Good luck guys. I wish you the best.

Regards,

Brian

P.S Hats off to Wesley for bringing to light the issue so that it could be dealt with appropriately.

Trust me, I’m all for doing positive things instead of bitching. But don’t try to tell me that’s what this is.

You really want to call this a community thing? Fine. Go start a wiki and make a peer reviewed “hacker fiction” book, and make it free to everyone. That’s community, sir.

Doing free tech edits to make up for a personally and professionally embarrassing series of cockups and put more money in somebody’s pocket?

That’s not my community, man. Maybe it’s yours.

While I’m being a dickweed, I wonder how many people surrounding this drama mill have deals for other books in the series in the works? Hrrm. Time to save the franchise, eh?

I just don’t get how this is being spun as some kind of community thing. We’re not talking about a collaborative project like MSF or nmap, and we’re not talking about something that’s going into Phrack, or 2600, or Uninformed, or a thousand other plausibly “community” outlets.

We’re talking about a commercial book, published by a commercial publisher, with some dudes’ names on it. Written, at least kinda, by those dudes, for money. And at least one of those dudes screwed up, *hard*, as did their publisher. Why exactly should I be tripping all over myself to help them fix that?

… You do, however, get to randomly copypasta junk from the Internet and have it make it past fact-checking and into print. Gaah. I should have listened to my Mom and went into accountancy. Every time I think we’ve perfected the Security Charlatan, someone comes along and makes a better one, like some sort of Terminator that keeps reengineering itself and can’t be killed. Bravo, Fritz, bravo.

Thanks for the comment. You’re right on the mark with it.

#2 Jayson is of the highest moral standards and caliber that i have met in quite a long time. I don’t say that lightly, as many of the people I meet in these communities are bloodsucking time vampires who have a greater self edification complexes than any of the worst dictators in history. It is refreshing to have someone who gives a shit about others enough to lay on the grenade.

#3 instead of writing long winded analysis of these situations, posting on twitter, and blog after blog of commentary…. why don’t we spend the time to help make it right. What ever happened to the security “COMMUNITY” ? this is just another drag on.. so people can hear themselves talk and get a little press.

#4 Anyone offer to help jayson and gang (Wes I know u did offer to tech review * i think*) rewrite the content to help get a good book out there that the COMMUNITY can learn from? If not…. time to close this browser and fire off an email.

To all of you who have given…. thank you for your sacrifice and humility.

To all that take… and bitch about what you got, instead of helping be a solution….. Find a new place to play, we don’t want you here.

After talking to all involved we have determined the following:
•The book’s technical editor is the source of this plagiarism. He greatly overstepped his role.
•He did, in fact, plagiarize despite signing an agreement that explained his role was to fact check and prevent plagiarism.
•The book’s authors, Jayson Street and Kent Nabors were not involved.

As soon as we learned about this issue, we ‘froze’ the status of the books. On Monday, October 19th we made the decision to destroy all remaining titles.

We’ve learned a lot of interesting lessons in the past few days. I suspect the most important is the value of a new anti-plagiarism software program. If you have suggestions on really good ones please feel free to send them my way. But equally important has been the goodwill and generosity of so many people in this community. Our editor and the book’s authors are already working on a plan to move forward due in no small part by experts in the community who have agreed to help us replace all of the plagiarized material with new content. The previous technical editor will in no way be involved with this new project— or with any future Syngress projects. We will hire a new technical editor to review the content.

Our plan is to publish a revised edition with this new content. We’re also working on placing all the new content on completely open websites so that anyone who did have a copy of the book can get electronic access—anyone who heard about the book and wants to check it out can do a quick preview before purchasing.

I’ve talked to several experts in the field who shared good suggestions on how to ensure we deal fairly with our customers. We’ve taken the last couple days to check them all out and to try to balance them with some of the realities of doing business with global sales channels and a variety of contractual obligations. Then we took a deep breath and decided to follow the old K.I.S.S. rule. To keep it simple, we’ll accept back ‘old’ books from current customers and replace them with the new version as soon as it publishes. And we’ll also do multiple postings of the new material and keep it open to all for the life of the title. We post this information in a variety of sources and take out an ad or two in info sec publications. We’ll always have latest up-dates on syngress.com and on dissectingthehack.com.

Although I realize it’s my job to say this, I honestly believe this is a great book and can’t wait to get the REAL version in my hands and yours.