Entries Tagged "Data and Goliath"

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Book Sale: Click Here to Kill Everybody and Data and Goliath

For a limited time, I am selling signed copies of Click Here to Kill Everybody and Data and Goliath, both in paperback, for just $6 each plus shipping.

I have 500 copies of each book available. When they’re gone, the sale is over and the price will revert to normal.

Order here and here.

Please be patient on delivery. It’s a lot of work to sign and mail hundreds of books. And the pandemic is causing mail slowdowns all over the world. I’ll send them out as quickly as I can, but I can’t guarantee any particular delivery date. Also, signed but not personalized books will arrive faster.

EDITED TO ADD (11/17): I am sold out. The sale is over.

Posted on November 15, 2021 at 2:34 PM • View Comments

Data and Goliath Published in Paperback

Today, Data and Goliath is being published in paperback.

Everyone tells me that the paperback version sells better than the hardcover, even though it’s a year later. I can’t really imagine that there are tens of thousands of people who wouldn’t spend $28 on a hardcover but are happy to spend $18 on the paperback, but we’ll see. (Amazon has the hardcover for $19, the paperback for $11.70, and the Kindle edition for $14.60, plus shipping, if any. I am still selling signed hardcovers for $28 including domestic shipping—more for international.)

I got a box of paperbacks from my publisher last week. They look good. Not as good as the hardcover, but good for a trade paperback.

Posted on February 8, 2016 at 2:11 PM • View Comments

The Further Democratization of QUANTUM

From my book Data and Goliath:

…when I was working with the Guardian on the Snowden documents, the one top-secret program the NSA desperately did not want us to expose was QUANTUM. This is the NSA’s program for what is called packet injection­—basically, a technology that allows the agency to hack into computers. Turns out, though, that the NSA was not alone in its use of this technology. The Chinese government uses packet injection to attack computers. The cyberweapons manufacturer Hacking Team sells packet injection technology to any government willing to pay for it. Criminals use it. And there are hacker tools that give the capability to individuals as well. All of these existed before I wrote about QUANTUM. By using its knowledge to attack others rather than to build up the Internet’s defenses, the NSA has worked to ensure that anyone can use packet injection to hack into computers.

And that’s true. China’s Great Cannon uses QUANTUM. The ability to inject packets into the backbone is a powerful attack technology, and one that is increasingly being used by different attackers.

I continued:

Even when technologies are developed inside the NSA, they don’t remain exclusive for long. Today’s top-secret programs become tomorrow’s PhD theses and the next day’s hacker tools.

I could have continued with “and the next day’s homework assignment,” because Michalis Polychronakis at Stony Book University has just assigned building a rudimentary QUANTUM tool as a homework assignment. It’s basically sniff, regexp match, swap sip/sport/dip/dport/syn/ack, set ack and push flags, and add the payload to create the malicious reply. Shouldn’t take more than a few hours to get it working. Of course, it would take a lot more to make it as sophisticated and robust as what the NSA and China have at their disposal, but the moral is that the tool is now in the hands of anyone who wants it. We need to make the Internet secure against this kind of attack instead of pretending that only the “good guys” can use it effectively.

End-to-end encryption is the solution. Nicholas Weaver wrote:

The only self defense from all of the above is universal encryption. Universal encryption is difficult and expensive, but unfortunately necessary.

Encryption doesn’t just keep our traffic safe from eavesdroppers, it protects us from attack. DNSSEC validation protects DNS from tampering, while SSL armors both email and web traffic.

There are many engineering and logistic difficulties involved in encrypting all traffic on the internet, but its one we must overcome if we are to defend ourselves from the entities that have weaponized the backbone.

Yes.

And this is true in general. We have one network in the world today. Either we build our communications infrastructure for surveillance, or we build it for security. Either everyone gets to spy, or no one gets to spy. That’s our choice, with the Internet, with cell phone networks, with everything.

Posted on April 24, 2015 at 8:55 AM • View Comments

More Data and Goliath News

Right now, the book is #6 on the New York Times best-seller list in hardcover nonfiction, and #13 in combined print and e-book nonfiction. This is the March 22 list, and covers sales from the first week of March. The March 29 list—covering sales from the second week of March—is not yet on the Internet. On that list, I’m #11 on the hardcover nonfiction list, and not at all on the combined print and e-book nonfiction list.

Marc Rotenberg of EPIC tells me that Vance Packard’s The Naked Society made it to #7 on the list during the week of July 12, 1964, and—by that measure—Data and Goliath is the most popular privacy book of all time. I’m not sure I can claim that honor yet, but it’s a nice thought. And two weeks on the New York Times best-seller list is super fantastic.

For those curious to know what sorts of raw numbers translate into those rankings, this is what I know. Nielsen Bookscan tracks retail sales across the US, and captures about 80% of the book market. It reports that my book sold 4,706 copies during the first week of March, and 2,339 copies in the second week. Taking that 80% figure, that means I sold 6,000 copies the first week and 3,000 the second.

My publisher tells me that Amazon sold 650 hardcovers and 600 e-books during the first week, and 400 hardcovers and 500 e-books during the second week. The hardcover sales ranking was 865, 949, 611, 686, 657, 602, 595 during the first week, and 398, 511, 693, 867, 341, 357, 343 during the second. The book’s rankings during those first few days don’t match sales, because Amazon records a sale for the rankings when a person orders a book, but only counts the sale when it actually ships it. So all of my preorders sold on that first day, even though they were calculated in the rankings during the days and weeks before publication date.

There are few new book reviews. There’s one from the Dealbook blog at the New York Times that treats the book very seriously, but doesn’t agree with my conclusions. (A rebuttal to that review is here.) A review from the Wall Street Journal was even less kind. This review from InfoWorld is much more positive.

All of this, and more, is on the book’s website.

There are several book-related videos online. The first is the talk I gave at the Harvard Bookstore on March 4th. The second and third are interviews of me on Democracy Now. I also did a more general Q&A with Gizmodo.

Note to readers. The book is 80,000 words long, which is a normal length for a book like this. But the book’s size is much larger, because it contains a lot of references. They’re not numbered, but if they were, there would be over 1,000 numbers. I counted all the links, and there are 1,622 individual citations. That’s a lot of text. This means that if you’re reading the book on paper, the narrative ends on page 238, even though the book continues to page 364. If you’re reading it on the Kindle, you’ll finish the book when the Kindle says you’re only 44% of the way through. The difference between pages and percentages is because the references are set in smaller type than the body. I warn you of this now, so you know what to expect. It always annoys me that the Kindle calculates percent done from the end of the file, not the end of the book.

And if you’ve read the book, please post a review on the book’s Amazon page or on Goodreads. Reviews are important on those sites, and I need more of them.

Posted on March 19, 2015 at 2:35 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.