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Thursday, October 16, 2008

4 SECRET AGENT: Are You Hooked?

TITLE: UNLAWFUL PERSUASION
GENRE: Thriller/Suspense

It must have been Jim Riley's fiftieth or sixtieth successful exploit. He'd done this sort of thing for a long time, years, long enough to earn the admiration of the lunatic fringe that ruled the alt.2600 message board.

Hackers, crackers, phreakers, black hats, and script kiddies. Jim was part of an underground, computer-savvy subculture replete with colorful names, assigned liberally based on an individual's hacking ability or intentions.

Some might say, and Jim would be the first to agree, that his actions were ethically ambiguous. The proper hacker lingo in this case would be a grey hat. That's someone whose actions may be considered illegal but, more importantly, whose intentions are not malevolent. Hacker's like to split hairs over such monotonous definitions. In the eyes of the law, they are all characterized the same: Cybercriminals.

It took a measure of patience and determination to find it, but Jim snooped with great persistence through every system log file and configuration setting until he eventually found the University's email server.

Without hesitation, he began to browse through various users' mailboxes. The language was Farsi, which Jim couldn't read, but he downloaded a free English translator from the Internet to help decipher the messages. He spent a good deal of time translating what turned out to be mostly trivia: an email from a student to their professor asking for more time on an assignment, a broadcast message from the system administrator asking students to reduce the size of their mailbox.

12 comments:

  1. The tone is good, but there is a lot of infodump that would make this book easy for me to put down and forget unless the pace picks up soon. I'll give you a few more pages, but if the entire chapter is like the opening paragraphs, no.

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  2. I would move the info dump on hackers and get right to the hacking. It's not really effective to get into ethical ambiguity when we don't even know what Jim has done yet.

    I like the concept but the excerpt presented here made me very impatient. I'd omit para 2, make the last 2 paras 2nd and 3rd, and then continue from there. That way we've got the action first and then a little bit of context/reflection afterwards.

    As it is, I would not read on.

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  3. I would read on a bit, but was a little overwhelmed by the info-dump right at the start. Reading other's emails did intrigue me, at least for a few more pages. Also, what's the alt.2600 message board?

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  4. I'm afraid I don't read this genre at all, so nothing in the setup interests me. As far as the writing stands, I'd suggest starting with the last two paragraphs and saving the huge load of information for later. Not hooked.

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  5. While the information is interesting, I'm not feeling a sense of tension here. We're told up front that this is a "successful exploit"... what's there to fear for Jim at the end when he's reading the stuff? I don't get a sense of anything at stake, either what he's looking for or his own personal safety in doing something illegal.

    Also, rather than being told up front he's a good guy, despite illegally reading people's mail, I'd like to make the call on his character on my own after watching him and seeing what sort of guy he is.

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  6. Sorry, but not hooked. Ditto on the infodump comments. Also, nothing earth-shattering (plotwise) pops up during his perusal of the email system. I kinda also felt the solution downloading the translator, though realistic, came across as too-convienient.

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  7. All that happens here is that Jim looks at e-mail. Start with some action and dribble in the backstory over time, after we're hooked and care about your character.

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  8. Sorry, but too much infodump and not a clear sense of the character here. You could start with the hacking, let us enjoy the voyeurist thrill of it together with the character, and slip in the backstory later.

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  9. I'm sorry, no... there seems to be too much telling here.

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  10. Not hooked. I think hackers are a difficult sell, unless you somehow connected it to a news hook. I also just didn't love the telling- I did not feel part of the hacker world, although "phreakers, black hats, and script kiddies" has a certain poetic ring to it. Also, I worry that terrorism might somehow come into play here. Terrorism is SUCH a difficult sell, even a hint of it will throw me off.

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  11. Wow! You're good. I don't know how you sniffed out the terrorism aspect. The only hint was the language being in Farsi....unless you've already read some of this before. Hmmmm...now I'm really curious to know your true identify.

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  12. It's too slow to start, and too much information I don't yet care about.

    I'd start here: It took a measure of patience and determination to find it, but Jim snooped with great persistence through every system log file and configuration setting until he eventually found the University's email server. This is where you finally got my interest and I'd re-work some of the information around that, like his "mission".

    I did like to earn the admiration of the lunatic fringe that ruled the alt.2600 message board. though, that made me laugh, and I think if you could rework that and the above snippet into a new opening paragraph, it would make a hookier opening while giving enough information about the set up and character without over-doing it. :) Just an idea.

    Anyway, I think there's potential here, it just still needs work.

    Good luck,

    ~Merc

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