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Showing posts from August, 2005
Much to report. First, you can now go read both the article I wrote for this month's issue of WIRED magazine, and its original, much longer version . Second, I can now reveal to an unsuspecting world that my third novel, Invisible Armies , is finished and has gone to copyedit. It'll be published in July 2006 in the UK; no word on American, Canadian, or translation publishers yet. Third, I'm hitting the road again. Back to the Dark Continent - Uganda, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, specifically - for two months, for Book Four research. I'll try to maintain a blog from the road; watch this space. Oh yes. And there are reviews up for Blood Price from Quill & Quire, Publishers' Weekly, and the Globe & Mail, with hopefully more to come.
WIRED magazine's September issue will include a short article by yours truly, in the "Posts" section, stemming from my expedition to Iraq a few months back. I may yet post the original, much longer, version of this article on this site's Travel Tales section. Meanwhile, BLOOD PRICE is now on Canadian bookstore shelves. It's also for sale in the UK, but would-be purchasers there may have trouble finding it offline - the hardcover printing was a very small 1000 copies, for libraries and review bait. It should be much easier to find in paperback come October.

Security through obscurity

This year's BlackHat computer security conference was, by all accounts, pretty ordinary - until Cisco replaced all the conference CDs, hired temporary workers to rip out pages 789 through 820 from every copy of the conference book, and hit the creator of the presentation in question with a restraining order and a criminal complaint. He was also summarily fired from his job. And then the FBI got involved. The subject of all this attention? A man named Michael Lynn, aka "Abaddon." (He's a hacker; hackers have flashy online handles. It's part of the culture.) His unforgivable sin? A talk in which he demonstrated the ability to remotely hack into, and take over - "remote root", in hacker parlance - Cisco routers. Yes, the same routers that conduct pretty much all Internet traffic. Lynn had been working for a security-consulting company called ISS - and working closely with Cisco - to, quite legitimately, reverse-engineer Cisco's systems and search for vu