Andre Amorim wrote: > Anyone knows what's is fact (real) and what is fiction in Dan Brown > novel, Digital Fortress ?
The book is almost wholly fiction with the occasional bit of name-dropping thrown in to make it sound authentic. The idea of a cipher that shifts over time and thus making it unbreakable is patently ridiculous. All you're doing is making a timestamp part of the encryption key, nothing more or less. The TRANSLATR machine does not work and cannot work, not under the laws of physics as we know them to be. The description of life in a secure high-reliability datacenter is also absurd. E.g., the book mentions several times how they use Freon to cool the machinery. Real datacenters explicitly forbid Freon. When Freon catches fire it decomposes into phosgene, a nerve gas, which makes it kind of hard to fight the fire. In the book, a fire ravages the datacenter and yet somehow people in it aren't dead from phosgene exposure. The portrayal of the NSA doesn't even rise to the level of a caricature. The book is a miserable, insufferable, abysmal waste of time. A friend of mine once gave me a copy with the caveat that I wouldn't be able to finish it. I did, but only to prove him wrong. _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users