A couple weeks ago I wrote that Andrew Fowler’s biography of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, The Most Dangerous Man in the World, was failing to impress. I persisted reading, however, and things got better.

My main gripe then was that just 41 pages into the narrative I was getting the distinct impression that Melbourne University Press hadn’t assigned an editor who had the faintest grasp of internet technology, history and culture. I listed a bunch of what, to me, were glaring errors.

However once we get past Assange’s earlier hacker life and into more recent material, which is more about interpersonal relationships and international politics, the book is significantly stronger. Indeed, The Most Dangerous Man in the World does a good job of tying together the various threads of the Assange and WikiLeaks stories, and even buries on page 217 an important revelation — if it is a revelation.

I have been reliably told that ASIO played an active part in the investigation into Assange, trawling through his life and activities in Australia. But what must be just as worrying for him, and has also never been revealed before, is the fact that the inquiry also included officers from ASIS, Australia’s overseas intelligence agency, which has strong links with the US.

Personally I’m not surprised by that news one bit. That’s just the intelligence organisations doing their jobs of investigating perceived threats to national security, as should be expected. But given how some folks get all frothed up whenever they discover that spooks are involved, I’m wondering why this wasn’t given more prominence.

The book still has some curious wording, such as on page 147 where WikiLeaks is described as “a child of the anarchic blogosphere”. I’m not sure that’s the right heritage to stress and, as I wrote before, Robert Manne’s free-to-read essay in The Monthly does a much better job of capturing Assange’s and WikiLeaks’ cypherpunk roots. On page 165 there’s a reference to “what’s known as the DefCon conference”, as if there’s some doubt as to the name of one of the longest-running and most-respected hacker events on the planet. And there’s still plenty of that sloppy editing I referred to, such as the Chaos Computer Club being explained twice.

Nevertheless, reading The Most Dangerous Man in the World will give you the core narratives. Just be aware that the technical and cultural descriptions are wobbly, and use it to get the timelines straight in your head.

Warning! I bought Andrew Fowler’s biography of WikiLeaks front man Julian Assange, The Most Dangerous Man in the World, ‘cos it’s a bestseller with good reviews. But just 41 pages in, I’m feeling like I’ve done my dough.

If I’m paying money for a book — especially when it’s written by someone billed as an “award-winning investigative journalist” and published by a prestigious imprint like Melbourne University Press — I have two basic but very simple requirements. The book should tell me more than I already know. And it shouldn’t tell me things I know to be wrong.

Quite frankly, after the first 41 pages I’m wondering whether MUP had assigned to this book an editor who had the faintest grasp of internet technology, history and culture. Shall we run through some of the problems?

On page 11, machine code is explained as “a computer programming language”, completely missing the point that machine code isn’t just any programming language. It’s the fundamental. Fowler missed the opportunity to highlight both the deeper understanding and ultimate control this gave Assange over his Commodore 64.

Also on page 11, adding a modem to a computer is described as “transform[ing] it from a machine that mainly played games to a supercharged device”, when of course adding a modem has no effect on a computer’s performance.

And again on page 11, Fowler asserts that “the Internet didn’t exist then”. Rubbish. Use of the term “Internet” to describe a single global TCP/IP network originated in December 1974. Assange is quoted later as saying the Internet didn’t exist. For him. Which is true. But that’s a fact-check fail right there.

On page 15, when Assange breaks into computers at the Australian National University, he’s said to have “cracked the code”. This would perhaps be a reasonable metaphor in more general writing. But cryptography will soon become a key element of this story — or at least it had bloody better — and sloppy writing about cracking codes when no codes have been cracked points to poor editing.

On page 20, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft is described as having “nuclear fuel”. Bzzzt! While this is soon clarified as “plutonium energy canisters”, there’s plenty of ways to describe the potential risk of radioactive contamination without confusing propulsion systems with electrical systems.

On page 21, Galileo’s planned trajectory is described as “pass[ing] very close to the earth before it started on its journey”. Um, it started from Earth. And surely a planet deserves a capital letter.

On page 24, Usenet is referred to as “Usernet”. Twice. Inexcusable. FFS, use Wikipedia if you’re not sure!

On page 27, the Strobe port scanner is described as a “device”. It’s software.

