YOUR PROFILE
SIGN OUT

Netsurfer Digest Trial Subscriptions

This is a trial subscription to Netsurfer Digest. You have three options:

1. Subscribe to obtain login for full access ($20/year) here: http://www.netsurf.com/signup.html

2. Unsubscribe your email from the trial subscription here: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/trialsub.html

3. Do nothing. Keep receiving the trial subscription and check out the content until you decide what to do.

Full text samples of Netsurfer Digest are here: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/backiss.html

Netsurfer Recommendations

All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror
Stephen Kinzer
John Wiley & Sons; ISBN: 0471265179

This book might as well have been subtitled "Anatomy of a Coup". It was, of course, all about the oil. In 1953, the elected leader of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh, nationalized his country's oil industry. This made him very popular with Iran's population, which deeply resented the oil monopoly of Great Britain and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. What followed was the infamous American-backed coup that placed Mohammad Reza Shah on the Peacock Throne. Stephen Kinzer tells the story based on a wide variety of sources, both private and official, some leaked from classified CIA sources. The centerpiece of the story is an hour by hour reconstruction of the events of that fateful August 1953, which at times reads like a fictional spy thriller. Kinzer follows up the story of the coup with its context in the history that followed, which ultimately led to the Islamic revolution of 1979 and a legacy of distrust which exists to this day between America and Iran. This is a breathtaking and timely history.

Ilium
Dan Simmons


Dan Simmons, author of the critically praised, award-winning, and popular Hyperion epic series (" Hyperion", " The Fall of Hyperion", " Endymion", and " The Rise of Endymion") returns to science fiction with what promises to be an equally epic story arc. In this new tale, the interests of three diverse future cultures begin to converge. On Earth, a group of humans who live in a technological utopia begin to question their origins. Meanwhile, AI entities who make their homes in the Jupiter moon system are investigating odd quantum fluctuations on Mars. And on Mars itself, a group of post-human beings play at being Olympian gods as they run a simulation of the Trojan War and re-animate scholars to document its progress. One scholar in particular is not all that happy about retelling " The Iliad" and embarks on an adventure his godlike creators never envisioned. The convergence of the three factions reaches a climax to be resolved in the forthcoming second volume of this story, "Olympos". Readers familiar with Simmons's style will not be surprised to discover a literate story, chock full of classical references skillfully translated into an exotic and complex future. It's SF literature at its best.

Wings of Madness: Alberto Santos-Dumont and the Invention of Flight
Paul Hoffman
Hyperion; ISBN: 0786866594

It's been 100 years since the Wright brothers made their famous first powered flight. As all anniversaries that end in zero must, this 100th provides an excuse for a raft of books about the early days of flight. These were pioneering days full of marvelous stories and personalities. A case in point is Alberto Santos-Dumont, a rich playboy and bon vivant who embraced flight with a passion. It would not be far wrong to call him the father of flight as a sport, as opposed to flight as a business. He captivated Paris society with his airborne antics, but beneath the playboy exterior lay a melancholy soul. Hoffman artfully weaves Santos-Dumont's story with the history of early flight, delving both into the technology of getting airborne and the personalities that rode those early magnificent machines. This is a fun book about a more romantic and even innocent era, before flight became the battlefield of businesses and nations.

Linux Security Cookbook
Daniel J. Barrett, Richard E. Silverman, Robert G. Byrnes
O'Reilly & Associates; ISBN: 0596003919

If the title of this book caught your eye, chances are you're already familiar with the popular O'Reilly cookbook format. This collection of incredibly useful canned recipes deals with a panoply of Linux security issues. The cookbook format is a great time saver for sysadmins who may be familiar with the theory of security, but who need to quickly accomplish a common security task without re-inventing the wheel. There are chapters on detecting intrusion, sending secure and encrypted e-mail, securing network connections, authorizing and authenticating users, and testing and monitoring your system. The book has just been published but it already is flying off the technical shelves, a tribute to the popularity of both the format and the subject of Linux security.