Richie's Picks: BRAIN JACK by Brian Falkner, Random House, September 2010,
368p., ISBN: 978-0-375-84366-2; Libr. ISBN: 978-0-375-93924-2
“Last month, the standards editor at The New York Times wrote a memo that
shocked -- shocked! -- bloggers everywhere. He asked Times writers to
avoid using the word ‘tweet’ (as in, ‘to say something on Twitter’).
“’We don't want to seem Paleolithic,’ he wrote. ‘But we favor
established usage and ordinary words over the latest jargon or buzzwords.’
“That the Internet’s reaction was so swift and harsh only proves the
point: the techno-savvy population can't even conceive of the existence of a
less savvy crowd. If you use jargon every day, you can't imagine that
millions of people have no idea what you're talking about.
“I do a lot of public speaking. And even today, when I ask my audience how
many know what Twitter is, sometimes only a quarter of the hands go up.
“The response depends a lot on where I'm giving the talk and the audience’
s age. But one day it occurred to me: how would they know? All of these
buzzy social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter sort of crept up on
us. The government never mailed fliers to every household explaining what
it’s all about.”
-- from the July 7, 2010 New York Times Op-ed piece, "For Those Facebook
Left Behind" by David Pogue (which I found through the headline on my
personalized iGoogle home page).
I have not heard a lot of the phrase "digital divide" in a while. But I
did read the recent articles about Finland making access to broadband a
legal right and President Obama pledging to expand broadband access throughout
America. To me, a librarian who considers such tools essential for
leveling the playing field on which we educate students in the Twenty-first
century, this expansion of broadband is a positive thing.
Not that I think everything about our brave new digital world is a plus.
There are incredibly important privacy issues to be resolved -- if such
resolution is at all possible. I also know that too many of us spend far too
much time sitting in front of our laptops (like I am right now). It is
summertime and I really should be making like Thoreau.
(I am no Twitter aficionado. I think I already mouth off more than
enough without starting to tweet, too.)
You can bet that I am going to be a bit more mindful about the real
dangers inherent in our digital world after reading nonstop through BRAIN JACK,
a breathtakingly, fast-moving, futuristic, cyber-thriller about high
school-age kids in which the population groups who are for and against the
increasingly pervasive nature of the Internet end up warring against one another.
It all begins with Sam Wilson sitting down in a cafe in lower Manhattan
and hacking into the computer system in a high security building next door.
Sam is a high school student and a hacker with extraordinary skills. In
his successful attempt to alter some files on a server in the Telcoamerica
buiding so that he can get himself and his best friend some free hardware,
we observe Sam causing enough systems damage escaping detection (when tech
people at Telcoamerica realize that their system has been compromised) that
it takes three days for the Internet across America to be working at full
speed again. The payoff for this invasion of Telcoamerica's system is a
pair of top-of-the-line laptops and a pair of Neurotech neuro-headsets that
are soon thereafter delivered to his door. These neuro-headsets are the
newest in technology advances: one puts on the headset and it provides for
thought recognition (you work on the computer using your mind in the same
manner that we, today, have voice recognition programs for word processing).
But what Sam missed, as he escaped out the back door of that cafe next to
Telcoamerica, is that there was a security camera mounted out there.
Sam's next caper: hack the White House in order to participate in a
top-secret hacker's conference:
"He scanned the disk structure of the big server.
"There were over thirty disk drives attached to the machine. He scrolled
through the list of drives, wondering where to start.
"One caught his eye. A tiny drive, just half a gigabyte. A fraction of
the size of the others, which was why he noticed it. It was labeled 'NHC.'
"It took a moment before that clicked.
"NHC! Neoh@ck Con! It had to be, he thought as he accessed the contents
of the drive itself.
"The hackers had set up their own partition on one of the White House
central server's disks and were using that for their meetings. On the drive
was just a single file. An executable. A program. That would be the
online-forum software he guessed.
"His watch said it was 8:15. Too early. Not that he minded being early,
but there might be risks in logging on too soon. The longer he was logged
in, the greater the chance of being caught.
"He alt-tabbed to bring the Neuro-Sensor software to the front again, but
even as he did so, he realized something strange. For the last twenty
minutes, he had been crawling around inside the computer network of the White
House. He had activated programs, spun data-webs, even written short bursts
of code.
"But he hadn't touched the mouse of the keyboard at all."
Utilizing that neuro-headset coupled with his unparalleled skills is how
Sam is able to do all of this without touching the mouse or the keyboard.
BRAIN JACK is the story of what happens after Sam is caught hacking the
White House and after millions of people begin using these neuro-headsets.
Oh, and the country is already beyond tense because Las Vegas was recently
vaporized by a nuclear weapon that was detonated in a light plane on a
charter flight.
This is a red hot cyber suspense tale of extraordinary proportions. I
dare you to tell me after reading BRAIN JACK that anything having to do with
the Internet is one-hundred percent safe. And while it is quite possible
that three-quarters of America will not even be able to understand half of
what is being described in the prologue -- no less where the story takes us
from there -- there will be a great number of teens who will find Sam
Wilson's story to be the ultimate in reading experiences.
Richie Partington, MLIS
Richie's Picks _http://richiespicks.com_ (http://richiespicks.com/)
BudNotBuddy@aol.com
Moderator _http://groups.yahoo.com/group/middle_school_lit/_
(http://groups.yahoo.com/middle_school_lit/)
Moderator _http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EcolIt/_
(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EcolIt/)
_http://slisweb.sjsu.edu/people/faculty/partingtonr/partingtonr.php_
(http://slisweb.sjsu.edu/people/faculty/partingtonr/partingtonr.php)
FTC NOTICE: Richie receives free books from lots of publishers who hope he
will Pick their books. You can figure that any review was written after
reading and dog-earring a free copy received. Richie retains these review
copies for his rereading pleasure and for use in his booktalks at schools
and libraries.
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