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3.92 AVERAGE
3.92 AVERAGE
adventurous
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
challenging
dark
funny
informative
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Really good series. Dystopia set in a not so distant future and based on the surveillance world we pretty much already live in. It's barely a dystopia. Love the tech talk, and it's honestly educational too. We all can learn a thing or two about digital privacy and security from reading this series while being entertained.
challenging
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This was very well done and quite scary. It goes into great detail about modern infosec, with a main character trying to cover all her tracks and keep herself from being tracked, and also ties in to protest movements trying to reduce surveillance. There are some appearances by characters from [b:Little Brother & Homeland|50403443|Little Brother & Homeland|Cory Doctorow|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1585199125l/50403443._SY75_.jpg|75365871] but the main character was kind of a side character/antagonist in those books. It's basically set in the extremely near future and is very plausible.
Some years ago, I got to a "conference" on cybersecurity put on by a bunch of government contractors and a few high up military folks who I suspect are now working for those contractors. Ostensibly, it was about emerging cyber security threats governments and quasi-municipal organizations were facing. Based on the quality of the venue and the buffet table, it was marketing. Buy our shiny tools! We'll partner with you and help you keep people safe! The dams are much less likely to fall and the power plants much less likely to explode if you let us install these black boxes! With proprietary protection! No warrants needed!
One of the generals said very sincerely "we absolutely do not eavesdrop on American Citizens," and then very fast "metadata is not eavesdropping." I snorted and got worried looks from the worthies at my table.Boundless Informant was in the news.
This is a sequel to Doctorow's absolutely brilliant Little Brother and his disturbing Homeland. We shift perspective from the plucky innocents caught up in the Total Surveillance Society. It explores the increasingly intrusive surveillance and black-0p tools from the perspective of one of the brilliant ghosts in the machine, Masha Maximow, who has a preternatural gift for both developing technology and understanding, deep down, how people work. Maximow saw the Oakland Bay Bridge come down in Little Brother and signed up to fight bad guys. She signs up with a contractor providing unsavory services to the highest bidder. She figures out very quickly how to use metadata to figure out who is organizing protests and who to focus hacking on to infiltrate their networks and sow chaos. Maybe she fights terrorists occasionally. She knows her clients do horrible things because she sees the ones she documents. And she does horrible things in the name of the contract and security.
She bounces between two companies, either of which could have been Blackwater. She drinks heavily, participates in and covers up war crimes, and ruthlessly compartmentalizes to the point that her own sociopathic mentors recommend therapy. From therapists on the payroll. Who have done wonders, helping other people come to peace with the evil they do and do not stop. She declines.
After she stops a massacre by a government using the very surveillance and black op tools she installed for that government, she gets fired. She goes back to San Francisco and realizes, to her horror, the same tools she developed are being deployed against her friends. And both of her former employers are competing to bring a broader array of her techniques to the local police departments. Lots of violence and manipulation ensues.
Masha is not a good person. She's not trying to be. But she knows some good people, cares about them, and is willing to reshape the world to protect them.
The book isn't perfect. The characters are there to tell a story about America and capitalism's willingness to destroy for that quarterly income report, and sometimes, their thinness intrudes through the text. The good guys are too charismatic and kind to be quite believable. Masha's conversion is a little too pat. But the horror her employers are willing to rain down on the world are all too gripping.
Well worth the time.
One of the generals said very sincerely "we absolutely do not eavesdrop on American Citizens," and then very fast "metadata is not eavesdropping." I snorted and got worried looks from the worthies at my table.
This is a sequel to Doctorow's absolutely brilliant Little Brother and his disturbing Homeland. We shift perspective from the plucky innocents caught up in the Total Surveillance Society. It explores the increasingly intrusive surveillance and black-0p tools from the perspective of one of the brilliant ghosts in the machine, Masha Maximow, who has a preternatural gift for both developing technology and understanding, deep down, how people work. Maximow saw the Oakland Bay Bridge come down in Little Brother and signed up to fight bad guys. She signs up with a contractor providing unsavory services to the highest bidder. She figures out very quickly how to use metadata to figure out who is organizing protests and who to focus hacking on to infiltrate their networks and sow chaos. Maybe she fights terrorists occasionally. She knows her clients do horrible things because she sees the ones she documents. And she does horrible things in the name of the contract and security.
