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stern writes "A security researcher at Cambridge was trying to figure out the password used by somebody who had hacked his Web site. He tried running a dictionary through the encryption hash function; no dice. Then he pasted the hacker's encrypted password into Google, and voila — there was his answer. Conclusion? Use no password that any other human being has ever used, or is ever likely to use, for any purpose. I think."

Rounding at a full week of stern reviews, stern takes a look at Andrew Leonard's new book Bots: The Origin of New Species. You may recognize Leonard's name from Wired and Salon. Click below to get the natural selection on his new book. Bots: The Origin of New Species author Andrew Leonard pages publisher HardWired Books rating 5/10 reviewer Stern ISBN summary

Define "bot" as any long-lived software process which runs with little or no human input. Andrew Leonard tries to make them exciting.

The Scenario

Andrew Leonard is yet another Wired reporter who has written a book about the computer software that will take you into the next millennium. He discusses bots, long-lived software processes with some decision-making capability, in their native habitats of IRC, usenet, MOOs and the web.

What's Bad?

While it is safe to guess that bots, under the guise of autonomous software agents, will be major players in the computing world, in order to get a book's worth of material, Leonard had to define the class very broadly. As a result virtually anything from IRC eggdrop bots to that little dancing paperclip in Microsoft Word qualifies. The stretch becomes particularly visible when he reaches back into history to discuss the origin of bots and comes up with early backup software and 'Eliza' [Note to younger readers: Eliza was a program which faked human conversation, badly. It has been implemented in every programming language you can imagine]. In chapter 4, Leonard actually describes the Wumpus of "Hunt the Wumpus" as a bot, about as ludicrous an argument as you could imagine. [Note to younger readers: Hunt the Wumpus was a very simple, very stupid game that was played on university mainframes and the early home computers of the 1970s. You wandered (textually) through a finite network of caves. Each time you moved, the wumpus moved too, randomly. You could shoot arrows into adjoining rooms. If you hit the wumpus, you won. If you wandered into the wumpus, you lost. Look, Doom wouldn't be invented for another 20 years.]

Once he's defined 'bot' so broadly, Leonard has to contend with the universe of daemons and faceless applications which infest any modern operating system. Unfortunately, most of these are not very exciting and Leonard focusses on software which is more visible, and ideally anthropomorphic. This means that all his modern bots fall into a small number of classes: usenet monitoring programs (including cancelbots), IRC bots, MUD and MOO bots, and web spiders. This puts him in an awkward position -- this book is clearly intended for the mass market, but the vast majority of the discussion regards systems which his readers will never use.

Leonard very much wants to draw trends and lessons from the evolution of bots in these areas. Unfortunately for him, the universe of bots he chooses to discuss has been so short-lived that he can draw only the most banal conclusions. "Poorly tested bots can get into infinitely recursive conversations with each other." "AI bots do a poor job of mimicking human beings." "When evil bots are programmed, good bots are usually created to fight them. Both groups are then reprogrammed repeatedly in attempts to outsmart each other."

This book avoids the typical Wired error of quoting a bunch of "friends of Wired" as experts on whatever topic is at hand. However, it does slip into the magazine's absurd typography. Many paragraphs (selected randomly, as far as I can tell) start with an initial letter which is dramatically larger than the surrounding text, rotated sideways, and rendered in a different font. How hip.

What's Good?

The book is delightfully cerebral, drawing from Plato and Darwin, Gibson and Asimov. [Note to younger readers: Plato for his moral "demon", Darwin for the theory of evolution by natural selection (which, if you ask me, clearly does not apply), Gibson for the AIs in Neuromancer, and Asimov for the "Three Laws of Robotics"] The research is admirable, and Leonard tracks down the authors of an awful lot of the software he describes. I used MUDs a few times back in 1990 or so (and honestly never saw the point). Chapters 1 and 5 describe in amusing detail the troubles caused by bots at various MOOs, including an extended discussion of "The Barney Problem," or the 1993 swamping of Point MOOt by sloppily programmed Barney Bots singing the "I love you" song.

The discussion of Bot politics on IRC was instructive. I've been on EFnet for almost ten years now, but have always tried to avoid the undying politics of IRC-abuse and server control. As a result, I missed the inside scoop on why Alternet formed and why Nickserv went away, and so forth. Leonard fills in the gaps. Would this be as interesting to somebody who doesn't use IRC, or who uses it so much that they already know the stories? Probably not.

