Customer Reviews

"The Internet Hero: Darc Fyber is the iHero": with the Knights of the Router Table

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Electronic rights advocate B.T. Slader (aka "Darc Fyber") tells all! "The Internet Hero" chronicles the creation and exploits of "Darc Fyber," a self-styled digital knight who takes on the malicious hackers of the world with the assistance of some techno-savvy friends, both real and virtual. Along the way, Fyber assists the Feds in the hacker crackdown, averts World War Three (?) and discovers a possibly extraterrestrial signal emanating from the electronic wildnerness of New Mexico. Slader's book is entertaining and accessible, rendering the online world in everyday terms for those who still think a "server" is someone you meet in a restaurant.

The premise is pretty far fetched to begin with, every system administator in the world (including governments not too friendly with the US)will let this guy and his friends onto their servers and networks because he's the internet hero somehow I don't think so. The story itself isn't particularly engaging, and technical, grammatic, and spelling mistakes (a small thing, but annoying nonetheless) are scattered throughout; also everything having to do with the internet apparently has to have "i" in front of it ie. iHero, iArmor, iWorld Domination, etc.
Darc's friends seem to be able to break cryptography with no effort and frequently enter servers without permission, the first time about five pages after a short tirade that cracking isn't right even if you don't damage the system, but they do actually delete information and in one case intentionally caused a disk crash, and then do it again several times to remove anything they find offensive (by the way four of them can do the entire internet in a few hours).
In another case after following a signal back to it's origin somehow they can tell what the machine it originated from physically looks like.
And the biggest of all they take down the whole internet frying a few machines in the process, and nobody's upset no criminal charges filed, no civil suits, in fact they're hailed as heroes because they saved the NYSE from hackers (that they would have crashed every other market and destroyed or corrupted billions of dollars worth of other data goes unmentioned).
The biggest annoyance is that the behavior the book condemns is performed over and over again by the hero but it's only the other people who do it that are bad.