Denna webbplats använder kakor för att fungera optimalt, analysera användarbeteende och för att visa reklam (om du inte är inloggad). Genom att använda LibraryThing intygar du att du har läst och förstått våra Regler och integritetspolicy. All användning av denna webbplats lyder under dessa regler.
Resultat från Google Book Search
Klicka på en bild för att gå till Google Book Search.
Neal Stephenson hacks into the secret histories of nations and the private obsessions of men, decrypting with dazzling virtuosity the forces that shaped this century.
In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse - mathematical genius and young Captain in the U.S. Navy - is assigned to Detachment 2702. It is an outfit so secret that only a handful of people know it exists, and some of those people have names like Churchill and Roosevelt. The mission of Waterhouse and Detachment 2702 - commanded by Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe - is to keep the Nazis ignorant of the fact that Allied Intelligence has cracked the enemy's fabled Enigma code. It is a game, a cryptographic chess match between Waterhouse and his German counterpart, translated into action by the gung-ho Shaftoe and his forces.
Fast-forward to the present, where Waterhouse's crypto-hacker grandson, Randy, is attempting to create a "data haven" in Southeast Asia - a place where encrypted data can be stored and exchanged free of repression and scrutiny. As governments and multinationals attack the endeavor, Randy joins forces with Shaftoe's tough-as-nails granddaughter, Amy, to secretly salvage a sunken Nazi submarine that holds the key to keeping the dream of a data haven afloat.
But soon their scheme brings to light a massive conspiracy, with its roots in Detachment 2702, linked to an unbreakable Nazi code called Arethusa. And it will represent the path to unimaginable riches and a future of personal and digital liberty...or to universal totalitarianism reborn.
A breathtaking tour de force, and Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon is profound and prophetic, hypnotic and hyper-driven, as it leaps forward and back between World War II and the World Wide Web, hinting all the while at a dark day-after-tomorrow. It is a work of great art, thought, and creative daring.
Zaklog: Cryptonomicon strikes me as the kind of book that Hofstadter would write if he wrote fiction. Both books are complex, with discursive passages on mathematics and a positively weird sense of humor. If you enjoyed (rather than endured) the explanatory sections on cryptography and the charts of Waterhouse's love life (among other, rarely charted things) you should really like this book.… (mer)
Busifer: Many of the events featuring in Stephenson's Cryptonomicon have actually happened and while Budiansky isn't the most eloquent author his book is an interesting companion read.
lorax: Seriously. A big fat book immersing the reader in a bizarre and alien culture, with well-written infodumps on subjects of interest to the narrator interspersed throughout the story. It's a very Stephenson-esque book.
Cryptonomicon är svår att klassificera: hälften av boken handlar om en grupp soldater under andra världskriget, som på olika sätt försöker hindra tyskar och japaner från att lista ut att nästan alla deras krypton har forcerats, hälften om dessa soldaters nutida (nåja; boken har mer än tio år på nacken) ättlingar, och hur dessa försöker starta ett it-företag som skall göra dem snuskigt rika (tio år på nacken var det). Redan här har boken ett stort problem: marinsoldater som försöker inbilla tyskar att de spanat på deras hamn i ett år när det man egentligen gjort varit att läsa radiomeddelanden är spännande, ett nystartat IT-företag är det inte. Lägg därtill att författaren förutom att berätta dessutom vill göra det så tufft som möjligt, och dessutom har en förkärlek för ironiska grimaser och ibland får för sig att det inte räcker med att boken är en hybrid av krigsroman och försvarstal för IT-teknik utan också vill att det skall vara humor (bland annat läggs mycket energi på någon slags parodi på Wales och små ösamhällen i Nordatlanten), och det blir bara för mycket, vilket klart visar sig i sidantalet: 900 sidor används där det hade varit övernog med hälften.
Trots detta så är det ändå ganska bra läsning: andra världskrigs-delarna är som sagt bra, och även om 90-talsdelen är betydligt slöare och ibland rätt poänglös bjuder även den på sina stunder av trevlig läsning. Samspelet mellan dem är också på det hela taget rätt väl hanterat, även om det är lite väl osannolikt att de yngre generationerna skall träffa på varandra sådär (fast det kanske är någon slags poäng att det inte skall vara sannolikt), och ibland undrar man faktiskt vad poängen med att ha med vissa av dessa yngre gestalter är överhuvudtaget. Eftersom Stephenson uppenbarligen identifierar sig själv som en nörd så är inte bara några av huvudpersonerna detta, utan boken innehåller även en hel del förklaringar av diverse relaterad matematik som kanske inte är strikt nödvändiga men som väl tjänar som ett sätt att visa upp hans kredentia: titta här, jag förstår faktiskt vad kryptering handlar om.
