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.

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Mistakes

Continuity mistake: In Chapter 120, the main characters discover what they realize is an 8-by-8 Caesar box code. The first two times we see the letters of this code, the fourth sequence of four letters reads MFHA. The first letter, M, is a typo - it should actually be P. When the letters are grouped in an 8-by-8 grid in Chapter 121, this sequence has now changed to the correct PFHA. The correct letter P gives you the word "responsible"; the incorrect letter M would yield "resmonsible".

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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.

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