Puzzle Description:

My computer screen after being "attacked" by a hacker. To honor The Milenium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson.

#1: Petra Lassen (Stjarna) on Sep 7, 2009 [SPOILER]

I heard the third book is now translated to English and that they'll start selling it in October in England; a little later in the US and Canada.

I presume you didn't read it in Swedish?

Ok, I won't tell you how it ends. :-D

:-)

I have indeed read the 3rd book Petra (in spanish).

Good for you!!!

I'm looking forward to the English translation of the third book. I enjoy the stories, but the hacking is not entirely plausible. The fact that Saladar's program embeds itself in "Internet Explorer" although most of the characters seem to have iBooks is the least of the problems. Well, I guess the first book, at least, is old enough that at least some Macs still had IE on them, though nobody in their right mind would have been using it. Some of the problems may be translation problems. This is apparent in the math too, where Swedish mathematical terms have apparently been translated into English words which are often not the words English speaking mathematicians would use for those concepts, e.g. "absurdity" instead of "contradiction". Clearly the English translator is not on firm ground with technical jargon. Mostly the hacking comes across as if Stieg consulted with someone who knew something about it early in the writing process, and then improvised from his notes years later. The basic concepts are sound enough, but the details are muddled and obsolete.

Jan: I don't know when exactly the books were written, but the author died in 2004 with the 3 books unpublished. IE was very popular until 2003, so may be it fits?

The spanish translation was also faulty and as Mario Vargas Llosas (a significant Latin American novelist) said it's structure is defective, but to the reader it doesn't matter because the novel is so engaging and the characters are so powerful that you just want to keep on reading.

There was a period when Macintoshes were sold with a Microsoft browser named "Internet Explorer" on it around the time when the books were written, so maybe my objection wasn't correct, but even then it wasn't something you'd be sure a Macintosh user would ever use.

The Macintosh version of IE was actually a completely different browser than the Windows version. A whole new browser written from the ground up by a different team. There were a few things it actually did better than WIndows IE, but mostly it was a mess. Many people jumped to the conclusion that it was Microsoft's deliberate attempt to sabotage the Mac, but as Heinlein said, "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity". Downloading Mozilla was about the first thing I did with my iBook, after which I never ran IE again except to document it's bugginess. Apple solved the problem by writing their own browser, Safari, and removing IE from all later Macs.

So Saladar replaces IE both on desktop systems, which are presumably windows systems, and laptops, which seem always to be identified as iBooks. The books say she actually replaces the whole browser with a program of her own invention that mostly works like IE but does a few extra things. If that was literally true, she'd have to have written two web browsers, which are large and complex pieces of software. That's a lifetime of work right there. More plausibly, she just hacked IE, overwriting part of the Microsoft code with her own modifications. But she would have to have down it twice, since Mac IE and WIndow IE were two entirely unrelated programs. But why is the hack in the browser? It's certainly useful for the initial infiltration of the system. She embeds hunks of code in documents and images and gets the browser to execute them. That's perfectly plausible - that's what a virus is. But she seems to smuggle the whole program in in little bits scattered across multiple documents and images, and that is silly. The first little bit should just fetch all the other pieces across the net. And ideally it should be embedding itself in the operating system, not the browser, because you want it to continue echoing disk files (like word processor documents) across the net even if the browser isn't open.

I'm no hacker, so I could be wrong about this stuff, but I am a programmer, and it seems to me that though the general drift of Saladar's hacking is plausible enough, the details are all muddled. Which is fine. Scarcely hurts my enjoyment of the book. I just assume that Saladar really did something more sensible and that the narrator muddled up the description. Still, I'd be happier if the details were spot on, and this puzzle got me thinking about this least satisfactory part of the book.

Though actually, i didn't think Saladar's resurrection at the end of the second book was any too plausible either.

I totally agree with you Jan. By the way is Lisbeth Salander (at least in spanish).

Salander in Swedish too.
I often choose to read books by English authors in English as the translations annoy me. There are always errors. The same goes for TV... It's never dubbed here (except for children's shows, mainly cartoons), we get subtitles instead and there are always errors. Even my kids get annoyed by the faults and errors, and they too read books in English instead of Swedish when possible. Unfortunately, books in their original language are often more expensive than the translated ones, and less likely to be found in the library, and I read a lot, too... And I don't like to part from my books, either. It's getting expensive, and we have books everywhere in our house now. Literally.

HHHHHMMMMMMMMMMMM plugging ears and covering eyes -- currently listening to book one while walking dog and/or pbning!

I know the books everywhere in the house problem, but as the number of kids in the house has increased, I've had to go through several rounds of culling bookshelves.

Stieg Larson's books don't take up any bookshelf space though. I read them on my Kindle. Which has it's own problems, but which I like on the whole.

Ooooh, I'd like one of those!

im sorry but the librarian in me is screaming: his name is Stieg LarSSon. two ss please.

Rea U R right!

srsly??

I'll have to check out the books. :)

The third book is available for pre-order at Amazon.com.

I've read the first two in paperback (English); the third hasn't come out in paperback the last time I checked, but it probably is now. Great series!!! Never expected to see it in a puzzle so that was a nice surprise.

Thanks Sarah.

Nice.

Thanks BlackCat.

Goto next topic

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