She bounces between two companies, either of which could have been Blackwater. She drinks heavily, participates in and covers up war crimes, and ruthlessly compartmentalizes to the point that her own sociopathic mentors recommend therapy. From therapists on the payroll. Who have done wonders, helping other people come to peace with the evil they do and do not stop. She declines.
After she stops a massacre by a government using the very surveillance and black op tools she installed for that government, she gets fired. She goes back to San Francisco and realizes, to her horror, the same tools she developed are being deployed against her friends. And both of her former employers are competing to bring a broader array of her techniques to the local police departments. Lots of violence and manipulation ensues.
Masha is not a good person. She's not trying to be. But she knows some good people, cares about them, and is willing to reshape the world to protect them.
The book isn't perfect. The characters are there to tell a story about America and capitalism's willingness to destroy for that quarterly income report, and sometimes, their thinness intrudes through the text. The good guys are too charismatic and kind to be quite believable. Masha's conversion is a little too pat. But the horror her employers are willing to rain down on the world are all too gripping.
Well worth the time.
Attack Surface: “The sum of the different points where an unauthorized user (the "attacker") can try to enter data to or extract data from an environment. Keeping the attack surface as small as possible is a basic security measure.” (Wikipedia)
In today’s world of cyberterrorism and technology, in terms of ‘freedom of information’ and human rights, I think that you pretty much know where Cory Doctorow these days.
Just in case you didn’t, this one confirms where the author stands before you even start the book - in Attack Surface’s dedication Cory lists a number of ‘whistleblowers’ “who listened to the voice of their conscience and spoke the truth” and finishes with “especially Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was murdered for doing her job.”
This is one of those stories about someone who works under the radar. Masha Maximow initially works as a counterterrorism expert for a transnational cybersecurity firm named Xoth Intelligence, whose work is mainly creating hacks for organisations and governments to monitor dissidents in faraway police states. It’s complicated, requires skill and pays very well.
In her spare time, Masha works almost as a double agent, helping those same dissidents, whose causes she feels are just, to evade detection. For the thrills, the excitement, the danger – and to severely annoy her bosses.
When she is involved in a street riot in Slovstakia (where she has been helping local protestors against a dictatorship), Masha quickly finds herself without a job and having to go on the run.
She ends up working for Zyz, a military intelligence contractor who used to be the opposition but is now working covertly for the US military, and now finds herself in places such as Iraq and Mexico City secretly developing software that is used to covertly spy on those others feel need watching. Throughout all of this, the sassy (and rather sweary) Masha is monitored and promoted by her mentor Carrie Johnstone, a boss who is never far away from the centre of what is going on.
Whilst Masha finds herself travelling in luxury from military camp to military camp, enjoying a fast-paced life of parties, alcohol and sex, as well as repeatedly telling us that she is very well paid, she also now finds herself being passed information from people in the CIA who risk everything to do so in the hope that one day she will be able to make the information public – evidence of government torture, covert ops, rape and murder.
More worryingly, Misha finds that some of the work she has been developing is used against her friends and family. To add to Misha’s woes, back home, her lifelong friend Tanisha is involved in a Black Lives Matter type protest group named Black-Brown Alliance. Masha offers to help Tanisha despite being told by Johnstone that that Tanisha’s group may be (unbeknownst to her) partly supported by the Russians. Masha continues to help her friend, as part of her doing what is right, and this puts them all in danger.
Much of the final part of the novel finds Masha juggling so many different and at times conflicting elements where any mistake could have consequences for all involved. It also shows her wrestling with her conscience, making choices where no answer is easy and realising that her decisions affect others that know her.
As expected, Attack Surface is detailed with current cybertech terminology and vocabulary, a state of the art, super-contemporary novel of what may be happening now. As I type this, I’m looking at news headlines about Belarus, where a recent election have led to people protesting on the street. At the same time, various governments around the world have accused other countries of meddling with their previous political elections. This book could take place in any of them.
