Authoritas: One Student's Harvard Admissions and the Founding of the Facebook Era

by Greenspan, Aaron and Aaron Greenspan

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1606690000
• ISBN13: 9781606690000
• Release Date: June 2008
• Publisher: Think Press
• Length: 335 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.

Customer Reviews

To let a multibillion dollar creation escape from you is something hard to get over.

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.

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 complyi

Interesting Read and Fun too

"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

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.