Reviewed
by: BigAl
Genre: Technothriller
Approximate
word count: 75-80,000
words
Availability
Click on a YES above to
go to appropriate page in Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Smashwords store
Author:
R.J.
Webster, is an Information Security expert with years of experience in the
field and two masters degrees in information technology.
Description:
“Young,
passionate and radicalized after exposure to the poverty in Haiti, Jack becomes
a hacker for a cause. He learns about botnets, rootkits, crimeware creation
kits, anti-forensics and cryptography. He eventually tries to leverage it to
help the poor. If the money trail leads to charities, how can he ever be caught?
The
Hacktivist is the story of the evolution of a hacker but it is also a primer on
information security topics. It provides a high level description of the
techniques used to hack our computers and the tools we can use to protect
ourselves and our internet financial transactions. After reading this book, one
should have a good understanding of what it really means to use a credit card
on the Internet.
Ten percent
of the proceeds from this book will go to Partners in Health to help the poor
in Haiti.”
Appraisal:
This review
is probably going to seem contradictory. That’s because it is. I’ll start with
an appraisal of The
Hactivist as a
fictional story, where it has some issues. Then I’m going to argue that reading
it might still be a good idea.
The issues I
found begin with a lot of grammar, spelling, and other proofing problems. I
spotted more than double the number of these kinds of issues I’ll allow before
considering it a serious problem. Although a lot of these are one particular
mistake, words that should be compound as two separate words, which I suspect
most readers wouldn’t be bothered by, there were more than enough remaining
even if I were to ignore this issue. They include homophone errors (magnet vs
magnate, are vs our, etc), wrong and missing words, incorrect spellings.
Another
issue was repetition, usually of technical background or backstory. A couple
examples are a discussion of how a hacker might spread a virus using the
autorun feature on a thumb drive and an explanation of a group that openly
works to find ways around “digital forensics” (techniques used, usually by
governmental agencies, to discover what you’ve done on your computer). There
were other issues that occasionally cropped up like showing instead of telling
and giving unneeded information about a character that bogged the story down.
The last
item I’m going to discuss is both positive and negative (here’s where I start
contradicting myself). There is a lot of technical information spread
throughout the book. Enough that, were I to find this much detail in how
something worked in another context, I’d complain. For purposes of what was
needed for the story it was too much. But as a “primer on information security
topics,” a goal the author is upfront about in his book description, this
information is good. And I’d argue that for anyone who owns or uses a computer
(that would be all of you) this is information you need. I’d guess many people
would prefer getting it as part of an often entertaining story.
Format/Typo
Issues:
A large number
of proofing and copyediting misses.
Rating: ***
Three stars
3 comments:
This sounds like something I'd like to read after it was cleaned up. Great review!
Thanks, A Voracious Reader.
Quick note, the version on Amazon has been professionally edited. Big Al received an early copy for review.
Thanks for the review Big Al!!
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