Customer Reviews

Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is perfect for people who want to understand more about information technology and don't want to read something long or technical to learn it. The authors do a superb job taking the reader through how major technologies function (computers, the internet, cell phones, etc.), how they are shaping our lives, and what impacts they have on our laws and society. Amazing stories are woven throughout it, making it readable and fun for techies and non-techies alike. At the end of the book, you'll have a new understanding of the things we take for granted - and what possibilities and threats they pose. You'll also be light years ahead of most other people - who themselves will need to come up to speed in the coming years. A great read!

This is one of those books that will change the way you look at the world, or at least, your computer (which, as you'll learn, might be a lot more of the world than you think!) In a very readable prose, the authors explain how the world is fundamentally different now that so much information -- so many bits -- is being generated, monitored, and stored about nearly everything we do. The book covers not just how the internet actually works but also weaves together many applicable examples from the worlds of commerce, entertainment, government, and law.

It is one of those books that will cause you to share what you just read with whomever happens to be in the room, as it is filled with many gee-whiz moments. A great read.

Few people would deny that the world has changed significantly since the explosion of the Internet. Hal Abelson, Ken Ledeen, and Harry Lewis have written an intriguing analysis of many of the issues that have erupted due to the ubiquity of digital data, not only on the Internet but elsewhere. Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion, published by Addison-Wesley, digs into many of the ramifications of making so much information available to the world at large. As I read through the book, I was alternately fascinated and horrified at what information is available, and how it is being used and abused.

While the subject matter is primarily about a technology that many people may still not comprehend, the book is written at a level permitting most people to understand how it affects them. There is sufficient tutorial information on how the Internet functions to allow all to follow the reasoning. For those more web-savvy, there are many references to web sites illustrating the authors' points. The reader is encouraged to check them out as you go. While there is a natural flow from one chapter to the next, each one is sufficiently encapsulated so that you can read chapters in any order you like.

Blown to Bits is a fascinating read which will get you thinking about how technology is changing our lives, for better and for worse. Each chapter will alternatively interest you and leave you appalled (and perhaps a little frightened). You will be given the insight to protect yourself a little better, and it provides background for intelligent discussions about the legalities that impact our use of technology.

I could not put this book down. It presents in approachable and lucid terms the complexities and subtleties of the information age. It goes beyond the mere didactic, using well thought out and entertaining vignettes to make it a joy to read. Read this book.

This collaboration between a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at M. I. T., the Chairman/CEO of Nevo Technologies and a Professor of Computer Science at Harvard U. is a broad overview of the internet. While fact dense, it is very easy to read and understand. Even though I have used computers since 1970 or so, and a desktop since 1984, and the internet since 1995, most of the details were new to me.

Starting backwards, a fine Appendix explains how the internet works, and how brilliantly it was engineered for international compatibility by broad agreement and with no governing body, for indefinite expansion in the future, and for robustness in delivering packets of data of all kinds around any damaged area with perfect accuracy. (I recalled that this last was part of a military requirement from over 30 years ago.) Near the end of the book, the history of telegraph, telephone, radio and television was given to show how some regulation was essential to avoid overload and overlap of messages, and control of content. From the beginning of the book, the difference between the internet and any of these old models was elaborated.

In case you are worried about being overwhelmed, fear not. The technicals are easy to understand and require no math ability. Well-drawn diagrams, photos and reproductions of web pages abound. There is a good index. Many references are given at the back by page number, which I normally regard as a cop-out, but here the exact phrase on a page for which the citation is backup is given. Many URLs for websites are given that looked useful and were new to me.

So from the beginning of the book the various impacts of the internet are explained. The magnitude of the messages sent and web pages available was shown to be staggering. We are reminded that NOTHING on the internet is private unless it is encrypted, and governments can usually break the encryption if they are determined. Nothing goes away except by accident. From p11: "The ease of storing information has meant asking for more of it. Birth certificates used to include just the information about the child's and parents' names, birthplaces, and birthdates, plus the parents' occupations. Now the electronic birth record includes how much [alcohol] the mother drank and smoked [tobacco] during her pregnancy, whether she has genital herpes or a variety of other medical conditions, and both parents' social security numbers. Opportunities for research are plentiful, and so are opportunities for mischief and catastrophic data loss."

Warnings are given that we no longer have any privacy. Even every credit card swipe is used to make a profile of your spending habits. Every view of a web page leaves evidence on who did it. Many of us are reminded that personal details provided on Facebook or You Tube would almost never have been broadcast by us to the world in any other medium. Worse, on p49: "Many cell phones can be reprogrammed remotely so that the microphone is always on and the phone is transmitting, even if you think you have powered it off. The FBI used this technique in 2004..." Nervous business executives routinely remove the battery. General Motors OnStar system cooperates with court orders for eavesdropping on conversations inside cars. Big Brother and 1984 is here not even counting millions of cameras. Claims of ISPs such as AOL to have "de-identified" subscribers in releasing data for research were shown to have been inadequate (p59). An old complaint of mine was aired on p83: Photographic evidence, even if it starts as film, can be altered before it is presented in law courts.

