Monday, December 28, 2009

Daemon: Don't mess with John Carmack

Over Christmas I read Daemon by Daniel Suarez. I saw an advertisement in the latest Wired for its sequel, Freedom, coming on January 7th, so I thought I would give the first book a try. The plot revolves around a dead video game programmer releasing the mother-of-all botnets that recruits a gang of conspirators to take over the world. I found the book to be a fun, quick read. Aside from the botnet with world domination goals, I was struck by how technically accurate the hacking portions of the story are written. The author describes different attacks ranging from buffer overflows to SQL injection with pretty dead on accuracy. One of the characters exploits an injection with a '1=1 string! Ideas like DDoS and kernel rootkits are integral plot points but never get bogged down in semantic details. Augmented reality even makes an appearance near the end. I really enjoyed the book. I would suggest it to anybody who likes detailed fiction in the vein of Tom Clancy or Michael Crichton.

I have already pre-ordered the sequel which is released on January 7th (and downloaded to my Kindle at 12:01am that morning).

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi there,
Thx for the tip. Just started reading it. However I'd like to comment on the stupidity of DRMs. When I saw your quick review about the book I thought this is the kind of book I like. I got my kindle 2 (I live in Australia) and try to get it. No luck :( searches returned 0. Then, I went to the amazon website, the book was there, but I couldn't buy it, because it is not available in Australia. Why it is not available in Australia? because some stupid company didn't get an agreement with amazon to get its own slice of the cake. And I as a consumer has to pay the price? DRM has to die!!!! Then I though, nice they do not want my money, I will rather download it from BT, Usenet, whatever, but I decided differently. I went to my amazon kindle page and changed my address to some random US address, BINGO!! Now I can buy any book @ kindle store even though they might not be available in Australia. the downside is I will pay an international fee (1.99) if I download books wirelessly. Not a big deal as I don't buy more than 1, 2 books a month. I can download them on my computer and then copy to Kindle (via USB).

I really enjoy your articles, nice work!!

cax.