Slashdot Mirror
The Mezonic Agenda: Hacking the Presidency
The book chronicles the final week before security expert Professor Chad Davis is to testify before Congress on the security of a commercial e-voting software product made by a fictitious company, Advice Software, Inc.
Davis' testimony will ultimately determine if the software will be implemented for use during the United States' 2004 presidential election, and therefore create a huge windfall for the company. The company will do anything and everything it can to ensure that Davis provides positive testimony. Advice will stop at nothing to complete their mission; that means they'll engage in multiple murders, kidnapping and a slew of other nefarious activities. All of this is addition to simultaneously attempting to corner the video chip market, and create video drivers that send subliminal messages about which candidate to vote for.
As Albert Einstein said, "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." The plot could have been made much simpler to mimic reality and the current state of insecure e-voting systems. As in real life, the e-voting companies are getting away with providing insecure e-voting systems; under the nose of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and an unsuspecting and apathetic voting public. The idea that an e-voting software company would resort to murder is where the book demonstrates it is a novel.
The reason e-voting companies and their insecure software can run roughshod through the FEC is that voting-system flaws do not have the same immediate tragic consequences that other product failures can. Plane crashes and adverse drug effects spur the FAA and FDA to take drastic actions and often overreact to an event; poorly written and insecure voting software is clearly not as newsworthy as a burning jet.
Combine this with a public that is utterly apathetic to voting in general and the situation is ripe for the situation where e-voting can have a near hypnotic effect on most people involved. Because voter turnout for U.S. presidential elections is quite low (60% of eligible voters cast their ballots in the November 2000 presidential election), and most people are completely unaware of the dangers of insecure voting applications, an under-funded federal agency can be manipulated by the e-voting vendors to roll out insecure voting software.
The international intrigue of the novel takes the reader to the RSA security conference in Amsterdam, where Davis is given a cryptic CD-ROM by Baff Lexicon, a notorious international hacker. Lexicon suggests there is serious problems with the software and will brief Davis at midnight that night at the Amsterdam Hard Rock Cafe on the details. Unfortunately, Lexicon is being trailed by undercover agents from Advice, and is murdered a few hours later by a Yugoslavian hit man that the company seems to have on retainer.
Davis now has the difficult job of unlocking the cryptic information on the CD-ROM on his own. That same CD-ROM is included with the book, and the reader is invited to join Davis in attempting to decrypt the contents of the CD and the conspiracy that Advice Software is attempting to perpetrate; namely the outcome of the 2004 election.
(If you are not interested in buying the book, anyone can download the software without having to buy the book. The software is actually part of a contest and the winner will receive a free pass to the BlackHat 2005 conference.)
A good section of the novel then details how Davis attempts to decipher the secrets that Baff Lexicon was attempting to convey to him. The two authors of The Mezonic Agenda have, respectively, a PhD in applied mathematics and a Master's in chemical engineering, and write in a someone choppy style representative of their technical backgrounds. Occasional errors in grammar and spelling are excused, save for the egregious misspelling of Learjet on page 154.
The story concludes with a moral dilemma that Davis faces: with his wife and daughter kidnapped by the Advice Software hit man, does he provide favorable, yet dishonest testimony about the software and watch his family set free; or tell the truth and watch them die?
The novel itself takes up 240 of the books 370 pages, with the last five parts dedicated to a history of voting, reverse engineering, cryptography, buffer overflows and steganography.
As a standalone novel, the book (while entertaining and enjoyably readable) is somewhat overpriced at $34.95, especially since the enclosed CD-ROM is freely downloadable and the plot is somewhat thin. The non-fiction final section, though, is quite informative and effectively complements the novel.
This novel does a good job of explaining how software can be cracked, and provides the reader with a good overview of security concepts such as buffer overflows, reverse engineering, cryptography, and more. It is hoped that the book will find itself in the hands of members of Congress and the FEC, who truly need to be educated in such fundamental security topics.
As a novel, The Mezonic Agenda will not compete with books from Tom Clancy or Robert Ludlum. But because insecure e-voting is one of the greatest threats to democracy today, it is a much needed title.
