Authoritas: One Student's Harvard Admissions and the Founding of the Facebook Era | 
 enlarge | Author: Aaron Greenspan
Publisher: Think Press
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 849359
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 335
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.2 x 1.1
ISBN: 1606690000
Dewey Decimal Number: 509
EAN: 9781606690000
ASIN: 1606690000
Publication Date: June 1, 2008
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Product Description
Aaron Greenspan was just like any other recent Harvard graduate until the day he read that his invention, a web site called The Facebook, was worth billions of dollars and someone else was taking the credit. Trying to find the rationale behind an unbelievable tale of ingenuity, triumph and betrayal, Greenspan sat down to write his story, and emerged with a book that follows a boy and his autistic brother from public school to the hyper-competitive college admissions process to the gates of Harvard Yard and beyond. A true story that sheds light on the American educational system, the immense challenges of coping with autism, and of course, the astronomical growth of The Facebook, Authoritas is an engrossing account of life that any student, parent, teacher or entrepreneur will relate to.
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| Customer Reviews:
To let a multibillion dollar creation escape from you is something hard to get over. September 3, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
To let a multibillion dollar creation escape from you is something hard to get over. "Authoritas: One Student's Harvard Admissions and the Founding of the Face Book Era" is Aaron Greenspan's amazing story of having developed the enormously popular Face Book software, only to let it escape from his grasp to the benefit of others. Greenspan candidly lays out the inherently fascinating story of his life - the memoir of an idealistic young man with huge dreams and an innovative idea -- only to be betrayed and have his creation stolen from him, then exploited for millions. "Authoritas" is a highly recommended look behind the famous Face Book website, and a recommended addition to academic and community library Biography collections.
 Odd. Compelling reading, but the author seems to have issues. July 25, 2008
7 out of 9 found this review helpful
This book is odd. It's well written and the narrative is compelling; enough for me to read it all in one go.
The stories of inadequate ego-driven teachers and students early on in the book are relayed well. The book's exposure of incompetence, back-scratching and favoritism from supposedly upstanding academic leaders is excellent. This is a good reason to read this book, and for excellently depicting an often overlooked part of academic life, this book deserves 4 stars.
The problem is, that's not why I bought the book. I was expecting a book about the "founding of the Facebook era" as the sub-title suggests. This, however, is certainly not a focus. From 335 pages in all, the name "Mark Zuckerberg" first appears on page 287, and any facts relating to Facebook's rise are within only the last 40 pages, mixed with of indignation.
Initially the author developed a system called CriticalMass that allowed students to rate their satisfaction of different academics at Harvard. Textbook Central, a textbook trading site, followed. Another system called FAStWebmail allowed Harvard students to access their official Harvard e-mail accounts over the Web. These were eventually rolled into a system called houseSYSTEM that included some other features like course preselection and calendars.
For a few chapters after explaining how these systems were developed, the focus is on how the administration and some other students considered houseSYSTEM to be insecure and flawed, due to its pseudo-requirement to have users' official Harvard passwords (in order for the webmail function to work) and a lack of proper SSL (HTTPS) security.
In dealing with these concerns the author showed a lack of technical knowledge. He protested that only an MD-5 hash of users' passwords were stored, but if this were the case, how did his system then access the users' official e-mail accounts? The author doesn't provide a proper level of detail to make a judgment as an independent reader, and the way he portrays it may just be very poor.
The author also says "Brian Wong is telling people that MD-5 generates 16-byte hashes, when it doesn't! There are 32 characters in all of them! Each ASCII character is one byte!" MD-5 generates a 16 byte hash (128 bits). That a textual hexadecimal representation of that 16 byte hash takes 32 characters does not make it a "32 byte hash."
