer" (complete with Spanish dialog repeated in English). Brown's thin story is plumped, not with some redeeming characters of depth and intelligent plot turns, but with unbelievably stupid characters and unbelievable plot twists. Our hero is no action hero (he stays in shape playing racquetball), yet he manages to elude the hitman who has carved a path of precision-guided death across Seville. Susan is beautiful and brilliant - though Brown never leaves us doubting as to which half matters more (Susan is probably the least independent, most vulnerable, unintelligent and otherwise dated female character I've seen in any technothriller; even her smarts are just a convenient device to explain why she's working with the NSA.) Strathmore is supposed to be a cryptographer par excellence, yet he defies belief - he's so obsessed with DF that he rams it into his priceless super-codebreaking computer, bypassing security checks meant to protect it from viruses. He does this despite knowing that DF is obviously more than it appears (its code for heaven's sake!!). There's another NSA co-worker, a guy who's supposed to set off our alarm bells, but it's obvious that Brown only means him to distract us from Strathmore since Brown couldn't be bothered to come up with more characters. Like Strathmore, the rest of the denizens of NSA headquarters are so dim, it's inconceivable that they'd be trusted to run a third rate ISP, let alone the most sophisticated code-breaking computer in the world. (Typical for low-grade technothrillers, Brown is so obsessed credentialing his characters as geniuses, he devotes little time to writing them even slightly smart. They're stellar when it facing Brown's artificial plot challenges, but in common sense terms, Beavis and Butthead would eat these guys for lunch). By the climax, I couldn't care whether the NSA would be destroyed by the killer code, mostly because the author had by then changed from telling a story to giving a pitch for some splashy action movie, making the novel's Hollywood aspirations annoyingly clear. In short, storm some other fortress.
Rating: 
Summary: OK, but somewhat predictable
Review: It's not a bad read, but many situtations were fairly predicatable. That kind of elimated some of the suspense.
Rating:
Summary: OK to read if you have nothing else better to do.
Review: Da Vinci Code was fascinating and I was expecting another good read, but was sorely disappointed. I don't totally blame Dan Brown - the publishing company unearthed this obviously older novel to piggy-back on Mr. Brown's current popularity. It was terribly out of date and full of holes.
Rating:
Summary: Decent but way too many plotholes.
Review: Note this review contains spoilers I would rather give this 2 1/2 but since you can't I'll have to round down on this book, on account of having WAY too many plotholes. Here's some of the more notable ones. The idea of a "rotating cleartext" makes absolutely no sense. If decrypted text is still shifted into gibberish after inserting the encryption key, how can a rotating cleartext EVER be used on a practical level? If the assassin in Spain was deaf, how did he know the names of all his victims? Strathmore kills an innocent man who is trying to cut power because "if Digital Fortress is going to be the NSA's new baby, he wants to be sure it's unbreakable!" Someone tell me why it matters if it's unbreakable or not? Wasn't it a bit weird that Strathmore suddenly came to the revelation that Digital Fortress was fake at the EXACT same moment Susan did even though they were in completely seperate rooms? ZIP is not an encryption algorithm Digital Fortress is mildy entertaininf if you've got nothing else to read but there's alot of other stuff you could read first.
Rating:
Summary: An Average Thriller
Review: This book has nothing to do with "The Da Vinci Code". Moreover, it is full of inaccuracies (for example, Dan Brown states that the Nagasaki bomb did not use plutonium as its fissionable matter) and is more worthy of a beginner author. If you really want to read some good tech-spy-thrillers go to the pros, such as Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum. The reason I did give it three stars and not less is that it did help me pass many hours waiting in the airport for my flight. That is, the book as a thriller is basically good. However, if you're expecting something like "The Da Vinci Code" or just a good, accurate, realistic, researched thriller, don't waste your time with this book.
Rating:
Summary: Enough said
Review: Dan Brown describes his hero as having "sharp green eyes and a wit to match." Enough said.
Rating:
Summary: Was Brown in high school when he wrote this?
Review: Unbelievable, check. Inaccurate, sure. But the part that makes this novel really terrible is that it's an absolute model of "bad fiction." Contrived, predictable, cliche, and at many times, downright cheesy, the only good thing about DF is that it's a fast read and the therefore the pain is relatively quick. Here are some questions, and these don't even include the techno-geek inaccuracies, which, not being a software engineer, I didn't catch right away: If the kid lives in Spain, and is a regular at the club, how does he fail to realize that 100 pesetas is about 87 cents? Why, when the lights went out in Crypto, could Susan see perfectly sometimes, but other times stumble around like it really was perfectly dark? Is Susan a mathematician, computer scientist or both? Are math-minded codebreakers computer savvy enough to write their own complex programs like the tracer? Would a punk teenage use a word like "weekending"? Did the scene where David asks Susan to marry him from the van in Seville make anyone else throw their book across the room? The best thing about this novel is that it gives hope to every other aspiring novelist in the world. If this can get published, what can't??? Just skip this one. The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons are way better.
Rating: 
Summary: Good read for a weekend at the beach
Review: Dan Brown is a good storyteller. His use of suspense got better in Angels and Demons and still better in The Da Vinci Code, but his work in Digital Fortress was clean and compelling. One of the things I like most about his writing is the obvious level of research he puts in before putting pen to paper. He takes some liberty with the technical aspects of cryptography, but none of it detracts from the overall quality of the story. In other words, he gave enough realism to the story to keep it realistic without making it so technical that the average person couldn't enjoy it. Nice book, good read, crack a beer at the beach and enjoy!
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