Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

1970s onwards about the British code-breaking endeavours at Bletchley Park in World War II. (I
particularly recommend Code Breakers edited by F. H. Hinsley and Alan Stripp which is a collection of
memoirs of some of the actual code breakers themselves). The writer Robert Harris evidently had the
same sort of childhood as me because his new novel Enigma is set in the wartime Bletchley Park and
the hero is one of the codebreakers. Around this historical and factual background Harris has written a
detective novel/spy story. The book's enormous strengths lie in the incredibly realistic re-creation of the
world of wartime Britain in general and Bletchley Park in particular. The writing is so vivid you would
swear you were living through it yourself. He skilfully evokes the sounds and sights and smells of the
era. Harris never stumbles here and the novel gives immense pleasure at this level. However the plot
itself is rather weak, being merely a common or garden thriller with, unfortunately, a punch line at the
end rather like an O'Henry short story which spoils it for a second reading.
One of the reasons cryptography looms so large in the mind of the computer geek is because of its
applications in ensuring the security of network traffic (particularly across the Internet). It is needed
because so many people out there on the information super-cliché appear to want to break in to things
and do damage. One of those was a man called Kevin Mitnick who has been convicted several times for
computer frauds of one sort and another. In 1995 he broke into a computer network belonging to
Tsutomu Shimomura, a computational physicist at the University of California and currently a senior
fellow at the San Diego Supercomputer Centre. Takedown, which he wrote in collaboration with John
Markoff is the story of how Shimomura tracked Mitnick down and had him prosecuted.
I decided to read this on the flight back to Auckland. It was a nice feeling to sit upstairs on a jumbo jet,
idly sipping champagne and stretching my legs and reading a most fascinating and quite witty book.
When Mitnick first broke in to the network, Shimomura said "Looks like the ankle-biters have learned to
read technical manuals. Somebody should teach them some manners." This phrase, popularised by
journalist John Markoff when he wrote up the attack for the New York Times brought Shimomura his
fifteen minutes of fame. And, I suppose, the book.
It is neither as screamingly funny nor as dramatic as Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoos Egg, a story about a
similar incident. Shimomura lacks Stoll's dry humour and Mitnick was no KGB agent, just a sad, deluded
and rather twisted nerd. But the parallels are still quite dramatic -- Shimomura got just as much cooperation
from the FBI as Stoll had done before him -- virtually none. Somehow I'm not surprised;
government departments never seem to learn. (Shimomura himself is quite scathing about the
bureaucratic inefficiency of the National Security Agency for whom he has done some work in the past).
There is something here for most people -- a little technical detail to whet the appetite of the jaded Unix
wizard, love interest for the romantics among us. But most of all there is simply the pain staking
gathering of clues and the primeval thrill of the chase. This has been a winning formula ever since Arthur
Conan Doyle invented it for Sherlock Holmes and it is just as valid now as it ever was. (Shimomura even
has his Watson look-alike, a somewhat inept graduate student called Andrew). I loved it.
I arrived back in Auckland and bought a bottle of Baileys in the duty free shop because they were giving
away a free Irish Pub with it. Only a small one, mind you. About ... this big.
Arthur C. Clarke & Mike McQuay Richter 10 Bantam
Fred Clarke Four Heads in the Air Rocket Publishing Co.
Larry McMurtry Dead Man's Walk Orion
Hunter S. Thompson Better than Sex Black Swan
Michael Palin Hemingway's Chair Methuen
Harry Harrison & John Holm One King's Way Tor
Alan Dean Foster Mad Amos Del Rey
F. H. Hinsley & Alan Stripp Code Breakers Oxford University Press
Robert Harris Enigma Hutchinson
Tsutomu Shimomura & John Markoff Takedown Secker and Warburg