The author has a habit of "quoting" his mental monologue, nearly all of which is negative in nature, and assuming whoever he's talking to is either an idiot or out to get him. The author's paranoia (warranted or not) permeates the last half of this book enough to make for uneasy reading. He also jumps to exaggerated conclusions. Shortly after the initial security concerns, the university decides that Greenspan needs to delete the password hashes he had collected so far and "forward the list of all those whose information you have collected" in order that those students could have their passwords reset. Instead of complying with this reasonable request, the author rants about how the users table has other information like phone numbers in it and asks "What, do they want those, too?" The e-mail he quotes requested a list of people who signed up for his site, not other details. This doesn't stop the author from eventually sending the whole user table anyway!
On the SSL issue, the text implies that a self-signed certificate was used, but the author appears not to understand the identification issues with this (though those who e-mail him appear to). It's a common theme that the author quotes well-thought-out e-mails and refutes them poorly. He argues that a wildcard certificate would be necessary - costing some $1000, though InstantSSL had them for under $500 at the time - not realizing he could use a regular SSL certificate (under $50) for the password transfer (the parts where security really counted), and a wildcard cookie for cross sub-domain authentication beyond that.
On Facebook, he seems to feel that Zuckerberg's developments, though independent, were a rip off of his own even though Zuckerberg is constantly quoted as remaining separate. houseSYSTEM did have a "face book" feature where pictures of students were located along with their names, but this had no social networking aspect. Zuckerberg's did. Nothing the author relays gives me the impression he "founded" the "Facebook" era.
On page 302, I feel that Greenspan attempts to blackmail Facebook. Despite considering Zuckerburg "inarticulate and naive," he suggested that he join Facebook. When told they needed an engineer with 15 years' experience, Greenspan highlighted Facebook's problems with ConnectU (who were suing Facebook for allegedly copying their idea and stealing code) and suggested that he had "grounds to sue both of you" before suggesting that if Facebook would hire him, he'd be on their side and help the lawsuit go away.
The last 20 pages are dire. The author claims that having a full Facebook profile "would have meant I endorsed intellectual property theft" without realizing that information willingly shared is not "thieved."
Lastly, the author appears to rub most people in the book up the wrong way. Other than his closest associates and his family, almost every social interaction seems to result in the author antagonizing someone or being ignored. In most cases, he relies on his father to write e-mails and letters on his behalf (mostly unsuccessfully), rather than fight his own battles. "If Mark can get $2 billion for my ideas, I should at least be able to get a couple million!" sums up what I see as a jealous, paranoid individual who, as it happens, has written a gripping and interesting book.
As good as this book is, I sense Greenspan isn't the sort of person to get over his envy and indignation, and it saddens me that his personality appears to restrict him from achieving all that he could be.
Interesting Read and Fun too June 26, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
"That's some catch, that Catch-22," Yossarian observed.
"It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.
That is the famous line from Joseph Heller's 1961 novel, Catch 22.
Authoritas is the autobiography of Aaron Greenspan's adventures growing up in Shaker Heights, then attending Harvard, and then finding himself in Harvard's 21st-century version of Heller's Catch 22.
Authoritas is an interesting, fast paced and a times humorous read.
While at Harvard, Greenspan develops by all accounts the very first version of what is now the international website "Facebook."
Aaron Greenspan writes very well and really knows computing. With that combination I think we will be hearing a lot from Mr. Greenspan in the future.
Heller's John Yossarian would have loved reading Authoritas.
Important and engaging book June 21, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
At some levels, the book is just an absolutely engaging story. At other levels, it shines a harsh light on uncaring, uncreative, and unimaginative people involved at administrative levels of education. At times, you'll be astounded at the depths educational administrators go to squash creativity, deny entrepreneurship, and cover themselves at the expense of providing service to education.
Aaron Greenspan graduated from Harvard. And although he is a successful CEO of his own company (Think Computer), his success came despite his Harvard education. In Authoritas you'll find Aaron struggle to avoid the crushing of the human spirit and the crushing of the innate desire to learn and his determination to provide compassionate assistance to his autistic brother.
Aaron's story is personal, engaging, and important.
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