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Ha. I teach an Intro to IT course, and I quite literally open my lecture on encryption making fun of Renowned Dan Brown. Namely, I acknowledge that the Tom Han

• thedanbob 3y ago
  Digital Fortress is the one and only Dan Brown book I've read. It thoroughly killed any desire I might have had to read any of his other books. IIRC, the protagonists attempted to decrypt data that they thought was encrypted with a new and unknown algorithm by brute forcing it with a supercomputer. I just couldn't suspend my disbelief after that.
  • Izkata 3y ago
    You must have forgotten the "rotating cleartext". I don't remember how well defined it was in the book, but it sounded like it means the decrypted message could change out from under them, without being decrypted. Like the encryption was itself a running program they had no control over that could be magically updated remotely. IIRC though, the whole thing ended up being a ruse, a virus made to look like an encrypted message, designed to destroy that specific supercomputer. Digital Fortress was also the only Dan Brown book I've read, and later when I started college, one of the other students said it was the reason he decided to take Computer Science. I kinda winced and wasn't really sure what to say.
    • jrm4 3y ago
      Oh, as I tell my students, I literally threw the book across the room once they revealed that was the premise. I remember nothing :)
  • jandrese 3y ago
    I’m in the same boat. I wasn’t all that interested in Biblical puzzle quests so I thought I’d read his book about a field I know a little about. It killed my interest in his works entirely. I managed to finish the book, but after the hero is chased down a hall by the fireball released when the computer virus caused the machine to explode like it was made out of nitroglycerin I was done.
• atourgates 3y ago
  Digital Fortress ruined Dan Brown for me. When Da Vinci Code came out, I knew essentially zilch about Renaissance Italy, or early church history or art or many of the other topics it touches on, and I thought it was fascinating! Then I read Digital Fortress and realized that it was quite possible that Dan Brown was very comfortable writing entire books on topics which he also knew essentially zilch about, and perhaps I should be a bit more skeptical of the historical and factual basis of his novels.
  • wkat4242 3y ago
    Yes digital fortress was terrible if you know anything about encryption. It reads like a JJ Abrams blockbuster, the tech just serves as a McGuffin to advance the empty plot. Good point, I've never thought of it that way. I thought the Da Vinci code wasn't bad as a mindless thriller, though going further into the series I got really annoyed with the plot repetition.
  • anthk 3y ago
    As a Spaniard I've seen horrors from Dan Brown and Tom Clancy, basically placing us as 3rd world country (if they knew about the actual, hugely culture and climate diverse Spain, from cold minus ten-twenty winters to scorching summers), as if we set the USA as some hell-like country with a mix betwen Detroit and some Americana ruralia with a Far West lore with some corrupt NYC cops on top. Or Tom Clamcy mixing Spain with Latin America and USA tropes on race fights to depict the political struggles in Spain, which we have nothing to do with Latin America tropes as it's a damn ocean between them and US and things diverged as much as the USA with the UK, if not further because of France, Italy and UK's influence from centuries ago, either by land or by sea (For instance, Bay of Biscay's coal -> UK's factories for the Industrial Revolution).