Sunday, September 13, 2015

The Crashing of the Cloud, by Norman Spinrad

Analog Science Fiction and Fact, September 2015; ~6,500 words
Rating: 3, Good, ordinary, story

A master hacker on the lam from the US government signs up to help Islamic terrorists.

Mini-Review (click to view--possible spoilers)

The story reads smoothly, progresses logically, and reaches a logical end.

The idea that a hack of the IRS could end up giving everyone a tax holiday is just silly. People would still send in the paperwork--their tax refunds would just be delayed. Likewise, if all the cloud data went away, there would be terrible problems, but the value of turning it back on would drop sharply day by day. The notion that someone could disable all that data for years and it still have some value after that time is also pretty silly.

No comments (may contain spoilers):

Post a Comment (comment policy)