REVIEW: "The Mezonic Agenda", Herbert H. Thompson/Spyros Nomikos
Rob, grandpa of Ryan, Trevor, Devon & Hannah
Review Copyright 2004 Robert M. Slade
Using a fictional story and premise to examine serious security concerns
seems to be getting more popular. This one purports to discuss the issues
surrounding electronic voting.
As a piece of fiction, the book isn't very good. The dialogue is stilted,
the writing and sentence construction is often jarringly awkward, and the
plotting, description, and story subtext are simplistic and formulaic,
making the occasional intrusions of "reality" (which would otherwise give
depth to the narrative and characters) odd and unwelcome.
Characterization is telegraphed in strange ways: the e-voting analyst's
name is Chad, someone driven insane by personal tragedy is called Payne,
and a turncoat politician is Shift. The copy editing is reasonable, at
least as far as spelling is concerned, but there is a very strange, and
repeated, typographical error of "Davis'ss". There are a number of
mistakes that would have thriller aficionados rolling in the aisles:
Amsterdam isn't a member country of Interpol because it isn't a country,
Interpol is not an investigative agency - they do communications and
liaison - and subliminal advertising has proven to be extremely
undependable.
The technical content is uneven. There are good bits: the description of
buffer-overflows doesn't handle all cases but is clear. The example of
SQL injection is missing pieces, but isn't bad. A lot of it is realistic,
but there are frequent oversimplifications. Reverse engineering is not
just the finding of buffer overflow exploits. Various types of blackhats
are grouped in one undifferentiated lump. Silly errors are made, such as
a conflict in IP addressing between pages 39 and 44. The importance of a
paper trail is mentioned, but somewhat peripherally.
The book itself does not mention the bulk of the problems with, and
reservations about, electronic voting systems, although an appendix
touches on many of them briefly. Probably the biggest problem relates to
why the analyst is proceeding in the way he does: without being able to
review source code, any problems that you do find will be largely by
accident. And, of course, in any kind of software review you can prove
the presence of bugs, but never their absence.
As fiction the book doesn't work very well. As a review of the problems
involved with electronic voting there is a lot of verbiage to get through
in order to find the few points of interest.
%A Herbert H. Thompson
%A Spyros Nomikos
%C 800 Hingham Street, Rockland, MA 02370
%D 2004
%G 1-931836-83-3
%I Syngress Media, Inc.
%O U$34.95/C$50.95 781-681-5151 fax: 781-681-3585 www.syngress.com
%O http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1931836833/robsladesinterne
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1931836833/robsladesinte-21
%O http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/1931836833/robsladesin03-20
%P 368 p. + CD-ROM
%T "The Mezonic Agenda: Hacking the Presidency"
====================== (quote inserted randomly by Pegasus Mailer)
rsl...@vcn.bc.ca sl...@victoria.tc.ca rsl...@sun.soci.niu.edu
I decline utterly to be impartial between the fire brigade and
the fire. - Winston Churchill
http://victoria.tc.ca/techrev or http://sun.soci.niu.edu/~rslade