The material in chapter 3 on the failure of AI could form the core of its own book, a book about why AI looked so promising in 1980, the brilliant people who devoted their careers to it, and why it failed nonetheless.

"In part, the AI community doomed itself. Its own bold promises and early success led to a breathless boom period in the 1980s. Corporations rushed to adopt so-called expert systems -- programs that specialized in particular domains of knowledge and were supposed to represent the accumulated wisdom of hundreds of human experts. Unfortunately, most expert systems ended up requiring even more human resources than they replaced, and they often failed to work as promised" [stern: give me examples! juicy ones!]

"A sorry record of broken promises and the demise of the cold war dried up most AI funding and sent the artificial intelligence community reeling. Attendance at the premier artificial intelligence conferences declined. Morale sank to its lowest point when aspiring AI workers discovered that just putting the words artificial intelligence in a grant application guaranteed the kiss of death."

Those two paragraphs, on page 45, could be the first two paragraphs of a book about the past failure of AI and new methods being tried today, especially on the web. That book would probably be better than the one which Leonard has written.

Two Additional Notes

1. Curiously, Amazon.com placed this book at the top of my personalized 'recommended books' list for months. Since this list is generated by the Netperceptions affinity engine, I can only imagine that it would not have made the list unless it was selling pretty well. This makes me perplexed about how it was marketed, since its true audience seems so small.
2. One of the blurbs on the back (you know, the ones which normally say things like "A brilliant work of technical writing which I will treasure forever" -- Sylvester Stallone) reads, in its entirety,
   "Bot is short for robot, which is cooler than program."
   IRC hacker, John Leth-Nissen
   That seems rather random, doesn't it?

So What's In It For Me?

Leonard writes well, and his research can not be faulted. I look forward to reading his future books. This particular book should be of interest to people already familiar with (and curious about) robo-moderators on USENET, web spiders, IRC or MUDs/MOOs. If you do not fall into one of those categories, don't waste your time here.

If you're into this, pick up the book at Amazon.

Table of Contents

1. A Plague of Barneys
2. Daemons and Darwin
3. One Big Turing Test
4. The Bot Way of Being
5. War
6. Raising the Stakes
7. On the Brink
8. The Technodialectic

After this most recent succesful foray into reviewing for us, Stern has sent us a review of net.wars. Written by Wendy M. Grossman, the book attempts to take a brainshot of the mid-1990s Internet. Click below to read more. net.wars author Wendy M. Grossman pages publisher New York University Press rating 6 reviewer Stern ISBN summary A cultural study of the mid-1990s Internet, concentrating on cultural and political battles online. The early, more historical chapters are particularly strong. The Scenario

Wendy Grossman is a freelance writer who has been published in Wired magazine and other periodicals. In this book, she describes various cultural and political wars involving the Internet. The book seems intended for people who missed the main thrust of the battles, or who found themselves on the wrong side of a fight they never knew they'd joined. (Imagine the poor AOL'er who sends his first "me too" over USENET and doesn't understand why people got angry).

The book has a secondary purpose of memorializing these battles for the sake of the net's own short institutional memory. In this regard, it resembles the Jargon file or the net.legends FAQ (which it quotes repeatedly).

What's Bad?

Grossman started with Compuserve in 1991 and migrated to the Internet in the summer of 1993. This book was commissioned in early 1997, and discusses the years in between. These were important days in the growth of the net, but as a relative newcomer to the world she documents, Grossman sometimes misses issues. Her perspective is further distorted by her affiliation with Wired magazine, and she tends to treat various "friends of Wired" as though they were important net.celebrities. For example, she repeatedly quotes John Perry Barlow, but never even mentions Kibo or ESR.

The book misses the mark repeatedly in later chapters, where Grossman tackles political conflicts which were not resolved at the time of writing. In some cases, she identifies minor issues (like the absence of long-distance settlement charges) as crises and, in other cases, she make broad predictions which, even in the two years since the book was published, have been proven wrong (for example, she predicted huge growth in the use of encryption and third party certification services. It didn't happen). Grossman devotes ten pages to the evils of the Communications Decency Act and the foolishness of trying to use it to "export the first amendment". In this space, she never specifies what the CDA would have required, a strange lapse.