On pages 29 and 30 there’s a comparison of 56-bit DES encryption with 1024-bit PGP. Given that we’ve only just had to explain that “machine code” is “a programming language”, can we really assume that the casual reader will know what a “bit” is, and that they’ll automatically get that N-bit encryption is better for higher values of N? More sloppy editing.

On page 30, Fowler refers to the US government having “trapdoors” into encryption algorithms when he means backdoors. A trapdoor is very different. However I’ll let this one pass, just because Wikipedia notes that trapdoor is an outdated synonym for “backdoor”.

On page 38, the Millennium Bug issue is described as:

… the theory that when the world’s computer clocks registered 000 they would trip all the world’s major servers, crashing the Internet.

FFS! That doesn’t even get the fact that it was about two-digit years! And WTF does “trip all the world’s major servers” even mean?

On page 39, Fowler writes that we can get an insight into Assange’s thinking through “the blog that he wrote called IQ.Org”. Perhaps we can. But IQ.org was already introduced on page 10 and doesn’t need to be explained again. It’s even listed in the index, so didn’t the indexer notice this? More sloppy editing.

Also on page 39, there’s a reference to Assange’s assets, namely the “computer software codes he had written”. Sorry, but in that context “code” is a bulk, uncountable noun, like “flour” or “rain” or “sheep”. Such a slip indicates that Fowler or his editor or both don’t understand the difference between code as in programs and codes as in encryption methods. Fail.

And finally, on page 41, we have this:

Lisa remembered she’d forgotten to bring any blankets to sleep in. Unperturbed, Assange said: ‘Why don’t we just knock on doors and see if there are any blankets we can have?’ Assange’s ability to get help from strangers was both charmingly naïve and mildly exploitative.

Or, it could indicate his skills at social engineering — a term which, surprisingly, does not appear in the index.

Now I don’t want to lay shit on Andrew Fowler. His bio indicates that he’s a respected journalist. But it’s clear that this time he’s writing about a culture with which he is not familiar. A good editor should have spotted that and pencilled in a bunch of queries to clarify the text.

I’m hoping that when we get to more contemporary material — and Fowler did interview Assange in 2010, for which he deserves kudos — we’ll see new material devoid of such glitches. I’m hoping.

But right now, with a recommended retail price of $32.99, or even at the $21 I paid at Kmart, I’m uncertain.

I reckon you’ll get better value from last month’s cover story in The Monthly magazine. Not only does Julian Assange: The Cypherpunk Revolutionary nail the importance of Assange’s cypherpunk connections — which surprises me, because I’d written off author Robert Manne as one of those guys still fighting the same fights he fought when he was a student politician in Melbourne the 1960s — it’s available online for free.

[Update 10 January 2011: These books have now been sold.]

For sale right now on eBay: my copies of Edward Tufte’s first four books on data visualisation: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative and Beautiful Evidence.

This is the first of a whole bunch of things I’ll be selling over the next few weeks. Yes, partially it’s because I have to move house. But it’s also because I’ve decided to make good on the comment I made at a lunch with the people from Blurb — that books I haven’t even opened in six months are simply wasting space on my shelves and are of no use to anyone. They’re an asset in a coma.

This also relates to a point I’ve been trying to make for the last couple of years, with varying degrees of success: that digital media allows us to separate to creative content — a novel, say — from the container it was traditionally published in, i.e. a book. One version was a Crikey article, Literature? What’s that got to do with the price of books? The core issue is that the pleasure people enjoy from reading the novel, with its characters, settings and plot, is a separate pleasure from the tactile sense of turning pages and feeling the paper, or the satisfaction of collecting objects. I don’t deny anyone any of these pleasures, but they’re no longer necessarily interlinked.

But I digress…

Having read Tufte’s books and absorbed their message, there’s no need for them to sit idly on bookshelves. They’re not something I refer back to. And I have no need to reinforce my sense of self-worth by displaying them as tribal markers either.

You can bid for these books directly at eBay.

