Daily Thoughts 05/30/2015

Edouillard Villard, Lucy Hessel Reading, 1913

Daily Thoughts 05/30/2015

I checked the library Twitter and Facebook this morning.

On the way to work, I read some more of CRACK99.  David Locke Hall describes the politics of cybersecurity as part of national security.  He describes how our military is highly connected with the private sector and why stealing commercial business secrets affects both our military and civilian sectors in the United States.  His primary focus is on China and Iran.

I brought in a bag of books from the Book Expo America convention this morning.  Balm by Dolen Perkins-Valdez looks interesting.  It is set during the reconstruction after the civil war in Chicago.  I have several more bags of books to bring in.  I decided not to ship everything back to the library.

I have quite a bit of reading material to go through for reviews.  I checked the displays and the gift books.   I also checked the collection management sheet at the reference desk for patron requests, added some books which were requested to an order which will go out on Monday and checked out a few books.

There were two books and a movie waiting for me at the circulation desk, Beyond Our Future in Space by Chris Impey, Evening's Empires by Paul McAuley which is science fiction, and a dvd named Years of Living Dangerously the Complete Series which was an Emmy Award Winner in 2014.  It is about climate change.  I am also looking at a graphic novel, The Age of Selfishness, Ayn Rand, Morality, and the Financial Crisis by Darryl Cunningham.

I read through a copy of the New York Times Book Review and the June Baker and Taylor Forecast.

I checked out the book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.  We are reading it for the Brown Bag Book Club on June 25, 2015 from 1:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m.  I also did a little work for a flyer on the Digital Photography Class on June 23, 2015 from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.

I spent some time looking at the monthly circulation statistics.  They are a little bit better than last months.

I finished reading Crack 99 The Takedown of a $100 million Chinese Software Pirate by David Locke Hall. This is a story of intrigue and patience over many years.  David Locke Hall works against bureaucracy and slowly builds a case to capture Xiang Li who is selling military and industrial software through the internet.  We get to see Xiang Li as a businessman taking advantage of an opportunity.  He collects and identifies the software from different parts of the web and sells high end software for very cheap prices.

David Locke Hall describes why it is necessary to take a proactive approach with intellectual property that is both military and industrial.  It is not just the story of Xiang Li, it is also the story of his customers who are willing to give Xiang Li high end software for very low prices so he can resell it cheaply.  The book describes how military technology proliferates when people are not being proactive.  The focus is mainly on Iran and China.  However, because of the nature and ease of distributing software, there are also crackers from Russia as well in the story.  I think this will make it intriguing for people who like true crime stories or books on criminal court cases.

This story is very different from traditional hacker stories.  The people involved are businessmen, arms dealers, politicians, lawmen, and lawyers.  It makes for a different kind of read than a book on hackers like Kevin Mitnick or cyberactivists like Anonymous.

The Crack 99 case is the largest example of expensive software being sold through the internet.  We get descriptions of software used for radar, patriot missile systems, Ares V rockets, police work, and industrial design.  It is the kind of technology that has both military and civilian applications.

It is also a story of how they find people on the internet, identify crime through email, search through files, create cases against people with software and documents, and make international agreements to bring people back to the United States.  The story is more of a legal puzzle than a gun battle.

I got this book while I was at Book Expo America.  It is an Advanced Reading Copy.  The finished copy is due out in October of 2015.  There were also copies of the galley at Day of Dialog between Librarians and Publishers.

Web Bits

A Library That Won't Be Read for 100 Years

http://www.mprnews.org/story/2015/05/29/books-thread-future-library

 BEA 2015: Second Library Book Buzz Panel Highlights Nonfiction
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bea/article/66939-bea-2015-second-library-buzz-panel-highlights-nonfiction.html