I slutändan lider boken något för mycket av allt extramaterial: den skulle kunnat vara betydligt tunnare och tätare, och med ett betydligt bättre slut än detta utpysande i ingenting. Svårare är att göra något åt sådant som att halva innehållet i grund och botten är rätt ointressant, eller att teknik- och samhällsutvecklingen lämnat Stephensons teorier liggande i vägrenen. Det finns många goda idéer, och en del dåliga, men anrättningen är till slut mindre än summan av sina delar. ( )
You'd think such a web of narratives would be hard to follow. Certainly, it's difficult to summarize. But Stephenson, whose science-fiction novels Snow Crash (1992) and The Diamond Age (1995) have been critical and commercial successes despite difficult plotting, has made a quantum jump here as a writer. In addition to his bravura style and interesting authorial choices (Stephenson tells each of his narratives in the present tense, regardless of when they occur chronologically), the book is so tightly plotted that you never lose the thread.
But Stephenson is not an author who's content just to tell good stories. Throughout the book, he takes on the task of explaining the relatively abstruse technical disciplines surrounding cryptology, almost always in ways that a reasonably intelligent educated adult can understand. As I read the book I marked in the margins where Stephenson found opportunities to explain the number theory that underlies modern cryptography; "traffic analysis" (deriving military intelligence from where and when messages are sent and received, without actually decoding them); steganography (hiding secret messages within other, non-secret communications); the electronics of computer monitors (and the security problems created by those monitors); the advantages to Unix-like operating systems compared to Windows or the Mac OS; the theory of monetary systems; and the strategies behind high-tech business litigation. Stephenson assumes that his readers are capable of learning the complex underpinnings of modern technological life.
Information från den engelska sidan med allmänna fakta.Redigera om du vill anpassa till ditt språk.
"There is a remarkably close parallel between the problems of the physicist and those of the cryptographer. The system on which a message is enciphered corresponds to the laws of the universe, the intercepted messages to the evidence available, the keys for a day or a message to important constants which have to be determined. The correspondence is very close, but the subject matter of cryptography is very easily dealt with by discrete machinery, physics not so easily." —Alan Turing
This morning [Imelda Marcos] offered the latest in a series of explanations of the billions of dollars that she and her husband, who died in 1989, are believed to have stolen during his presidency. "It so coincided that Marcos had money," she said. "After the Bretton Woods agreement he started buying gold from Fort Knox. Three thousand tons, then 4,000 tons. I have documents for these: 7,000 tons. Marcos was so smart. He had it all. It's funny; America didn't understand him." —The New York Times, Monday, 4 March, 1996
Dedikation
Information från den engelska sidan med allmänna fakta.Redigera om du vill anpassa till ditt språk.
To S. Town Stephenson, who flew kites from battleships
Inledande ord
Information från den engelska sidan med allmänna fakta.Redigera om du vill anpassa till ditt språk.
Two tires fly. Two wail. A bamboo grove, all chopped down. From it, warring sounds.
Citat
Information från den engelska sidan med allmänna fakta.Redigera om du vill anpassa till ditt språk.
He is disappointed because he has solved the problem, and has gone back to the baseline state of boredom and low-level irritation that always comes over him when he's not doing something that inherently needs to be done, like picking a lock or breaking a code.
The ineffable talent for finding patterns in chaos cannot do its thing unless he immerses himself in the chaos first.
This conspiracy thing is going to be a real pain in the ass if it means backing down from casual fistfights.
LET’S SET THE existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate. After about three billion years of this sometimes zany, frequently tedious fugue of carnality and carnage, Godfrey Waterhouse IV was born, in Murdo, South Dakota, to Blanche, the wife of a Congregational preacher named Bunyan Waterhouse. Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo—which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn’t a stupendous badass was dead.
Randy is a little bit turned around, but eventually homes in on a dimly heard electronic cacophony—digitized voices prophesying war—and emerges into the mall’s food court.
One of his minions eventually had Randy sign a legal disclaimer stipulating that it was perfectly all right if the oral surgeon decided to feed Randy’s entire body into a log chipper, but this, for once, seemed like just a formality and not the opening round in an inevitable Bleak House-like litigational saga.