• Academic Earth: “Video lectures from the world’s top scholars”, it says. Provided they’re American. The universities included so far are Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, UCLA and Yale.
• [Air-L] Trivial tweeting: Another viewpoint on the “Twitter is pointless babble” rubbish, this time from Cornelius Puschmann, PhD, in the Department of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Düsseldorf.
• Power of Information | UK Cabinet Office: The February 2009 report from the UK government’s taskforce on Government 2.0.
• My #blogpostfriday post | Scripting News: Dave Winer is worried about the cloud. “We pour so much passion into dynamic web apps hosted by companies we know very little about. We do it without retaining a copy of our data. We have no idea how much it costs them to keep hosting what we create, so even if they’re public companies, it’s very hard to form an opinion of how likely they are to continue hosting our work.”
• 8129.0 – Business Use of Information Technology, 2007-08 | Australian Bureau of Statistics: Detailed indicators on the incidence of use of information technology in Australian business, as collected by the 2007-08 Business Characteristics Survey (BCS).
• The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction | Wikipedia: Someone — I forget who — told me to read this 1935 essay by German cultural critic Walter Benjamin. It’s been influential in the fields of cultural studies and media theory. It was produced, Benjamin wrote, in the effort to describe a theory of art that would be “useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art&”. “In the absence of any traditional, ritualistic value, art in the age of mechanical reproduction would inherently be based on the practice of politics. It is the most frequently cited of Benjamin’s essays”, says Wikipedia. Sounds like I should indeed read it.
• How Tim O’Reilly Aims to Change Government | ReadWriteWeb: Tim O’Reilly posits “government as platform”, where the government would supply raw digital data and other forms of support for private sector innovators to build on top of. That’s the writer’s version. Does this fit with the Rudd government’s idea of the government as an enabler, as outlined in their Digital Economy Future Directions paper?
• CHART OF THE DAY: Smartphone Sales To Beat PC Sales By 2011 | Silican Valley Insider: This is based on worldwide sales figures, and it makes sense. The Third World could really use a low-power, rugged smartphone at a sensible price, rather than a laptop or even a netbook to lug around.
• News Corp pushing to create an online news consortium | latimes.com: By “consortium” they mean “cartel”, right? “Chief Digital Officer Jonathan Miller has positioned News Corp as a logical leader in the effort to start collecting fees from online readers because of its success with the Wall Street Journal Online, which boasts more than 1 million paying subscribers. He is believed to have met with major news publishers including New York Times Co, Washington Post Co, Hearst Corp and Tribune Co, publisher of the Los Angeles Times.”
• Us Now : watch the film: “In a world in which information is like air, what happens to power?” This entire film can be watched online.
• Morons with mobiles sour the tweet life | theage.com.au: Jacqui Bunting writes some of the dumbest words about Twitter which have ever been written. Note to editors: Anyone who starts from the premise that Twitter is meant to be a “commentary on life” needs to be taken out the back and slapped around a bit. It’s 2009. Please catch up.
• The Conversation | Now That I Have Your Attention: The creator of Father Ted and The IT Crowd, Graham Linehan, also has a few words on Pear Analytics’ cod research on Twitter. He makes the point that for the first time we’re truly having a global conversation.
• Pointless babble | The New Adventures of Stephen Fry: The redoubtable Stephen Fry rips into that Pear Analytics research on Twitter, with more brevity and wit than I did the other day. Well said, Sir!
• Top 100 Aussie Web Startups – August 09 | TechNation Australia: The latest league table of Australian web businesses, for those who like to have winners and losers in clearly-defined categories.
• Benjamin Franklin’s daily schedule | Flickr: Proof that you don’t need the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology to be boringly anal-retentive about your scheduling.
• Bruce Schneier: Facebook should compete on privacy, not hide it away | The Guardian: Another thought-provoking essay by Bruce Schneier.
• Hype Cycle Book | Gartner: Mastering the Hype Cycle is the book explaining Gartner’s regular Hype Cycle reports.
• How It All Ends | YouTube: A follow-up to the video The Most Terrifying Video You’ll Ever See, which presented a risk analysis showing that we cannot afford to ignore the potential risk of climate change, even if it all turns out to be wrong. This version skips over the main argument and addresses the potential objections.
• Climate change cage match | Crikey: A delightful comment from a Crikey reader, Stephen Morris, who likens the tactics of climate change denialist Tamas Calderwood to the mating habits of the Satin Bowerbird, which is totally obsessed by the colour blue. “It will actively search through a wide variety of brightly coloured objects that might suitably decorate its bower, but the only colour that interests it and it wants to collect are those coloured blue. Tamas in his scientific objectivity (and unfortunately often his logic) is very Satin bowerbird like. It doesn’t matter what large amounts of available data says about global warming, the only titbits of data of interest to Tamas, are those that can be seen to indicate cooling. Once a data set loses its blueness (or coolness), it seems interest in it is lost and other blue data sets are sought.”
• Senator Lundy describes her Public Sphere initiative | Net Traveller: A ten minute video in which Senator Kate Lundy describes her Public Sphere initiative, made for students at ANU studying Information Technology in Electronic Commerce COMP3410.
• AP contradiction: Move forward but restore | Pursuing the Complete Community Connection: Steve Buttry points out the problem with Associated Press’ content protection plan: How can you “move forward” and “restore the past” at the same time?

