Digital Fortress

2 corrected entries

★★★★★

Corrected entry: At one point, an underground chamber is described as having a 40-by-30 foot video wall at one end, and having been built by excavating 250 metric tons of earth. Assuming the earth to be of average density, the room would be less than 2 meters long.

Correction: The 250 metric tons of earth referred to the databank underground, not its control room.

Corrected entry: In Chapter 5, the computer can check 30M keys per second and has been running for 15 hours. Given these two numbers, the time elapsed would be insufficient to brute force a 64-bit key.

Correction: It says TRANSLTR has 3 million processors, not that it checks 30 million keys per second.

More for Digital Fortress

Mistakes

Factual error: The whole book is about a computer breaking a very strong code, and that for every code a large enough computer can be built to break it. That's simply not true: The "one time pad" cannot be broken by brute force, only by traditional stealing of the key.

More mistakes in Digital Fortress

Trivia

Trivia: The cipher that Brown calls a "Caesar box cipher" is actually called a columnar transposition cipher. Julius Caesar did really invent ciphers, but the only one whose description has survived - and which to this day is called the "Caesar cipher" - is much simpler than the columnar transposition.

More trivia for Digital Fortress

Join the mailing list

Separate from membership, this is to get updates about mistakes in recent releases. Addresses are not passed on to any third party, and are used solely for direct communication from this site. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Check out the mistake & trivia books, on Kindle and in paperback.