Back in the day, hacking was easy.

I recall when I started my career as a finance person in the 90’s that few if anyone password protected their computer. My boss and I were working late on a Sunday night preparing for a Monday morning meeting with the executive team. He found a typo on one of the summary documents that was going to get a lot of visibility. The analyst who had worked on that file had it saved on his desktop, was away for the weekend, and unreachable, so my boss went to his desk and turned on his machine.

A short Q&A Session with author Paul Sande about his debut novel In the Name of Peace.

He talks about the inspiration for the book, the main themes in the story, and the reason he decided to use a real person in the book.

A reader reached out via Facebook to share her disgust at how I portrayed the people of Newfoundland in my novel, In the Name of Peace.. “I found your take on us to be extremely offensive,” were the exact words.

In 2015 Samsung debuted the Invisible Truck. The concept was quite simple, they put a big screen TV on the back of an eighteen wheeler and some wireless cameras on the front. The result is that you can see “through” the truck! The idea being that you make it easier for people to safely pass a truck, particularly on two lane highways.

Admittedly, I was about a minute into this video before I realized it said “Bosstown Dynamics” and not the famed Massachusetts based company called “Boston Dynamics.” So while the video is fake, the concept is really not far from being reality. The producers of the video did a brilliant job of bringing the robot to life and making the viewer feel empathy for it. As AI continues to develop, the prospect of a robot army is very real. Are we ready?

Steganography is the practice of hiding a message within a message, which is a form of cryptography. A common practice is coding text within a photo. In the digital age it became easy to do this with video, music, or even text files. You can use software to encode your secret message into the binary of the file, then use the same software to decode it.

At the front of In the Name of Peace is a dedication written in binary. It’s very easy to decode, just go to the following site:

I’m not embarrassed to admit that I had to google the meaning of the word “bespoke” (it mean’s “custom,” by the way) because it isn’t a word in common usage. Although since discovering their site, I’ve suddenly heard the word spoken on the news and in articles online. Funny, that.

While promoting my book one of the services replied that my cover was “not workable.” It forced me to take a good hard look at my cover and compare it to other thrillers. I swallowed my pride and I hired Peter and Caroline O’Connor of Bespoke Book Covers. In a few weeks I’ll be reposing my novel with a brand new cover.

When I decided two years ago to make him a background character in the novel, I recognized that it was a risk. Given who he was (is?), clearly he lived in danger every day. In the novel his death was a precipitating event. So when the headlines came in late July and early August, I wondered if I should replace him with a made up terrorist mastermind.