Book Review: Dot.Con: The Art of Scamming a Scammer by James Veitch

Dot.Con: The Art of Scamming a Scammer
by James Veitch (817 Vei)

British comedian James Veitch set himself the task of actually replying, positively, to all the scam e-mails he received — Nigerian princes wishing to have help moving large sums of money out of their country, beautiful Russian women seeking companionship, desperate “friends” stuck overseas and needing a loan to be able to return home, and so many more. This book compiles the chains of e-mails back-and-forth between Veitch and several of the scammers, in which Veitch played cat-and-mouse with them, teasing that he was going to give them what they wanted, only to back out after many, many e-mails were shared and responded to.

Veitch is dryly humorous, and the shtick of leading the scammers on is initially funny, but eventually becomes something of a one-note theme. None-the-less, this volume is definitely entertaining, and provided the vicarious thrill of watching him waste enormous amounts of the time these scumbags would have otherwise spent stealing the money of those gullible enough to fall for their malarkey. A fun, light read…just don’t expect any depth from it.

[ official James Veitch web site ]

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library – Public Service

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DVD Review: Searching

Searching
[DVD Searching]

This contemporary technological suspense drama came out in 2018, and stars John Cho (Sulu in the recent reboot Star Trek films, among many other credits) as David Kim, the father of a teenage daughter, Margot. Both of them are still hurting from the relatively recent loss of David’s wife (and Margot’s mother) to cancer.

David is somewhat tech-savvy, but he still finds himself in over his head when his daughter disappears under odd circumstances, leaving her laptop behind. With the help of a driven police officer (Will & Grace‘s Debra Messing), David goes on a deep dive into his daughter’s social media, in order to try to decipher where Margot might have gone or what might have happened to her. This film has lots of dramatic twists and turns, and its exploration of Margot’s recent digital footprint shows that David doesn’t know his daughter as well as he thought he did.

The performances by Cho and Messing are both excellent, as are those of Michelle La as the 15-year-old Margot, and Joseph Lee as David’s brother Peter. The filmmakers’ skill at creating a narrative patched together from social media and interactions with laptops and smartphones is fantastic. In the “extras” on this disc, the actors talk about the challenges of performing opposite blank screens and their concerns about giving realistic performances without other actors to play off of — they manage to pull it off very well is this taut thriller.

My only warning is as follows — this probably looked great on a movie-theater screen, and probably still looks good on larger TV screens. But because so much of the “action” comes in the form of text on computer screens and smartphones, watching this on an old under-30″ TV made it hard to make out a lot of the important graphics that form the story’s narrative. If you’ve got a larger TV to watch on, this probably won’t be a problem. But if you’ve got an older, small TV screen, you may have some difficulty with all the visual details.

[ Internet Movie Database entry for this film ] | [ official Searching Facebook page ]

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library

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New Customer Review - We Are Anonymous

We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency
by Parmy Olson [364.168 Ols]

A book about an internet entity as seemingly fast and complicated as Anonymous and 4chan seems like it would be impossible to research, but Parmy Olson does a very good job at coming off well informed. A interesting read on both the technical complexities of hacking as well as the even more hard to understand social uses of the internet and how normal people can be in some ways reprogrammed and de-synthesized. The book often feels like a thriller, focusing on a few individual hackers rather than anonymous as a whole. I highly recommend if you are curious about hackers, Anonymous, or even the effects of the internet on our society. -- review submitted by Wyatt P. - a customer of the Gere Branch Library

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Rough Guide to the Internet

Rough Guide to the Internet [2009 edition]
by Peter Buckley [004.678 Buc 2009]

I've long been a fan of the Rough Guide series, and Rough Guide to the Internet is no exception. Buckley and Clark open with a section about the hardware and software necessary to connect to the internet, and then explore browsers/browsing, how to use Google, how to sign up for and read RSS feeds, how to use various types of e-mail accounts, how to engage in chat. Curious about common acronyms on the 'net, or looking for a list of emoticons (those little sideways smiley or frowny faces) -- look no further. Additional chapters deal with shopping and ebay, computer security, software downloads, file sharing, and how to set up your own presence (website, blog, etc.) on the internet. The sections I enjoyed the most, however, were the 50+ page collection of "Things to Do Online" (in over 30 different activity categories!) and a 20 page section that's a nutshell history of the Internet. There's also a 20 page glossary of terms to help new net surfers acclimate to the common terminology online. [If you like this one, you'll probably like the other volumes in the Rough Guide, especially those dealing with technology.] -- recommended by Scott C. - Bennett Martin Public Library

