bad book (Score 1)

I did NOT like the Digital Fortress at all.

IMHO its literary quality is disgusting: look - main hero is linguistic genius, professor - and 6' tall athlete, main heroine is mathematical genius, and (!) hi-paid hi-level executive, and beautiful woman capturing male guard's dreaming gaze, etc. Of course they make passionate love - guess where? of course ! - in front of fireplace in a "manor" in smoky mountains. Looks like a high school attempt in fiction writing.

As for the plot twists and rationale behind - to me the book looks like cheap work - if any work at all. The author wants action with gunfire in the heart of NSA. He (and any reasonable person) knows it is impossible because of tight security. Did he worked hard to imagine really smart twists to overcome security ? No, he just pretended there is no security at all, not even video monitoring, in the Crypto! and so on, and so on....

And now about mathematics... can you imagine a (super)computer blasting because of overheating due to cooling malfunction? Oh, boy! Ok, let go straight to the crown jewel: we have got a foolproof encryption algorithm. Everyone wants to see it. But its description is encrypted! Great! Its encryption employs THAT algorithm, and you will never know the algorithm's sectrets unless you have the key.... wait a minute! When you enter the key - the encrypted file will open up, and THAT means that there is a program there that takes the key and makes the decryption - so we can look at the program code and get the algorithm from there ! One does not have to decrypt the file to get the algorithm ! and so on, and so on...

And on top of all that the author claims that the Nagasaki bomb was not plutonium one, as everyone believes...what fools we all were!... and he even explains that it was "artificially manufactured, neutron-saturated isotope of uranium 238". Do you know how they make plutonium? i tell you - they "neutron-saturate" uranium 238 - as a result they get plutonium. There is no nature source of plutonium, every atom of it is "artificially manufactured"

And the last straw - in author's view a 64-bit key is represented by 64 character string. AND it is implied that it is NOT a binary string. Now that is really gross. Probably the author did not do ANY research for his so-called-book. That's why I would call this book a [EXPLETIVE DELETED].

Regards