Reader’s Diary

Cory Doctorow

The book’s hero, Marcus, is a 17-year-old student skilled in evading high school surveillance.  After being rounded up in the aftermath of a terrorist bombing in San Fransisco he devotes himself to undermining the invasive procedures put in place by the Department of Homeland Security (George Orwell’s ghost must still be laughing at that name).  He’s David fighting Goliath, and some of his tactics have unfortunate side effects.

The book deals with some important themes and contains a lot of useful information about security systems and the measures people can take to guard their privacy.  For those who say “I have nothing to hide”, I recommend Marcus’s argument: “It’s not about doing something shameful. It’s about doing something private. It’s about your life belonging to you.”

This young adult novel about the Surveillance State should be assigned reading in American high schools.   Some mildly explicit sexual content will probably keep it off public school reading lists.  This is an unfortunate mistake on Doctorow’s part since it provides a cover for book-banners who are actually more threatened by the book’s real message: that the US Constitution should trump the fear-based excesses of our “protectors”.

If my kids were still in high school I’d want them to read this book.  Ironically, I read it the week that the following story broke:

The FBI is investigating allegations made against the Lower Merion School District in a lawsuit by the parents of a student. The lawsuit claims school officials used a remote-controlled Webcam to spy on their son, a high school student.

…

According to the suit, the district provided laptops to high school students as part of a technology initiative, and did not notify families the laptops were equipped with Webcams that could be turned on remotely. The family alleged in the suit they did not learn of the capability until school officials accused Blake Robbins of “improper behavior in his home” and cited as evidence a photograph from the Webcam embedded in the laptop.

(Via eWeek.com)

When I compare that to my high school experience in the early 1970′s, where, at our all-white working class Catholic school, I could read Eldrige Cleaver’s “Soul on Ice” for an English class, debate the merits of socialism in world cultures class,  where there were no surveillance cameras, and where, despite all that,  none of my classmates have yet become terrorists, I wonder what has  happened to my country.

(The book has some excellent “afterwords” by several different authors and a useful bibliography.  The entire book is available for free download.)

Peter Seibel

Six hundred pages of very similar interviews with prominent software developers would probably put most people to sleep.  As a programmer with three decades of experience, though, I found this pretty fascinating.  The book has it’s faults: the interviews don’t seem very interactive -  Seibel seems more interested in his prepared questions then in following up on interesting things his subjects mention.  It’s also biased towards the craft’s elder statesmen.  That’s not entirely bad, especially when the old guys’ opinions agree with mine.  For example, many of them are not fond of IDE’s, think C++ is an abomination, have little interest in Java, and some shun debuggers.  OK, I’m a dinosaur.

Many of the interview subjects equate programming more with literature than with math or even science, something I’ve long thought to be the case.  Writing code and writing prose seem to use the same parts of the brain.  It has never seemed odd to me that the father of Perl,  Larry Wall (who is notably absent from “Coders at Work”), was a linguistics major.

This would be an excellent book for somebody considering taking up the software trade.  It’s also a good book for people who want an “inside baseball” look at software development.

Cory Doctorow

“Makers” is an intriguing book without much of a plot.  In a near-future, post-economic-collapse America, two hackers in an abandoned Florida strip mall create clever mechanical art largely through the use of 3D printers and run afoul of corporate interests, namely Disney. Jimmy Buffet meets “Neuromancer“.  Even though the plot is weak, the novel is full of interesting ideas and characters you end up caring about.   Even though it could use some tight editing, I enjoyed this one a lot and it pairs nicely with “Daemon” and “Freedom (TM)“.

(For a non-fiction look at cutting edge – ha – manufacturing technologies, see “Fab“.)

Bernard Cornwell

The follow-up to “Sword Song“  is vivid, exciting, and graphic but I’d really like to see the Uhtred saga move forward rather than go in circles.  It’s good stuff, but I wish Cornwell’s would let his characters change over time.

Richard Polsky

Like Polsky’s first memoir (“I Bought Andy Warhol“), this book consists mostly of anecdotes about the world of contemporary art.  During the time covered in this volume, Polsky made the transition from dealer to “art financial advisor”.  Consequently,  it’s more about dollars than art, but it’s an interesting read nevertheless, albeit a little impersonal compared to his first book.

Richard Clarke

It was interesting to read this book, which is about cyber warfare apparently waged by China, during the week that Google made it’s allegation against China about attempts to penetrate Google’s systems.  Note that I said “apparently”, which is a bit of a spoiler but the real culprit is telegraphed so early in the book that I’m not spoiling much of a surprise.  (So if fictional culprits can make an attack look like it came from China, couldn’t real attackers do the same thing?)

Clarke, a former senior White House advisor to three presidents, uses fiction to make a convincing  case that the US infrastructure is very vulnerable to technological attacks.   His protagonists are plausible, his villains two-dimensional, and his thriller-writing workmanlike.