[ www.roughguides.com ]

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The Accidental Billionaires (on CD)

The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook - a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal
by Ben Mezrich [Compact Disc 338.76 FacYm]

For those interested in the details and personalities associated with the origin of today's hottest social-networking site, Facebook, this is a fascinating, if depressing read. Or listen, in this case, since I ended up trying this as a book-on-cd. Facebook only started within the past 5 years, so there's a sense of immediacy to the telling of the creation of this online behemoth. The subtitle of this book, "a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal" pretty much sums it all up. Facebook began as an experiment by a couple of Harvard geeks to catalog and "rate" the women at their university, then rapidly grew into a more broadscale site that allowed people to identify and associate with their friends and/or interest groups online in a way that had not been done before. Adding users campus by campus, before ultimately taking Facebook to the general public (where it now flourishes), programmer Mark Zuckerberg and his college friend and financial backer Eduardo Saverin launched the site from a Harvard dorm room on a single laptop. The trail from that humble beginning to the multiple millions who use the service now is strewn with broken friendships, misappropriated intellectual property, mangled egos and numerous lawsuits. Despite the dark tone, I found this to be a fascinating topic, and the audio narration by Mike Chamberlain was very well done. If you're into contemporary web trends, I recommend trying this book out. After finishing it, I've seen online commentaries indicating Mezrich soft-peddled a lot of the conflicts between the major players, but The Accidental Billionaires is still worth reading to get a sense of what was involved in the birth and explosive growth of Facebook. [Note: One warning I would offer -- the language is definitely "R" rated in this particular book/book-on-cd. Listener beware!] -- recommended by Scott C. - Bennett Martin Public Library

[Also available in print format.]

[ publisher's official Accidental Billionaires web site ] | [ official Ben Mezrich web site ]

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Click

Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters

by Bill Tancer [Compact Disc 004.678 Tan]

Bill Tancer, who leads global research at Hitwise, an online market research company, tracks the Internet usage by millions of people. From these usage patterns he identifies our attitudes about everything we research on the web. Every Google query we make leaves web tracks and allows web researchers to draw conclusions about what we purchase, what we worry about and what we want out of life. It was fascinating to listen to Tancer describe how he and his team deduce patterns based on people's web tracks. Listening to this book made me think that "Big Brother" is watching us, except that, in this case, "Big Brother" is not the government but anonymous researchers who might sell the information for profit. -- recommended by Donna G. - Eiseley and Walt Branch Libraries

[Also available in book format.][ Tancer Q&A at publisher's web site ] [ official Click and Bill Tancer web site ]

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Staff Recommendation - The Rough Guide to Blogging

The Rough Guide to Blogging

by Jonathan Yang

Excellent general overview on how to become a blogger and what the world of blogging is all about. Short, concise entries on the history of blogging, how to find blogs, how to subscribe to blogs and how and where to begin your own blog. This Rough Guide volume, like others in the RG series, features tons of side bars and a massive appendix, all listing further resources to explore, or cool sites to visit for blogospheric inspiration. -- recommended by Scott C. - Bennett Martin Public Library/Reference

[ official Rough Guide page for this book ] [ Author's companion blog to accompany this book ]

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Staff Recommendation - Snow Crash

Snow Crash

by Neil Stephenson

One of the most influential books in recent science fiction. Stephenson has a brilliant grasp of what sociological/technological changes are only a short distance in our future, and what the impact of those changes is going to be on our world. This book is stylistically all over the place, but if you can get past the seeming chaos, you'll see that Stephenson very accurately predicted the worlds of social networking and deep databases on the world wide web, and he's dead on in predicting such increasingly popular virtual environments as Second Life. In addition to being an extremely prescient science fiction novel, it's also a rock 'em sock 'em adventure and high-tech espionage book, with liberal doses of multi-culturalism and religious exploration thrown in for good measure. Don't pick this book up if you're looking for a traditional linear reading experience. But if you want an excellent example of cutting edge, mind-blowing, high-tech scifi, you won't want to miss this one! -- recommended by Scott C. - Bennett Martin Public Library/Reference

[Also available in unabridged audiotape format.][ Wikipedia page for Snow Crash ] [ official Neal Stephenson web site ]

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