Russell Atkinson's Blog, page 22

The Ransomware Hunting Team by Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden

The Ransomware Hunting Team by Renee Dudley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed this book, but it may be largely due to my experience and interests. I was an FBI agent on the very first high-tech squad in Silicon Valley in the 1990s and I have a longtime interest in cryptography and computers. I was dismayed at the unflattering (but accurate) portrayal of the FBI and its response (or non-response) in the middle of the book. But I was pleased to see by the end that the FBI has upped its game and works well with the private sector to combat this scourge of ransomware.

The book is not a technical manual. It spends most of its time on the lives of the team members, the mostly young people who selflessly devote their time and talents to breaking ransomware or otherwise helping victims recover their encrypted files without paying ransom, or sometimes by helping to reduce the ransom through negotiation. The team who does this is an informal but real group, many of whom have never met the others, scattered around the western world. Their technical skills are formidable, but they are often socially somewhat inept, the stereotypical computer nerds from TV and movies. The reality is these people are heroes.

The ransomware business is more complicated than I’d imagined, and the book gives fascinating insights about it. I hadn’t realized, for example, that many American businesses profit from it. Insurance companies make money insuring against it and there are unethical companies who claim to help victim companies recover their files through their technical expertise and not pay ransom, but actually just pay the demanded ransom and charge the victim that amount plus a premium. The ransomers vary in geographic locale and in their conscience (e.g. not victimizing hospitals), but the worst of them are in Russia, Iran, or Belarus. Read the book to learn more.

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2022 Timeline map

In case anyone is interested in where I go, here’s my Google timeline map for 2022 for the Bay Area. A couple of visits to the East Bay are out of range, and my road trip to Olympia, Washington doesn’t show here, although it does when I zoom out. The widespread nature of the locations is due mostly to my geocaching. I was surprised to see so many.

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Varsity Blues finally over

William Singer, the mastermind behind the college admissions scandal known as Varsity Blues was sentenced yesterday to three and a half years. That’s a reduced sentence because he cooperated with the FBI to ensnare all or most of his clients. His was the last sentencing, because they had to keep him on the string until all the other cases resolved. He might have had to testify at trial for any holdouts.

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The Local by Joey Hartstone

The Local by Joey Hartstone
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really liked this book and recommend it. Although this is his first novel, the author is a professional writer (screenplays for movies and TV) and it shows. The plot is suspense-filled, with twists and turns, and he does an excellent job of painting a scene of the east Texas legal scene. As a lawyer and FBI agent who worked in the intellectual property (IP) field, I was impressed with the depth of his research. The basic setup is that the main character, James Euchre, is a patent attorney who serves as the local counsel for patent law firms coming here from out of state. He is representing a client, Amin, who loses a ruling and screams threats in the courtroom. Then the judge who presided is murdered. Amin is charged with the murder and Euchre must represent him even though he’s never been a criminal attorney. Okay, that’s far-fetched. A good-looking female attorney, Layla, formerly a prosecutor, is seconded to the case to help him since it’s a capital case. To add a twist, the victim judge was a dear personal friend and mentor to Euchre. Euchre wants to find the killer, even if it is his own client, so he has in mind that he will screw Amin if he finds out he’s guilty. It is up to him and his quirky investigator, “the Leg,” to find out whodunit.

For a non-lawyer the author got the vast majority of the legal stuff right, like the feds deferring to Texas in order to go for the death penalty, and most of what wasn’t right was probably due to literary license. He lists a slew of lawyers in the acknowledgments section. However I feel compelled to set the record straight on a few issues. There is no FBI lab in Dallas. The only FBI lab is in Quantico, VA. It does assist local cases like this on request, but it is much more likely a local department would use a state lab for several reasons. This trial would surely be moved from the local area; it it wasn’t, any conviction would be overturned on appeal.

Another reason I can’t boost this to five stars is that the characters aren’t very likeable. Amin is a jerk. Euchre is a dissolute hothead. He claims to be a non-smoker but chain smokes Marlboros and throws the butts out on the roadway or sidewalk. He drinks heavily and is obviously impaired from hangovers running up to trial. At trial he cuts down to three stiff drinks a night as though that’s virtuous. He’s sarcastic and insulting to half the people he deals with. I’ve never really understood why authors like to make their lead characters flawed, but I guess it goes back at least to Sherlock Holmes and seems to be popular with some readers. Layla is inserted as a token black and female who should be lead counsel with her experience, but does almost nothing but provide a love interest. The Leg is the only somewhat likeable character, although she also seems like a token lesbian who ultimately doesn’t have much effect on the final resolution. The plot strains credibility even more toward the end, but I found it compelling enough to really enjoy it.

