March Suggestion box

[james_davis_nicoll]

Waiting for the last few books on my to-read list to come in. Open to suggestions, particularly for more recent books.

I cannot recall who asked me to read the Rational Harry Potter but it has defeated me. May I review something else?

Comments

[felila.livejournal.com]

I was completely absorbed by Naam's novels. It wasn't until afterwards that I realized that the whole #$%@#$% plot depended on the brain software possessing ONLY those backdoors that the developers had written into it. That's a coder fantasy that doesn't play out very often in real life. Hackers find bugs, buffer overflows, whatever. Is there any software that is absolutely impervious to attack?

I recall Gene Spafford opining that a computer in no way connected to the net, surrounded by barbed wire and a moat, guarded by guys with guns, was only relatively secure.

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

An example being that Stuxnet was a successful attack on computers that were "in no way connected to the net, surrounded by barbed wire and a moat, guarded by guys with guns".