The Sword and Laser discussion

I had to put this book down yesterday because I was annoyed by some of the weirdness surrounding technology. I plan to pick it up again, but I just needed a break.

The first thing that annoyed me was something that constantly annoys me in television/movies. Why when someone gets into his system does he pull the plug on the whole system and not just kill his network connection?

And slightly related to this is the fact that he's running all of this just off his home computer and network. I live in NYC and my internet connection occasionally goes down for a few hours, this would seem like a problem for him, but and I would think that he should have some sort of offsite backup that is running so that if his computer crashes or loses network or his house catches on fire the protection keeps going and logging what's going on.

Overall I'm enjoying the book, but this kind of stuff just pulls me out of the story.

By his own admission, Alif does illegal things for people who face heavy repercussions up to and including death. This makes him complicit in their activities. He also prides himself on his ability to keep these peoples' activities under the radar, and we can assume he's been largely successful up to this point, since he keeps getting work. But he lives in a country where the State can regularly "disappear" people, never to be seen again.

Given this situation, I can understand Alif not wanting to trust his data is secure if he doesn't have it near him at all times. If he keeps backups in a physical place, say with his friends at Radio Sheikh, they could be raided by the State when he's not there, and then his whole operation is compromised and he soon has State goons after him. If he keeps backups in the cloud, he runs the risk that hackers--whether criminal rivals or government agencies--will eventually crack them and his operation is compromised again. But if he keeps everything on hardware he has in his own room, if he suspects any trouble, he can physically cut connections or grab the hardware and run away.

As for his internet reliability, well, it's possible a Gulf petro-state like the UAE or Qatar (which Alif's city seems to resemble) has better internet service than New York City.

In point of fact they probably do. A large percentage of the world has better internet than the United States

Shaina wrote: "The first thing that annoyed me was something that constantly annoys me in television/movies. Why when someone gets into his system does he pull the plug on the whole system and not just kill his network connection? "

If your computer is under destructive attack, the shredding program can continue to run without a network connection. If your computer is under an unknown type of attack, assuming it's destructive gives you the most options for future recovery. A tremendous amount of damage can be done while you are deciding what to do about it.

Christopher wrote: "In point of fact they probably do. A large percentage of the world has better internet than the United States"

Yes and it's way cheaper too. Check out this page of UK prices.
http://www.money.co.uk/broadband.htm
Note that is you already have cable then you are already paying the line rental fee. So the cost of 16mb download speed is less that $5 in most cases. Sky gives you 50mb for $15.

I assume that Alif has a certain amount of pride in his skill as well, which would explain how he tries to resist attack.

The part that annoyed me was the idea you could just make up a phone number. Is that real? What if you made up one someone already has?

The way I understood it his hypervisor? was running partially on his clients computers as well. In some types of botnets, the nodes connect to a control node for commands and whatnot. If he didn't explicitly instruct the other computers to disconnect, they could be traced back by their future connection attempts, even if the control node was offline. By simply unplugging it, his machine may have been safe but he would have compromised all those he was supposed to be protecting in the process.

At least, that's how I understood it. I'm not exactly an expert on these things.

I'm only so-so with computers and I rolled my eyes at the dramatic melting of the harddrive.

I was willing to forgive that scene since (view spoiler)[ satan was helping him turn it into a virtual tower of babel that toppled before it could breach the heavens, but only just (hide spoiler)]

Caitlin wrote: "The part that annoyed me was the idea you could just make up a phone number. Is that real? What if you made up one someone already has?"

Yeah, that part had me thinking too. Out of all the computer-y stuff, that was the thing that bothered me the most. And I have a comp sci degree and work as a network/system admin

I love the story of Alif the unseen, but I do share the annoyances reported in this thread. Somebody reported that the internet is worse in NYC than in other parts of the world. I would add that for what concerns the UK, much of us have home insurance plans (https://hello-safe.co.uk/home-insurance and https://hellosafe.ca/assurance-habita... and https://hellosafe.be/assurance-habita... or https://hellosafe.com.mx/seguro-hogar) that do protect against the internet falling down. That's something to take into account, even if I am very thrilled by the story of Alif, and I think I'll go to end of the book.