It helps that the book is filled with the sort of high-density ultra-smart dialogue that you’d expect cyberhackers to talk about. Cory clearly knows his stuff, and this adds a convincingly realistic feel to the context of the plot. Here’s a typical example:
I’m not particularly technical, but it could be intimidating for some readers. However, Cory does enough to explain such terms to even allow non-Internet dweebs like me to follow what’s going on.
It’s also a whip-smart techno-thriller, engagingly told with humour and some degree of peril for the characters. Masha is a complexly intelligent and endearingly sweary character who makes choices and finds her moral compass being subverted by what she is asked to do, to the point where she almost becomes amoral. I realised that I shouldn’t like what she does, and yet liked her enough to be interested in reading what happens to her, and how the plot plays out. In the end her choices, good or bad, affect lives.
For those who want a story that feels real, and that could be happening now, with enough technical detail to make what happens sound plausible, Attack Surface is a cracking read, even if a little scary. The three (yes, three!) afterwords - one by the founder and director of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, one by someone who works in cybersecurity (and who could be a template for Masha) and Cory himself give a valuable background to the context of the novel.
However, if the idea of this is to reassure you at the end of the novel that it is just fiction, it doesn’t work! Even if you weren’t worried about the amount of reliance we all seem to have in our gadgets, this book might just make you think again. Never mind phones, I’m off to turn off my Kindle and Alexa now….
In today’s world of cyberterrorism and technology, in terms of ‘freedom of information’ and human rights, I think that you pretty much know where Cory Doctorow these days.
Just in case you didn’t, this one confirms where the author stands before you even start the book - in Attack Surface’s dedication Cory lists a number of ‘whistleblowers’ “who listened to the voice of their conscience and spoke the truth” and finishes with “especially Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was murdered for doing her job.”
This is one of those stories about someone who works under the radar. Masha Maximow initially works as a counterterrorism expert for a transnational cybersecurity firm named Xoth Intelligence, whose work is mainly creating hacks for organisations and governments to monitor dissidents in faraway police states. It’s complicated, requires skill and pays very well.
In her spare time, Masha works almost as a double agent, helping those same dissidents, whose causes she feels are just, to evade detection. For the thrills, the excitement, the danger – and to severely annoy her bosses.
When she is involved in a street riot in Slovstakia (where she has been helping local protestors against a dictatorship), Masha quickly finds herself without a job and having to go on the run.
She ends up working for Zyz, a military intelligence contractor who used to be the opposition but is now working covertly for the US military, and now finds herself in places such as Iraq and Mexico City secretly developing software that is used to covertly spy on those others feel need watching. Throughout all of this, the sassy (and rather sweary) Masha is monitored and promoted by her mentor Carrie Johnstone, a boss who is never far away from the centre of what is going on.
Whilst Masha finds herself travelling in luxury from military camp to military camp, enjoying a fast-paced life of parties, alcohol and sex, as well as repeatedly telling us that she is very well paid, she also now finds herself being passed information from people in the CIA who risk everything to do so in the hope that one day she will be able to make the information public – evidence of government torture, covert ops, rape and murder.
More worryingly, Misha finds that some of the work she has been developing is used against her friends and family. To add to Misha’s woes, back home, her lifelong friend Tanisha is involved in a Black Lives Matter type protest group named Black-Brown Alliance. Masha offers to help Tanisha despite being told by Johnstone that that Tanisha’s group may be (unbeknownst to her) partly supported by the Russians. Masha continues to help her friend, as part of her doing what is right, and this puts them all in danger.
Much of the final part of the novel finds Masha juggling so many different and at times conflicting elements where any mistake could have consequences for all involved. It also shows her wrestling with her conscience, making choices where no answer is easy and realising that her decisions affect others that know her.
As expected, Attack Surface is detailed with current cybertech terminology and vocabulary, a state of the art, super-contemporary novel of what may be happening now. As I type this, I’m looking at news headlines about Belarus, where a recent election have led to people protesting on the street. At the same time, various governments around the world have accused other countries of meddling with their previous political elections. This book could take place in any of them.
It helps that the book is filled with the sort of high-density ultra-smart dialogue that you’d expect cyberhackers to talk about. Cory clearly knows his stuff, and this adds a convincingly realistic feel to the context of the plot. Here’s a typical example:
“Second, make sure your IMSI-catcher countermeasures are up to date. They just bought an update package for their fake cell towers and they’ll be capturing the unique IDs of every phone that answers a ping from them. The app your phone used last week to tell a fake tower from a real one? Useless now. Update, update, update. Check every signature, too.”