A few conflicts are almost conspicuous in their absence. Where is "everybody versus Microsoft?" Technical battles do not appear because Grossman is not a technical person. Sometimes her lack of savvy throws itself in your face. Can you honestly imagine her sitting with a friend at a computer and failing to find pornography on the net? "We spent three hours wandering uselessly around the Web not finding shocking pictures." Even for 1995, that's a pretty astonishing claim.

What's Good?

The early chapters are strongest, in which she focusses on historical issues and conflicts which were resolved by the time of writing (early 1997). These rely on Grossman's ability to describe net.culture, which she does well and with humor. Among the stronger chapters are her discussion of Why Everybody Hates AOL (and why it may be just garden variety bigotry), Scientology vs. The Net and the awkward position of women on the net. The book is scrupulously endnoted.

So What's In It For Me?

The book is well written; Grossman is articulate, intelligent, and diligent about collecting testimony from the principals in the battles she covers. At just under 200 pages of substantive material, it's a quick and worthwhile read.

Pick this book up at Amazon.

Table of Contents

1. The Year September Never Ended
2. Make.Money.Fast
3. The Making of an Underclass: AOL
4. Guerrilla Cryptographers
5. Stuffing the Genie Back in the Can of Worms
6. Copyright Terrorists
7. Exporting the First Amendment
8. Never Wrestle a Pig
9. Unsafe Sex in the Red Page District
10. The Wrong Side of the Passwords
11. Beyond the Borderline
12. Garbage In, Garbage Out
13. Grass Roots
14. The Net is Dead
15. Networks of Trust
16. Dumping Tea in the Virtual Harbor

Stern has written a review of Software Runaways -- Lessons Learned from Massive Software Project Failures. You know that delicious thrill you get from seeing massive destruction? Imagine that applied to software projects-click below for more information. Software Runaways -- Lessons Learned From Massive Software Project Failures author Robert L. Glass pages publisher Prentice-Hall, Inc. rating 9 reviewer Stern ISBN summary ulti-million dollar and multi-billion dollar software projects, the reasons they failed, the companies they destroyed, and the people to blame. The Scenario

Humans are drawn to scenes of carnage; we can't pass an accident on the highway without slowing to look for blood. Robert L. Glass reports on the car crashes of the computer industry -- massive software projects which failed, sometimes destroying the firms which created them.

Glass has been writing on these topics for decades, but this is his first book since 1987, and there have been a rich array of projects for him to discuss since then.

Much of the book is composed of articles written by other people, from the Wall Street Journal, Computer Decisions Magazine, and other periodicals and studies. These are uniformly well written, and Glass has selected a valuable set of outside sources.

What's Bad?

The books is not intended as a tutorial for programmers or even program managers. Those readers will find the book interesting, but I would suggest they turn to Steve McConnell's Software Project Survival Guide or similar books for how-to help. Software Runaways is intended for people operating at a political level, especially those confronted with management which believes that fundamental business problems can be solved by the deployment of new computer systems or trendy infrastructure designs.

What's Good?

Glass has no fear of assigning blame, naming the particular corporate executives, government officials or consulting companies whose incompetence or malfeasance led to disaster. He has a deep understanding of the superiority of software that works over software that is flashy or serves some conflicting interest of the decision maker or consultant. The book should be in the library of anybody who ever has to argue against the deployment of a new system.

The 1986 article "Anatomy of a 4GL Disaster", which describes the failed rollout of a new computer system at the New Jersey Division of Motor Vehicles is practically a political thriller. The 1996 article "When Things Go Wrong" describes how the failure of a $65 million inventory control system destroyed FoxMeyer Drug, a $5 billion company. Each reader will have a different favorite chapter, depending on the industries and technologies for which he has personally worked in the past.

So What's In It For Me?

Primarily, the book is fun to read. It is practically techno-porn. For those who work on massive software projects, this is also a collection of useful cautionary tales and lessons that may save you grief and money.

So, if you want to read up about all the pitfalls - and know how to avoid them, pick this book up over here.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Software Runaway War Stories
   1. Project Objectives Not Fully Specified
   2. Bad Planning and Estimating
   3. Technology New to the Organization
   4. Inadequate/No Project Management Methodology
   5. Insufficient Staff on the Team
   6. Poor Performance by Suppliers of Hardware/Software
   7. Other -- Performance (Efficiency) Problems
3. Software Runaway Remedies
4. Conclusions