• VideoLAN: I was surprised to discover quite a few people who didn’ know about this free open source video player. It’s very good, you know, handling both downloaded files and live streams.
• The Iremonger Award | Allen & Unwin: A $10,000 prize for someone who was an idea for a non-fiction book which will “contribute to public debate on a contemporary Australian political, social or cultural issue”. Entries close 1 September 2009.
• Control freaks don’t get it: the web works best in a free-for-all | The Observer: John Naughton says it all on the 50th anniversary of C P Snow’s famous meme, the mutual incomprehensible “two cultures” of science and the “literary intellectuals”. But now, the two cultures are very different.
• Defence needs a plan for the Internet age | Tom Worthington via Link: Tom says the Australian government’s new defence white paper is deficient in not mentioning “Internet” or “web” at all. The section on cyber warfare envisages military personnel and scientists operating a “Cyber Security Operations Centre”. But without civilian support from organisations such as AusCERTt, the ADF will be vulnerable to cyber attack.
• Mogulus Live Broadcast: I’ve been using Ustream.TV to do Stilgherrian Live. This new (?) service still officially in beta offers the full mix of live video streaming, video on demand of previous programs, and 24/7 streaming of pre-sequenced programs. I will definitely be exploring this properly soon!

John Birmingham has followed up his highly-successful Axis of Time trilogy of military thrillers with another “ripper yarn” novel, Without Warning: America is Gone. It’s a good read, but not as good as it could be.

Like Axis of Time, which posited a 21st-century naval task force suddenly finding itself at the Battle of Midway and the final volume of which I reviewed earlier, Without Warning is alternative history. One the eve of the 2003 Iraq War, an unexplained energy field obliterates all human life across most of the United States. As the world realises the last remaining superpower is gone, the novel tracks the political and military conflicts which emerge through the eyes of characters ranging from a US general at Guantanamo Bay to a female assassin working undercover in France.

My perceptions of Without Warning are coloured by Katie Harris’ comment that my recent Gonzo Twitter effort was like Hemingway. I still haven’t read any Hemingway, but I’ve been thinking about writing styles. In a previous review I described William Gibson’s noir prose as “a richly textured cabernet merlot” in comparison with the “slab of VB” simplicity of Adrian d’Hagé’s action thriller. Birmingham’s writing is another slab of VB. It’s a fast, easy read without too many difficult words or complex metaphors to slow you down.

Of course there’s plenty of military and other boy’s toys brand names and train-spotter facts.

Lee… opened the throttles on the big boat’s massive Caterpillar engines, unleashing a stampede from the 1492 horsepower contained in each one…

Three identified shooters there. All white males, dressed casually, armed with FAMAS G2 assault rifles…

She opened the oversized hold-all and pulled out the artillery. The pistol-grip Benelli shotgun came first: customised 12-gauge, extended mag with a side-saddle shell carrier. Next was the deal closer, a specially cut-down Heckler & Koch UMP .45, with an extended box mag housing thirty rounds of .40-calibre Smith & Wesson goodness. She slung the HK over her shoulder. It was a large, excessive arsenal for just one young lady to haul around…

Yeah, I know. Chicks with guns are hawt, and there’s plenty to keep the lads moist. Who’ll be cast for the movie, I wonder?

Occasionally I was forced to look up some piece of military jargon or other to grasp the sense of a scene. Irritating to me, but Birmingham’s fans would reckon that just brands me a n00b.

