These two whilst being school kid targeted, if you don’t know the subject matter you’ll find them pretty enlightening - without the gift of hindsight!
Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire
by Stephen Dalziel (Author)
&
Kgb Cia
by Celina Bledowska (Author)
it’s that man again!
Mr da vinci - “Dan Brown” himself!
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0552151696/
Damn romantic slushy stuff, reasonably factually OK and you can’t put the bugger down. Took me three days! Both this book and the Singh book were lent to me by the same person. A very non-geek friend of my wife’s.
Verdict: This guy is a bit like JA, but we don’t know what is crime is yet. (A damned good simple storyteller, but uses an even smaller vocab.)
I think he should quit living in the states and pitch his writing with a higher reading level age, then I think he could write best sellers with lot more respect.
Great book by Simon Singh, really code encompassing book on the history and theory of encryption.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390384/
OK, but not a make out movie. Whoops - bad choice.
OK screen play, IMHO could have done with better editing - which may have lead to better direction. Hard to determine why this film didn’t quite work and I bet the pace at the start of the film looses 99% of the viewers.
In it’s present cut, only geeks need watch this.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0274812/
Different, one of Mrs X friends recommended to see. OK, not too bad, but not something we would have picked out together or individually.
My angle would if it had been directed by a Brit, as I think that his or her style of portrale would have been very different.
The lighting work is not disimilar from a European Foreign sub-titled film - appauling. Over lit.
Acting given script and direction - not too bad. But I did get the impression that she did it to launch her career. However having said that it probably has open doors for her in either direction. More of the same or wait for the right script to come along.
by Niall Ferguson
Neat Pocket Penguin book - very enlightening.
By Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner - this is a great book!
Thank you Maria.
by Bruce Sterling I bought this book years ago, but for some reason decided to reread it before checking it out.
What a mistake that would have been, after reading Freakonomics which gives you a different way of looking at facts I learnt more about the effects of perceived computer intrusion than at first glance.
Little snippets:
The US Secret Service was set up to counter conterfeit currency, protecting the President was a duty tacked on. Thus in the early ’90s these guys had to into wirefraud in big way.
The amount of money lost to phone freaking paled into significance the volume of money extracted out of people on the back of charity raising scams.
Hacks “used” to use war dialers to derive 800 pre-paid telephone cards, scammers would set up shell company 10 deep, hack US phone exchanges to forward calls via an anonymous warehouses and call up little old grannies who regularly gave money to charity. They got the credit users details from hackers as well. Setup up a credit card account. Next, “Hello I’m calling from Lightbulbs for the Blind…”. Bank the money for a month and wind up the shell companies and start all over again!
It left me thinking - what the hell are the dark sided phone freaks up to now!
Great story, just zero descriptive narrative. Bought as a present, out of choice - I wouldn’t have read as I had seen a good documentary on it by Tony Robinson.
It is quite cool in that the secret societies all exist.
by James Howard Kunstler
Mine was a nice US hardback edition that I bought on hols.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/
Great read, at lot consider him to be too much, I can’t see that he has got much wrong!
Location: Paignton Apollo
Report: Not bad
imdb entry
There’s “not a lot” you can say about this one.
Classic film - even better book!
Completed on the way back from Boston.
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