"Filipinos are a warm, gentle, caring, giving people," Avi says, "which is a good thing since so many of them carry concealed weapons."
"I strenuously object to being labeled and pigeonholed and stereotyped as a technocrat," Randy said, deliberately using oppressed-person's language, maybe in an attempt to turn their weapons against them but more likely (he thinks, lying in bed at three A.M. in the Manila Hotel) out of an uncontrollable urge to be a prick.
This "sir, yes sir" business, which would probably sound like horseshit to any civilian in his right mind, makes sense to Shaftoe and to the officers in a deep and important way. Like a lot of others, Shaftoe had trouble with military etiquette at first. He soaked up quite a bit of it growing up in a military family, but living the life was a different matter. Having now experienced all the phases of military existence except for the terminal ones (violent death, court-martial, retirement), he has come to understand the culture for what it is: a system of etiquette within which it becomes possible for groups of men to live together for years, travel to the ends of the earth, and do all kinds of incredibly weird shit without killing each other or completely losing their minds in the process. The extreme formality with which he addresses these officers carries an important subtext: your problem, sir, is deciding what you want me to do, and my problem, sir, is doing it.
Avslutande ord
Information från den engelska sidan med allmänna fakta.Redigera om du vill anpassa till ditt språk.
For a long time there is really nothing to be seen except steam; but after Golgotha's been burning for an hour or two, it becomes possible to see that underneath the shallow water, spreading down the valley floor, indeed right around the isolated boulder where Randy's perched, is a bright, thick river of gold.
Neal Stephenson hacks into the secret histories of nations and the private obsessions of men, decrypting with dazzling virtuosity the forces that shaped this century.
In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse - mathematical genius and young Captain in the U.S. Navy - is assigned to Detachment 2702. It is an outfit so secret that only a handful of people know it exists, and some of those people have names like Churchill and Roosevelt. The mission of Waterhouse and Detachment 2702 - commanded by Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe - is to keep the Nazis ignorant of the fact that Allied Intelligence has cracked the enemy's fabled Enigma code. It is a game, a cryptographic chess match between Waterhouse and his German counterpart, translated into action by the gung-ho Shaftoe and his forces.
Fast-forward to the present, where Waterhouse's crypto-hacker grandson, Randy, is attempting to create a "data haven" in Southeast Asia - a place where encrypted data can be stored and exchanged free of repression and scrutiny. As governments and multinationals attack the endeavor, Randy joins forces with Shaftoe's tough-as-nails granddaughter, Amy, to secretly salvage a sunken Nazi submarine that holds the key to keeping the dream of a data haven afloat.
But soon their scheme brings to light a massive conspiracy, with its roots in Detachment 2702, linked to an unbreakable Nazi code called Arethusa. And it will represent the path to unimaginable riches and a future of personal and digital liberty...or to universal totalitarianism reborn.
A breathtaking tour de force, and Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon is profound and prophetic, hypnotic and hyper-driven, as it leaps forward and back between World War II and the World Wide Web, hinting all the while at a dark day-after-tomorrow. It is a work of great art, thought, and creative daring.
Google Books — Laddar...
(4.2)
8
Trots detta så är det ändå ganska bra läsning: andra världskrigs-delarna är som sagt bra, och även om 90-talsdelen är betydligt slöare och ibland rätt poänglös bjuder även den på sina stunder av trevlig läsning. Samspelet mellan dem är också på det hela taget rätt väl hanterat, även om det är lite väl osannolikt att de yngre generationerna skall träffa på varandra sådär (fast det kanske är någon slags poäng att det inte skall vara sannolikt), och ibland undrar man faktiskt vad poängen med att ha med vissa av dessa yngre gestalter är överhuvudtaget. Eftersom Stephenson uppenbarligen identifierar sig själv som en nörd så är inte bara några av huvudpersonerna detta, utan boken innehåller även en hel del förklaringar av diverse relaterad matematik som kanske inte är strikt nödvändiga men som väl tjänar som ett sätt att visa upp hans kredentia: titta här, jag förstår faktiskt vad kryptering handlar om.
I slutändan lider boken något för mycket av allt extramaterial: den skulle kunnat vara betydligt tunnare och tätare, och med ett betydligt bättre slut än detta utpysande i ingenting. Svårare är att göra något åt sådant som att halva innehållet i grund och botten är rätt ointressant, eller att teknik- och samhällsutvecklingen lämnat Stephensons teorier liggande i vägrenen. Det finns många goda idéer, och en del dåliga, men anrättningen är till slut mindre än summan av sina delar. (