Topic 1119 [media]: Media Appearances of WELLperns VI, S.F.Bay Area Division #217 of 296: Aaron L Dickey (kieran) Wed Jan 3 '96 (20:19) 7 lines Charles Platt responds: "John Markoff's reply to my replies is much more factual and convincing than his original response to my review of his book. I thank him for his time and trouble. I still find it hard to agree with his overall perspective, but I am now convinced that he does have a sincere point of view, and I value the instances where he has corrected me on details." Topic 1119 [media]: Media Appearances of WELLperns VI, S.F.Bay Area Division #223 of 296: Declan McCullagh (declan) Thu Jan 4 '96 (07:33) 23 lines And one final response from Charles Platt: "Someone suggested that by criticizing TAKEDOWN I attempted to further my own career. "My primary career has nothing to do with computer journalism. Under a different name I write a series of prehistory novels, the first of which now has 200,000 copies in print. This is my main source of income; I pursue computer journalism as a sideline, because it pleases me. "I do have a computer-related book coming out under my own name later this year, but it was written more for pleasure than profit and is aimed at a small audience: people who are more concerned about really dangerous criminals such as James Exon or Ralph Reed than about hackers such as Kevin Mitnick. Frankly, this book will not sell a lot of copies no matter what I do, because decency legislation and first-amendment issues are a noncommercial topic compared with so-called computer crime. "Bearing all this in mind, it is misleading to suggest that I wrote my review for motives of self-promotion. I wrote it because I had just finished reading TAKEDOWN, it had irritated me greatly, and I believed (perhaps wrongly) that I possessed background information that might not be mentioned by other reviewers elsewhere."