I agree with the estimable Duncan Riley’s review too (interestingly the first Google hit for the book after the Amazon listing):

The French stream, except nearly right at the end of the novel, was perhaps the worst character development ever delivered by Birmingham…

The ending wasn’t great, and set the story up for a sequel which Birmingham is already talking about writing. It’s a BIG book for a Birmingham novel, and an awful lot to cover, and the need to flip ahead into the future is understandable, but it didn’t conclude strongly.

Still, it is what it is. A thrill for the fans. They won’t be disappointed.

Don’t get annoyed by the about-the-author blurb though.

John Birmingham refuses to build a website, but he has three blogs…

Um, and what is a blog if not a website? Fuckwits.

John Howard, during his time as prime minister, talked a lot about the rule of law. If we are a nation of laws then those laws must, presumably, reflect what we believe about ourselves as a nation. As people. As human beings. As Australians.

Howard, quite correctly, sees a century of the rule of law as one of the great achievements of Australian federation. And yet, under his watch, fundamental legal principles were eroded. Laws made as part of the so-called War on Terror introduced imprisonment without trial, secret evidence, searches without warrant…

With these conflicting thoughts in mind, I opened the pages of Julian Burnside’s book Watching Brief: reflections on human rights, law, and justice while leaving Australia for the first time.

As dusk fell somewhere over the Timor Sea, I imagined the horror of traversing that ocean below in an over-crowded, leaky refugee boat only to be hauled off to a concentration camp a quarter of the world away. Meanwhile, I ordered another brandy and Mr Burnside provided me with a concise, clearly-written explanation of just why I’d been so angry with the Howard government, and so angry with a weak and ineffectual opposition for allowing it to happen.

The book is studded with pertinent observations, explained well. I’ll mention only two which stood out for me.

1. Our own government was actually cynical enough to call the 9000-volt electric fence around the Baxter Detention Centre a “courtesy fence”.
2. Under Australia’s own laws regarding “crimes against humanity” (let alone international law), the extended detention — sorry, let’s call it what it is! — the continued imprisonment of people who have committed no crime (i.e. refugees) is illegal. John Howard, Philip Ruddock and Amanda Vanstone should all be charged. Unfortunately only the Attorney-General can launch proceedings, which Ruddock obviously wouldn’t do if he were one of those to be charged. However he is no longer Attorney-General.

John Howard is gone, but his laws remain. Burnside’s book provides a useful roadmap for what Kevin Rudd needs to un-do.

One of my six special vices is reading thrillers, often very trashy ones. So it was an especially wonderful pleasure to read two thrillers in a week — from opposite ends of the trashiness spectrum.

Adrian D’Hagé‘s action thriller The Beijing Conspiracy is like demolishing a slab of VB with mates on a Friday night. It’s loud, fast-paced and perhaps a little clichéd. But it’s great fun and you know you’ll be back for more. I ploughed through it in less than 24 hours.

By comparison, William Gibson‘s Spook Country is like a richly textured cabernet merlot. Take it slowly to appreciate the subtleties, and your time will be generously rewarded.

He was Brigadier Adrian d’Hagé when I first encountered him as Head of Defence Public Relations in Canberra. Him, not me. I was working for ABC Radio in Adelaide. I didn’t realise then that he’s a Genuine War Hero, recipient of the Military Cross for something he did in Vietnam. He subsequently headed up defence planning for the Sydney Olympics, became a research scholar in Arab & Islamic Studies, a wine scientist and a ski instructor. Oh, and a best-selling novelist. A complete failure in life.

His first novel The Omega Scroll wasn’t just a beautifully-timed entry into the market, following Mr Brown’s over-rated thing about secret scrolls, it was a fine read. This second novel is just as good — and just as perfectly timed.

The Beijing Conspiracy concerns a terrorist plot planned for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. It involves Muslims (non-Arab), biological warfare, corrupt politicians (American), an independently-minded scientist (Australian, female), a hunky secret agent (American, FBI, male), a love interest (see preceding) and everything you could pack into a novel like this. I don’t think I’ll be giving away too much if I mention that Sydney is the target of one particularly creative terrorist operation.

