Forwarded from: Jason Scott <jason@private> What originally got me on the ISN list in the first place was William inviting me after I got into a back-and-forth with Verton about his previous book "Confessions of Teenage Hackers", which is basically riddled with hyperbole, factual errors in regard to history, and possible exploitation of underage interview subjecs if you hold it to the right light. My apparent concentration of focus on Verton is actually not; it's part of a larger project that I've been idly working on to collate and list major errors in many works, including those by Hafner, Markoff, Littman, Goodell and so on. It is very personally troubling to me when these books are later used as source materials for untold numbers of school reports, academic papers, and possibly even laws, and they simply get facts wrong. However, only Verton has taken the time to tell me to "get a life" and other similar jibes. As a result, I purchased his Black Ice book, intending to see if the approach he took in Confessions was a standard practice or just a fluke of bad reporting taking on a subject he wasn't too good with. Here, I encountered a problem: the book is astoundingly boring, so much so that several wanderings into the chapters caused me to retreat like a dog that's run into brambles. The subject is vague (cyberterrorism) and his writing is not all that engaging. Trying to work up interest in the subject at all is difficult enough, what with the whole idea of "cyberterrorism" just being another hype term to give the security industry some boost. So I abandoned the chore of reading Verton's book for the time being; it stares at me as I speak, mocking me from my "at-hand" bookshelf. So naturally I take an interest when I see an article from somewhere else going after the book and its stylistic problems, and I see that the reviewer doesn't enjoy Verton's leaning towards hyperbole and portrayal of imminent threat any more than I do. But here we also encounter a problem. Richard Greene, the reporter for the Register, isn't all that much better. I had the unenviable position of watching all sides playing out in the Gweeds/cDc/l0pht/Sir Dystic soap opera Greene orchestrated, and I got to see that in several critical cases, he went for one-source reporting, and throwing e-mails by god-knows-who with god-knows-what-motivations verbatim into his articles. It was at best disheartening and at worst angering to watch him apply his chainsaw, and it has taken the heart out of any enjoyment I used to have reading "juicy" Register articles. Of course they're juicy: guess who's supplying the juice? The point of all this I'm saying? Watch the bylines. Match bylines to articles, match them to books. The tendons of hype will make themselves clear to you. On Thu, 26 Feb 2004, InfoSec News wrote: > http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/35816.html > > [ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0072227877/c4iorg - WK] - ISN is currently hosted by Attrition.org To unsubscribe email majordomo@private with 'unsubscribe isn' in the BODY of the mail.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Feb 27 2004 - 04:21:36 PST