Another warning is on the durability of electronic records. A photo of a thousand-year-old book is shown, perfectly readable, may not be matched by digital data that requires complicated devices for storage and electric power for access. Still, the authors note that we are willing to have almost no privacy in return for great convenience in making personal contacts, online shopping, and finding general information. The latter comes with some warning that few sources are absolutely reliable. [I will throw in here that, in the UK's universities, use of citations to Wikipedia entries are forbidden because they are not sufficiently reliable.] Also, anything on a web page may be altered, which is why journals require date of access.

Related, the differences between search engines is shown to be staggering (p147) with an example for a "boston florists" search with drastically different results from Google and Yahoo. Users surveyed were overconfident that a high ranking (page 1) hit for a company meant it was tops in its field.

Advances in encryption made reasonably safe internet shopping possible. But copyright infringement was possible as never before in any other medium (p203). Laws have not caught up yet. Never mind CDs and DVDs -- any book or photo can be scanned and duplicates sent all over or to paying customers. After a warning, the original source warned can delete all it had, but "the genie is out".

On p298: "The dramatic pluralism of our information sources threatens to create a society where no one learns anything from people with whom they disagree. It is simply too easy for people to decide whom they want to hear and to ignore everyone else. Will the digital explosion in fact make information more limited?"

Well, the book is more upbeat than this review. People are adopting the internet and e-mail so fast that the problems are accepted or ignored. Dozens of interesting websites I never heard of are worth the price of the book. I recommend this book very highly.

Like it or not there is no such thing as privacy anymore! I knew it was bad, but this book shows just how public nearly everything we do is in the modern world! We may not be able to change the way things are, but at least by reading about how our purchases, computer activity and movements are tracked we can better understand how this information is gathered and can be used against us. And to some degree, we can keep more of our data to ourselves with this knowledge.

This is an important book to read because of the perspective it provides. "Blown to BITS" clearly describes a future of information systems and their users when they get trapped in Cyberflatland. Just like the now well known book Flatland, the people and systems of Cyberflatland are challenged to even imagine the extra dimensions.

The authors are very accomplished and I happen to know and respect them and their work. I gave the book a 5 star rating because it provides a context for imagining the extra dimensions that it would take, and that actually exist, to escape Cyberflatland.

The Computer Science community and the associated industrial base has the capacity to break out of Cyberflatland and enable an alternative future.

The authors of Blow to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion cover both new and old technologies and how they relate to todays cultural and political climates. Driving home the history of most of the technologies we can't live without and their tumultuous relationship with the legislative and judicial branches of the American government.

Breakdown of the chapters:

Chapter 1: Digital Explosion: Why Is It Happening, and What Is at Stake? 1
Chapter 2: Naked in the Sunlight: Privacy Lost, Privacy Abandoned 19
Chapter 3: Ghosts in the Machine: Secrets and Surprises of Electronic Documents 73
Chapter 4: Needles in the Haystack: Google and Other Brokers in the Bits Bazaar 109
Chapter 5: Secret Bits: How Codes Became Unbreakable 161
Chapter 6: Balance Toppled: Who Owns the Bits? 195
Chapter 7: You Can't Say That on the Internet: Guarding the Frontiers of Digital Expression 229
Chapter 8: Bits in the Air: Old Metaphors, New Technologies, and Free Speech 259
Conclusion: After the Explosion 295

All the chapters were well written, informative and flow well together. I felt the authors did a great job breaking down the technical concepts behind the technologies well enough to get the required background (technical but not too technical) and then move into the political discussions of those technologies. The real value of the book was the "Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness" portion of the discussions. They discuss how has the world changed now that we are moving away from paper and everything is in bits. Who owns those bits, what is the government and industry allowed to do with those bits and what about privacy in our lives now that very detailed profiles of people can be generated from those bits (especially since we gave that information away for a few cents off at the register or for some "free service")?

There are plenty of books that discuss the 1's and 0's of the concepts but few I have read that talk about the privacy, governmental or cultural issues that arise from those technologies. Like one of the other reviewers mentioned, plenty of "geez whiz" moments along with plenty of other "I cant believe they did that" moments as well. A great read.

One does not often stop to think of how the rush to technology has dug itself into our lives. Blown to Bits gives you an engaging perspective and makes you think every time you do something "on-line" like this simple review, right here, right now!

Think of this book not as "Internet Policy for Dummies" but as "Internet Policy for the Educated Layman." Abelson, Ledeen, and Lewis survey a broad swath of tech policy territory -- privacy, search, encryption, free speech, copyright, spectrum policy -- and provide the reader with a nice history and technology primer on each topic.

The authors aren't really seeking to be polemical in this book by advancing a single thesis or worldview. To the extent the book's chapters are guided by any central theme, it comes in the form of the "two basic morals about technology" they outline in Chapter 1:

(1) "The first is that information technology is inherently neither good nor bad -- it can be used for good or ill, to free us or to shackle us.

(2) Second, new technology brings social change, and change comes with both risks and opportunities. All of us, and all of our public agencies and private institutions, have a say in whether technology will be used for good or ill and whether we will fall prey to its risks or prosper from the opportunities it creates."

Mostly, what they aim to show is that digital technology is reshaping society and, whether we like or it not, we better get used to it -- and quick!

Like John Palfrey and Urs Gasser's excellent book Born Digital, Blown to Bits is very accessible and each chapter contains a great deal of useful information to bring you up to speed on the hottest tech policy debates under the sun. You can find my full review of Blown to Bits on the Technology Liberation Front blog.