I suspect d’Hagé puts his own thoughts into the mouths of his characters — in this book anger with the corruption of of American politicians regarding the Iraq War, in The Omega Scroll anger with Vatican corruption. But I’m sure he’d tell me that this is just a work of fiction. After all, the evil American corporation connected to the Vice-President is a Big Pharma outfit called Halliwell, which is nothing even remotely like Halliburton.

The Beijing Conspiracy Is A Great Read. Yes, structured absolutely according to the genre, but that’s the point. Can’t wait for a movie.

Now William Gibson…

What can you say about the Grand Master of Cyberpunk that hasn’t already been said? Nothing. So I won’t bother trying.

I only need to say that Spook Country is a worthy addition to the Master’s bibliography, and quote a few words from the Wired interview.

Like Pattern Recognition before it, William Gibson’s eighth novel, Spook Country, feels like dictation from the zeitgeist. Its “illegal facilitators,” non-existent magazines, terrorists, pirates, junkies, mad art dealers, and WMD are all woven together into something more unsettling and blackly comic than anything he’s done before.

Buy this book, and then make sure you have plenty of uninterrupted time to read it.

Bonus links:

• William Gibson’s official website, including an interview about Spook Country and blog
• A Tale of Two Thrillers, my previous double review

Stella Rimington was head spook at MI5, so she presumably knows how The Game is played. I’d enjoyed her first novel, At Risk, a fairly standard spy thriller featuring female intelligence officer Liz Carlisle. So I figured the second Carlisle tale would be worth a read.

Alas, Secret Asset is disappointing.

The main theme is a nice new twist — an IRA mole doesn’t disappear quietly once The Troubles die down, but instead decides to “screw the Brits” generally with the aid of some Pakistanis. And the pacey writing kept me reading.

But there’s a difference between archetype and stereotype — and the supporting characters are stereotypes. Resident geek-spook “Technical Ted” has a ponytail and swoons into a virtual orgasm when challenged to read data from ancient floppy discs. And the analyst on loan from MI6 is bookish, a former librarian even. The ending’s a cop-out too — but I won’t spoil it.

What grated most, though, were the wave-the-flag patriotic moments. Sohail, a Pakistani law student, for instance, was reading English Torts: A Casebook:

He liked the precision and arid tautness of its prose. The book was almost theoretical in its abstraction, but unlike the Islamic literature he was surrounded by during the day, English law seemed incapable of perversion in the hands of fanatics.

Oh please! The Empire saved by the OED? OK, it’s standard practice for “retired” spooks to add to the propaganda pool, but a little subtlety might be in order from one of The Greats.

Still, Stella kept me moderately amused before bedtime two nights in a row, which at $32.95 is cheaper than a hooker. The Liz Carlisle stories will make excellent fodder for ABC TV’s Friday night sessions.

By comparison, John Birmingham did thrill me with Final Impact because it doesn’t pretend to be anything other than cheap trashy action — and it’s a bloody fine example of the genre.

“Birmingham’s an arsehole,” I used to think — another story for another time. Now I’ve read all but one of his books and loved each and every one.

Final Impact is the third (final?) Axis of Time novel, set in an alternate World War II where a 21st Century naval task force — replete with stealth ships, multicultural crews and nukes — finds itself at the Battle of Midway.

Yes, the “contemporary war-fighters do The Time Warp” trope has been done before. But this is a well-crafted yarn, following on nicely from Weapons of Choice and Designated Targets. Where those books cover the initial “Emergence” and then the issues facing the integration of the 21C and WWII forces, Final Impact is the end-play and the Race for The Bomb — with plenty of surprises along the way.

Birmingham scatters the books with quirky references — Prince Harry as an SAS colonel — and even has Himmler cracking jokes! As the SS supremo struggles to work his high-tech “flexipad” he finds…

… the Windows file management system a diabolical confoundment. And they accuse me of crimes against humanity, he thought as he settled himself at his desk. Willhelm Gates, you are a beast and your family will pay.

Sure, it’s all Boy’s Own action with plenty of technical detail and blood’n'gore. But that’s what the genre is about. And it’s appropriate that Time compares him favourably with the genre master Tom Clancy.

As it happens, today is John Birmingham’s birthday. So what better cheapskate present than to tell him, “Mate, loved your book. Two thumbs up.”