Book details of 'Conspiracy.Com'

Title	Conspiracy.Com
Author(s)	R. J. Pineiro
ISBN	0812575059
Language	English
Published	April 2002
Publisher	Forge

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Reviewer amazon.com wrote:
It takes almost 300 pages for the Criminal Investigation Division of the Internal Revenue Service to get the bad guys in this tepid remake of The Firm, but when they finally do, it's enough to convince you that these wolves in accountants' clothing are the scariest guys in town. It would be better to pay taxes on every cent of your income than bring them down on you. Murder a bunch of innocent people? They'll hardly notice. But try to cheat the government by diverting IRS funds offshore and evading taxes on your ill-gotten gains? Now that's a crime! When SoftCorp hires Michael Ryan, fresh out of Stanford, and lures him to Austin with plenty of perks and promises of more to come, he has no idea that his boss and some higher-ups in the company's only client--the IRS--are lining their pockets with government wealth. But when a dogged FBI agent goes solo to tie Softcorp to the murder of one of her own and finds herself thwarted by higher-ups in her own agency, she partners with Michael and his wife to uncover the conspiracy and save the day. Of course, she has to call in the CID to do it, but by that time the reader has spent so much time in the virtual reality program Michael created to make catching tax cheats easier that it's all a blur of bytes and bits. R.J. Pineiro's real talent is for making complicated technology understandable, but that's not enough to turn this into a read for anyone who's not halfway there already.
Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
The author's bio, printed inside the back cover, indicates that he has almost two decades of experience in the computer industry. The material on his Web page (which, unfortunately, doesn't seem to have been updated in the past two years) points to work as a chip engineer. Which may explain the myriad errors in everything from network operations to authentication to screen resolution. From a technical perspective, the book presents a bit of a dichotomy. On the one hand, there is a rough awareness of much of the detail of the computer world. On the other hand, many of the particulars are wrong: the whole point of the Internet was that you wouldn't need to dial up each computer individually, high end workstation prices in the book are ridiculously inflated, and there is the standard mistake of assuming that a cellular phone actually has to be making a call in order to be tracked. The same rift occurs in regard to computer security. For once the good guys seem to do all the system penetration. There is a lovely piece of social engineering employed in order to install a kind of rootkit. One character takes advantage of a "beaming" (infrared data transfer equipped) personal digital assistant, and the inevitable fact that people write down lists of their passwords, in order to obtain access information. (The beauty of this scam is somewhat reduced because PDAs have extremely weak security at the best of times, making this plot device somewhat redundant.) But the attempt to make the action "visual" (one can almost hear the movie deal making going on) definitely comes at the expense of technical realism. The virtual reality "interface" makes little sense in terms of either networking or database management. The agents seem to simply operate by magic. The security systems are ludicrously vulnerable, with operations and controls completely exposed. There is a vague hint of "sniffing" for passwords as they are used, but security and intrusion detection systems would be operating in a resident mode (and generally internal to a system) so that they would have no need to submit passwords. Certainly the idea that major banks, corporations, and government institutions are all using static, reusable passwords, with no challenge/response systems, is sadly behind the times. A mixed bag, this. More than a passing familiarity with the computer world, but a ton of annoying mistakes. copyright Robert M. Slade, 2003
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Book description:

Hunted by the top companies in America, Michael Patrick Ryan was offered the world: high starting salaries, stock options, and signing bonuses. Ryan set his sites on SoftCorp, Inc., a company with only one client-the Internal Revenue Service.But Mike Ryan has also fallen into the sights of the FBI. Millions of dollars have been smuggled out of the country, and Karen Frost suspects it's someone in the IRS. The deal: federal protection and immunity for information. But Frost has already lost one informant. Someone who got too close to the truth. As Ryan closes in, he realizes that he is a puppet in a ring masterminded by one man. One man whose agenda is designed to bring America to its knees.