You can purchase The Mezonic Agenda: Hacking the Presidency from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
and to those who'd mention emu ports, the processor in a mac is not as powerful as that in a PC of the same price-range, nor are most emulators that are ported to mac optimized to run on mac. additionally, i don't believe all pc games are really shite these days. some gems are released occasionally... not that the mac gets ports of them most of the time anyway.
seriously, i can't understand why anyone with even rudimentary knowledge of information technology would use a mac, other than the simplicity of use after a hard day's work on a real computer. as for me working on a mac feels almost condescendingly... simple. that's all well and good for someone who desires only to do simple tasks on their [vastly overpriced] computer, but for someone who needs to get into the guts of the machine for either fun, hobby, or simple necessity, macs are clearly not the best computers to get.
the audience for apple products is essentially people who either:
a) are better off not fiddling with the workings of a system [those unskilled when it comes to PCs]
b) people who still believe macs have better video & audio quality or are better for audio/visual editing. generally artfags, sometimes professionally.
c) people who believe the 'think different' ad campaign and the faux-utopian company-manufactured apple 'community' mean apple products make them cool. artfags, trendy college kids, yuppie blogger types.
c2) people too stubborn to switch to PCs because they have been using apple products for years and have developed 'brand loyalty'. these people are just idiots.
d) ipod users. another subclass of c, really, because they are stupid enough to buy a more expensive, less reliable, nigh-featureless product simply because everyone else has one. apple has a near-monopoly on digital music hardware and DRM'd music sales both [a 54% share of the mp3 player market against MANY competitors, plus something like 80-90% of the digital music sale market, i'm not sure about the latter figure, i haven't checked lately]. the ipod is shit hardware with shit support [the battery problem], and the alternatives are cheaper & better.
and worst of all:
e) people who buy the computer because it comes in a prefab cabinet that looks like a lamp and is therefore 'prettier'. these people are the same who hire interior designers and 'feng shui' twats to tell them what to buy and where to put it. yuppies mostly. fucking yuppies.
think boycott.
build your own pc for 1/3-1/2 the price. when it comes to laptops, you can get more powerful machines from other huge companies for a better price because they don't look like massive, colourful clamshell-style BC pillcases. you don't even have to install windows on the fucker if you don't want to. i'm sure some company still sells machines with no OS. go linux if you want to be different and special. or beos. or something that doesn't suck.
Post
Entirely off topic, but I have been sitting on five invites for a while now. Everyone else I know has it already. First five that reply with a valid email in their profile or in their reply gets 'em. Nope, not that gmail troll going around - just wanna get rid of them and hook someone up if they need an account.
"As the intrepid kobold companion continues his journey, he begins to wonder... if priests raises dead, why anybody die?
It really hurts my feelings
Ok, I moderated the questions to ask the presidents!, ALRIGHT? Now the thing was that I focused on questions that I felt had less important, so I moderated them down. Now my meta-moderation has all these unfair moderation thingies. What the hell? You want every question to be 5 points? But they wanted us to prune them.... gah
"Have you ever even kissed a girl?"
- W. Shatner
Ha! my thoughts exactly
Flame me for being off topic if you wish, but we are talking about the presidency and hacking, so I feel this is relevant. Check out this article at Salon.com that suggests Bush was wearing an audio receiver at the first debate (a clear violation of the rules if true). The web site Is Bush Wired also discusses it and includes more evidence from previous Bush speaking events. In a couple of cases, the audio of the voice prompter feeding him the answers has been picked up and accidently transmitted as part of the live news broadcast.
So what are the chances that the democrats will attempt to intercept the broadcast and use it to their advantage during tonights debate? Hacking the Presidency indeed!
The Bolachek Journals
I've seen you modded down more than once when you said something insightful. Its sad really... you must be pretty freakin' cool in real life.
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
Great thanks for correcting me. I can always count on the slashdot crowd for correcting my mistakes. It's a shame that I made so many. I had issues during my life man real issues and alot of mistakes were made. Alcholosm, drug abuse, man if it's in the english lanquage and can be conjoined with the word abuse I've had it done to me.
When you deal with crap like that on a daily basis your just not gonna develop right and do stuff like say "Double-odd" when the correct term was "Double-Aught" but that's why we have you slashdot guys for. Slashdot grammer trolls: I SALUTE YOU!
>
He did. He thought about karma-whoring.
<tongue planted="firmly in cheek" />
I find the real news so much more exciting than fake news.
Why the hell would anyone watch a fake president on the west wing when we have a real president that needs watching!
Why read about fake election fraud when we have our own real election fraud!
Not a very nice review, but that doesn't make it a troll. Stupid moderator.
Suidae wrote: I had to read this about 4 times before I caught the error. Do people who quickly catch grammer errors read slower, or fixate on every word or something?
Can't speak for everybody, but I catch 80% of spelling/grammar errors in written work while reading at normal speed. I read faster than most people, too. You're probably lucky if you don't notice spelling or grammar errors. I've noticed that any place on the Net that allows the general public to post comments will be riddled with typos and grammar gaffes, because teaching people how to write and proofread just isn't done these days. Oh well, that makes people who can write and proofread that much more valuable!
Give a monkey a brain and he'll swear he's the center of the universe.
it's funny u assclowns.
Quit posting AC pretending you aren't garcia, garcia, you karmawhoring faggot.