Digital Fortress

2 corrected entries

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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

Plot hole: Early on in the book the NSA is described as a top secret agency, an agency very few Americans know exist. However throughout the rest of the book there are many references to groups who openly protest against the NSA, bad widespread publicity, and the majority of Americans being against the agency. If hardly anybody knows about the NSA then how can there be so much open debate about it?

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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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