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Misplaced modifying clauses

Last night on the news I heard the newsreader (not really a reporter, alas) say something like “After sitting in her car for four hours at subfreezing temperatures, police officers were able to rescue the woman.” You may wonder why the police were sitting in the woman’s car for hours and why they waited so long to rescue her.

The answer is, of course, that it was the woman, not the police, who sat in the car for hours. This is the only thing that makes sense in the context. But from a grammatical perspective, the initial clause, lacking a subject of its own, is presumed to refer to the subject that immediately follows. You might think this is picky since, after all, the meaning is clear. But that’s not always so. That’s why it’s important to put the modifying clause immediately before or after the thing it modifies.

Take this example: “After winning the match, I asked Joe to buy me a beer.” Who won the match? It makes sense either way. Maybe we had a friendly bet and he owed me the beer since I won. Or maybe he won and I was hoping he’d buy me a beer as gracious consolation prize. The logic applies even if I was the one buying the beer for him. But what did your brain tell you when you read the sentence? You assumed I had won the match. Why? Because you intrinsically know the rule that the thing immediately following the clause is the thing referred to. Of course the best phrasing, at least for purposes of clarity, is to include the subject of the clause in the clause, e.g., “After she had sat in the car for four hours, the police rescued the woman.” The newsreader made three of these misplaced clause errors in a row in that newscast.

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The Space Merchants by Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth

The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Pohl’s 1952 satirical treatment of consumerism and mercantilism seems dated these days, but overall it stands the test of time. At some point in future America, advertising agencies are the highest ranking employment and societal strata. They control Congress and the presidency. The highest legal authority is the Chamber of Commerce. The populace is divided into consumers and copysmiths, i.e. ad men. Mitch, the central character, is an ambitious copysmith who lands the Venus contract. His agency is seeking to commercialize the planet, notwithstanding the fact that it’s essentially uninhabitable at present. That’s a mere niggling detail for the engineers and Production Department to handle. The important thing is to convince people they want to go to Venus and buy Venus goods, etc. But there are evil opposition forces at work – the Consies (conservationists) who spout blasphemy such as opposing pollution and despoliation of the planet – both planets. You get the idea.

Mitch gets kidnapped, tattooed to appear to be a consumer (gasp!), and stuck in a consumer job. He learns what it’s like to be part of the masses and it isn’t pretty. The book is very well written and quite humorous in places, at times intentionally, and in others, accidentally. It’s always amusing to read old sci-fi that is set in the far future only to find that everyone communicates by fax and landlines, smokes cigarettes, and has female secretaries who type memos. Pohl’s dystopia is very imaginative, but I will refrain from spoiling the fun for you with further description.

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Our Ignorant Newsies – Arlon Judge

Yesterday I watched a local (San Francisco) television news program mention how the SF Giants missed out for the second time when they failed to sign star player Carlos Correa. They then showed a tweet from some random person condemning this failure and mentioning that the first failure, a few days earlier, was in not signing “Arlon Judge.” The correct name is Aaron Judge.

In case you don’t follow baseball (I don’t), Judge is probably the best batter in the major leagues now and the best-known. He’s a Yankee outfielder and just set the all-time American League home run record, beating Roger Maris’s old record. He was voted the AL’s most valuable player.

Right after showing the tweet, the anchor (female), weather reporter (female), and co-anchor (male) filled the final thirty seconds making chit chat about missing out on Correa and “Arlon” Judge. They repeated the wrong name at least three times. Now I don’t expect everyone to be a baseball fan, but what disturbs me is that so-called news professionals don’t follow the news themselves. They appear to be mere news readers. I would expect someone in that line of work to make a point of paying attention to the sports guy and to national news as well, if for no other reason, so they can pronounce things correctly.

More than that, it shows that behind the scenes the writers and researchers are sloppy and don’t check the facts. Those who write the news at the very least should follow it and not select erroneous tweets or other dubious claims off the Internet as news.

