{"id":61,"date":"2005-02-28T10:31:14","date_gmt":"2005-02-28T02:31:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/?p=61"},"modified":"2014-12-06T07:03:36","modified_gmt":"2014-12-05T23:03:36","slug":"digital-fortress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/mathematics\/digital-fortress-61","title":{"rendered":"Digital Fortress"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Dan Brown's 1998 effort, \"Digital Fortress\" was a fun read. The publishers make a big deal of his new-found fame via \"The Da Vinci Code\", with the following emblazoned prominently on the cover: <i>#1 New York Times Bestselling Author of The Da Vinci Code<\/i> . That's okay, but clearly his skills have improved since the \"Digital Fortress\" days.<\/p>\n<p>Some of the themes in the book that I found interesting and\/or disturbing...<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The vulnerability of sensitive data and how protection of databases will continue to be a growth industry<\/li>\n<li>The stupidity of keeping all vital data in one place<\/li>\n<li>The motivation of many in high places (and not so high) is that they must <em>look<\/em> good, rather than <em>be<\/em> good<\/li>\n<li>That even in 1998, Brown felt the need to explain to his readers such concepts as email, using a search engine and Netscape (what?)<\/li>\n<li>The low respect that academics receive in Western societies (quotes like \"I'm only a teacher\", \"I'm not rich, I'm just a teacher\", \"She can do better than a teacher\"). This may be because Brown's father was a mathematics teacher - and they commonly suffer from esteem problems...<\/li>\n<li>At least he has a brilliant female mathematician as the heroine - this is a rarity in fiction<\/li>\n<li>It is obvious that Brown writes hoping his book(s) will be made into a movie one day<\/li>\n<li>The depiction of Asians as the 'baddies'. (To be fair, there were baddies at all levels in the story)<\/li>\n<li>It is nice having your intelligence challenged by the author (he throws codes at you every now and then - something he did a lot more of in Da Vinci Code) but then insulting that intelligence in other places with corny plot twists<\/li>\n<li>A credibility gap in some of the plot (sending the professor to Europe on a dangerous mission, the visual representation of hackers getting into the system, and the last minute climax of the book)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Despite the shortcomings, I recommend the book, especially if you are into technobabble.<\/p>\n<p>Related post: My rave about <a href=\"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/learning\/thiering-revelations-and-da-vinci-47\">Da Vinci Code.<\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"alt\"><a href=\"#respond\" id=\"comms\">Be the first to comment<\/a> below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dan Brown's 1998 effort, \"Digital Fortress\" was a fun read. The publishers make a big deal of his new-found fame via \"The Da Vinci Code\", with the following emblazoned prominently on the cover: #1 New York Times Bestselling Author of The Da Vinci Code . That's okay, but clearly his skills have improved since the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[124],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}