I’m not particularly technical, but it could be intimidating for some readers. However, Cory does enough to explain such terms to even allow non-Internet dweebs like me to follow what’s going on.
It’s also a whip-smart techno-thriller, engagingly told with humour and some degree of peril for the characters. Masha is a complexly intelligent and endearingly sweary character who makes choices and finds her moral compass being subverted by what she is asked to do, to the point where she almost becomes amoral. I realised that I shouldn’t like what she does, and yet liked her enough to be interested in reading what happens to her, and how the plot plays out. In the end her choices, good or bad, affect lives.
For those who want a story that feels real, and that could be happening now, with enough technical detail to make what happens sound plausible, Attack Surface is a cracking read, even if a little scary. The three (yes, three!) afterwords - one by the founder and director of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, one by someone who works in cybersecurity (and who could be a template for Masha) and Cory himself give a valuable background to the context of the novel.
However, if the idea of this is to reassure you at the end of the novel that it is just fiction, it doesn’t work! Even if you weren’t worried about the amount of reliance we all seem to have in our gadgets, this book might just make you think again. Never mind phones, I’m off to turn off my Kindle and Alexa now….
adventurous
inspiring
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I tend to like Cory Doctorow and know what to expect from his books. This one didn't disappoint - I picked it up on vacation and read it in a few days. The ending left me conflicted. Maybe I'm just jaded, but the naïve side characters started to get on my nerves. I have no idea what the main character is doing now. All the so called friends seem so far away and pretty much useless. The solution felt like an unrealistic ex machina moment. I don't know. I'll go and change my passwords.
adventurous
informative
lighthearted
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
informative
inspiring
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This is the third volume of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother series, but it also serves as a standalone novel. It tells the story of Masha, who served as one of the antagonists in the first novel, Little Brother, and provided assistance to Marcus in the second, Homeland.
The story begins with Masha working for Xoth, a private company assisting a foreign government suppress protesters. After completing her work for the day aiding the authoritarian government, she moonlights by assisting a group of protestors, teaching them how to evade the monitoring.
If the first two books had Marcus as the protagonist, here we follow Masha Maximow, who was mostly “on the other side” working to help to suppress hacktivists, but at the same time supplied Marcus with sensitive data in the second book.
As the story unfolds, we see flashbacks of how Masha ended up working with Homeland Security in the first novel, then getting picked up by Carrie Johnstone (the primary antagonist in Little Brother) and back to the present.
With the back and forth between working for Xoth and Xiz and back again, it got a little confusing where in the timeline certain events were in the middle. But getting to see events from Masha's perspective really rounded out the tales told in the first book, and seeing things come to a conclusion.
While Little Brother (and Marcus' ideology) cries out "heck yeah technology!" and shows what can be done with it, Homeland shows that technology can't always be our savior. Attack Surface brings it full circle and with Masha's perspective shows that technology is simply a tool to be used. Both sides can use it, but it cannot be the only card in our deck.
The story begins with Masha working for Xoth, a private company assisting a foreign government suppress protesters. After completing her work for the day aiding the authoritarian government, she moonlights by assisting a group of protestors, teaching them how to evade the monitoring.
If the first two books had Marcus as the protagonist, here we follow Masha Maximow, who was mostly “on the other side” working to help to suppress hacktivists, but at the same time supplied Marcus with sensitive data in the second book.
As the story unfolds, we see flashbacks of how Masha ended up working with Homeland Security in the first novel, then getting picked up by Carrie Johnstone (the primary antagonist in Little Brother) and back to the present.
With the back and forth between working for Xoth and Xiz and back again, it got a little confusing where in the timeline certain events were in the middle. But getting to see events from Masha's perspective really rounded out the tales told in the first book, and seeing things come to a conclusion.
While Little Brother (and Marcus' ideology) cries out "heck yeah technology!" and shows what can be done with it, Homeland shows that technology can't always be our savior. Attack Surface brings it full circle and with Masha's perspective shows that technology is simply a tool to be used. Both sides can use it, but it cannot be the only card in our deck.