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Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal

Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The title is not a mistake, but it is a bit misleading. A group of Punjabi widows in London join a writing class by Nikki, a young, modern, London-born Punjabi woman. What Nikki thought would be a creative writing course turned askew when she learned most of the women could not read or write, or had minimal literacy skills. The class turned into a story-telling class, and, yes, the stories became raunchy as these widows seemed to be hornier than people imagined. For propriety’s sake, the tales mostly involve the ladies’ own husbands. They are more graphic than I would have expected, so if you’re not mentally prepared for bodice-ripping (or salwar kameez ripping) lustful raunch, just skip the italicized portions. They don’t take up much of the book.

That setup is the framework for a story focused on the differences and difficulties between the generations within the Punjabi community, but, more broadly, between traditional cultures and today’s more permissive western society. While not a murder mystery per se, the plot also involves a mysterious death. Nikki falls into danger while she and her sister both find themselves in romantic entanglements. To say more would be a spoiler.

Some readers may find it sort of cute that these old ladies are as lustful as they are, but at times it almost seems as a cheap trick to get some low-grade smut into the book. Another drawback for a white American male reader is that the book contains a great deal of Punjabi terms and cultural references. I know almost nothing about Sikh/Punjabi/London culture. I was looking stuff up on my phone pretty much to the very end. There’s also a lot geographical knowledge of London required to fully appreciate what’s going on, i.e., which areas are ethnic, or hip, or dangerous, etc. I think the book was written primarily with a British/Indian audience in mind. There were virtually no explanations of the various terms or customs used for the rest of us.

You may wonder how I came to choose to read this. Tired of my usual sources, I decided to search online for “books with good non-political stories” or words to that effect. I checked some of the links on the first page and one book blogger had a list of ten described almost exactly that way. As it happened, I’d read two of them and liked them both, so I was encouraged to try this one. I’m not exactly disappointed in it, but neither can I say I really enjoyed it. It passed the time until my next book on hold at the library came in.

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Sunny Balwani sentenced to 13 years

Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, Elizabeth Holmes’s erstwhile boyfriend and president of Theranos, was sentenced last week to 155 months (one month short of 13 years) in prison for his role in the fraud and conspiracy they both perpetrated. People following this case already know that Holmes was sentenced to just over 11 months.

If you’re curious as to why, it’s easy enough to explain. Sunny was convicted of 12 counts while Holmes was only convicted of four counts. The extra counts related primarily to the patients who were given false medical test reports and the doctors who prescribed them in reliance on the false claims of Theranos. Under federal sentencing guidelines, the extra counts can be a factor both in the amount of “loss” and can also trigger an enhancement for taking advantage of vulnerable victims. I don’t know if the judge applied that enhancement for Balwani, but the jury found him guiltier than Holmes’s jury did, so he is paying the consequence. Both Holmes and Balwani plan to appeal their sentences. Both should surrender to prison early next year.

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Unmasked by Paul Holes

Unmasked: My Life Solving America’s Cold Cases by Paul Holes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I found this book very interesting, but some readers will need a strong stomach for the gorier crime scene or autopsy descriptions. Those parts can be skipped. The author was a criminologist in the San Francisco Bay Area. The book is a mix of his personal story and case studies. The personal story is relevant in some ways in that we learn how obsessive he is about the cases, how that and his childhood contributed to his many marital troubles and work stress. But I wasn’t very interested in him as a person, and I doubt most readers are, either. The most interesting sections are discussions of some famous cases, including Jaycee Dugard and the Golden State Killer. I gained a much better understanding of, and appreciation for, the expertise required and employed by criminologists and detectives and the roadblocks they face. The roadblocks include bosses who would rather direct resources to open cases than to cold cases or ones past the statute of limitations, and interagency rivalry. Many departments refuse to share evidence or theories because they want to be the ones who solve and get the headlines, or because they don’t want local residents to know that a serial rapist or murderer may be in their midst.

The writing is unremarkable but workmanlike, which is appropriate for a semibiographical book, and it is clear and easy to follow. There’s a little too much time at the beginning spent on the author’s early life, but it soon focuses on some of the cases he worked. I believe most people will be surprised at how easy it is for a detective to become fixated on an innocent person by interpreting the evidence incorrectly. There is quite a lot about DNA in the latter pages and some of that surprised me, especially the differences between forensic analysis and genealogical analysis. One minor irritant with the book is the author’s apparent high opinion of himself. I was tempted to say something like “It’s not about you,” but to be fair, the title warns you that it is about him, i.e. the life of a criminologist who specialized in cold cases, not solely the cases themselves.

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