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EUCAMS_CRYPTO • July 21, 2019 8:10 AM
@Rachel
No love in the age of decipherment? No exchanging keys? No secret sharing?
Penetration testing in a romance novel? Sounds kinky!
Clive Robinson • July 21, 2019 11:04 AM
@ Bruce,
Really
What can one say other than,
- Aghh tweet
@ Rachel,
I don’t understand why this is a blog post here.
It is Friday and these books are most definately about “dressing down”. But in the dim and distant past the Friday Squid page used to have ammusments and similar appear on it as a way to ease out of the working week on the “Something for the weekend” principle.
However as you have pointed to an Observer article that points out that “Tech Movies” are on the rise, just think when the film of this book comes out as “Straight to DVD” it can have a tag line of,
- Bodice Ripping meets Media Ripping
I’ll stop at this point as the next stop is through the barrel and descending fast… Just as mechanics has “grease nipples”, “asymetric oilers”, “recipricating movments”, “grubscrews” and many more as part of it’s lexicon, that have all been turned into risqué jokes, so does the ICT lexicon have a surfit of innuendo inducing terms, which have yet to be exploited in amusments. Which is a task I will leave to others 😉
Alyer Babtu • July 21, 2019 11:06 AM
And then there is
http://www.elsewhere.org/journal/archives/2018/10/30/neural-net-romance-book-titles/#more-3386
Just titles, but, with a bit more work, who knows …
Alyer Babtu • July 21, 2019 11:12 AM
Or perhaps the shiv_integer code from Thingiverse could be adapted to produce romance-tech literary output.
Givon Zirkind • July 21, 2019 5:38 PM
bound to happen sooner or later. mata hari and james bond have to go digital and cyber. after all, angelina jolie was the super hot hacker of hackers, right? besides, farms, boats and horses are getting passe and trite for romanace novels. it’s a lot more romantic meeting by hacking and counter-hacking, than bumping carts in the supermarket or fender benders, right? and all those ladies, fan readers, can just fantasized about being admired for their brains. it’s gotta sell copy.
my 2c as a mild mannered s/w qa tech writer by day dreaming of writing the next great american novel.
Tatütata • July 22, 2019 4:16 PM
Can you train a neural network to create bad novels? “It was a dark and stormy night…“
Orwell had already dreamed of novel writing machines. If Julia was the one who got these machines to work, could she have been a hacker?
Luzugas Fenyev Baixar • July 22, 2019 8:34 PM
@Tatütata
Julia … hacker
In as much as Julia with her note, her code, breaches the State mandated and maintained solipsism/narcissism (am I the perfect mirror of Ingsoc ?), a kind of firewall of the soul, establishing an unauthorized but paradoxically authentic and deeper network link – “only connect” – she is a “hacker”.
Clive Robinson • July 23, 2019 2:53 AM
@ Tatütata
Can you train a neural network to create bad novels?
First define what you mean by “bad”, but beware the POV trap, what might be so excruciating bad it makes your toes curl, might be the most exquisit of pleasures to others…
I don’t know if you know but the writer and poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, wrote a poem “There was a little girl” that had the words,
- And when she was good, she was very, very good,
But when she was bad she was horrid.
At some point a “peroxide blond siren” changed the “horrid” for “better”, and shortened it a little to,
- When I’m good, I’m very good, but when I’m bad, I’m better.
Oh and so good was this siren that they named a life preserver after her in WWII. I’m not sure if “Mae West” ever got any royalties on it though.
Ken M • August 22, 2019 8:58 PM
Add to this list the (free until the end of August if you own a Kindle) Black Nowhere by Reece Hirsch. Our villain (although a hero in his own mind) uses TOR to stay safe from various parties while running a Bitcoin-fueled anonymous auction site for drugs.
Aside from the technical holes, I gave up about halfway through when I started to think about the number of agents that the FBI could devote to taking down this site. Simple example: vacuum-sealing drugs to prevent dogs from sniffing from them out was mentioned; the FBI could probably track down every industrial-sized purchaser of the equipment and supplies for doing this if they wanted.
It’s a new title, but I don’t know whether the well-known vulnerability that the FBI used to take down TOR users exist in this fictional universe because, as I said, I gave up halfway through.
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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.
Rachel • July 21, 2019 1:19 AM
I don’t understand why this is a blog post here.
Seperate to this, I did actually read the linked article, the author sounded like an gushing verbose idiot. Allow me to be the fool that waded in and spares you the trouble getting wet.