Termination Node (Turtleback)

Recently, the Federal Government released a report stating that over $2 billion had been stolen over the internet by hackers breaking into personal accounts and stealing money from everyday people. That's when I re-read THE TERMINATION NODE and discovered that Gresh and Weinberg had predicted all of the recent problems involving internet robbery five years ago. Though the book never received much coverage in science sections, it should have been on the front pages of newspapers throughout the country. Most citizens still have no idea how vulnerable their bank accounts are to hackers. Maybe it'll take a $50 billion dollar heist like the one in this book to convince everyone that they need to protect their internet investments better. This is a book every person worried about 21st century crime should read!

There are at least a half-dozen fairly popular books that have all followed this same formula before, and it's starting to wear a little thin. Brilliant hacker who lives in California (doesn't everyone live in CA?) gets caught up in some kind of major computer-crime incident, inevitably involving all the TLA government spook agencies (FBI, CIA, NSA, etc., although this book goes one better and even invents its own such agency: The ISD, or Internet Security Department), and manages to single-handedly solve everything by breaking into seemingly every computer on the planet.

The Termination Node stands out in my memory, though, as the most tech-heavy of the techno-novels I've read. The authors aren't afraid of showing you command-line entries where they use commands like netstat or ping, which seems kind of refreshing, since it seems to indicate that the authors actually know something about computers. (Actually Lois Gresh is allegedly a real-life computer expert, which is probably what makes the difference.)

But what makes this book so incredibly annoying, so exasperatingly stupid, is how easily the protagonist can crack into systems. She uses a variety of tricks which almost sound sort of plausible because they borrow from some real-world elements, but are just plain dumb when you think about it. A great example of this is the "blue box" which she uses at one point while making a phone call. No, she's not using it to make a 2600 Hz tone; The "blue box" in this book is a device which makes your phone number untraceable, by using loop lines. Huh? How are loop lines (which really do exist, and really are used for testing purposes as the book states) supposed to help you prevent someone from tracing your phone number? If you have any idea what the authors are talking about, this kind of impossibility just makes you want to scream. And if you don't understand the techno-talk, then the book will fly right over your head anyway and you won't enjoy it.

It really illustrates a serious problem authors have when they try to create a book like this: The need to strike a balance between actually sounding technological, and being appealing to a broad audience. I appreciate this difficulty, and the book does try hard to do the impossible. Ultimately it was a fun read, which is why I'm giving it 3 stars.