Red Team Blues

I picked this book up in Antigone Bookshop (a great little place on 4th avenue in Tucson, Arizona). It's a fictional tale about Martin Hench. He's 67, mostly retired, and at the end of what seems like an illustrious career as a "self employed forensic accountant" [ref].

Martin is the narrator of the story, we are set in present day as far as I can tell, and he is very tech savvy - he speaks in a way I understand. His van is called the "Unsalted Hash" which is a technical term related to security and cryptography and I'm loving every minute of it.

Corey Doctorow created the word of the year enshittification - for the "pattern of decreasing quality" in large platforms.

What a cool book. Hench is like a nerdy James Bond. We learn that he is a life long red-teamer (someone who professionally attacks security systems) but it looks like he will be forced to work on the blue team (defensively) in this novel. There are a lot of timely cultural references - signal for secure messaging, burner instagram accounts, lock picking videos on youtube.

Just after finishing this book, I realized that Corey Doctorow would be at the Tucson Book Festival that I was volunteering at! Got to meet him and say "Hi!"