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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 prota
by 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 agoYou 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 agoOh, 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 agoI’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.