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Comment by edanm | Hacker News Reader

In case anyone doesn't know him, Clifford Stoll wrote "The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage", a book about his real experiences tracking down a group of computer hackers.

By the way, there's a bonus at the end of the book: he mentions Paul Graham (in the context of Robert Morris' worm). Was a pleasant surprise when I read the book.

Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Computer-Espionag...

Wiki about the book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_%28book%29

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He also has a Klein Bottle company, with an entertaining website:

http://www.kleinbottle.com/

And he gave a TED talk in 2006:

http://www.ted.com/talks/clifford_stoll_on_everything.html

His is one of my all-time-favorite TED talks. I also happen to agree with him on most of his points.

I currently make a reasonable living by untangling technology for people. Not only that, but I make another person's living doing it, and soon I'll be making yet another's, in spite of my many competitors all doing the same thing. I think this indicates some serious shortcomings in current technology, and a severe gap between technologists and non-technologists -- one which is incredibly difficult to communicate to technologists.

There are two different ways to read what he wrote. One is to take it in the way that most technologists would: when Clifford Stoll opens with, "The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper", you take the word "replace" in the most literal way possible, and say, "A-ha! But now we do have online databases replacing daily newspapers, so he was wrong!"

The other way -- and the one that I think is closer to his intended meaning -- is less favorable to technologists; in this case, no online database will "replace" our daily newspapers because online databases won't offer the same value. (Not more value, nor less value, but just not the same value.)

I think this is supported by his very next statement: "...no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher..." And, again, I think he's exactly right. A competent teacher interacts with students in ways which technology has yet to offer.

And, some of his other statements are eerily prescient: "The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen." ...This happens now, all the time, and yet I don't think it can be said that the average internet user is actually more informed about the topics on their favorite community site.

It's a cheap form of education, at best, the nutritrional equivalent of subsisting on a snack food and dessert diet.

"At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book." Again, readability on electronic devices is still a work in progress. ePaper and Amazon have made incredible strides, but many avid readers -- those that value the experience as well as the content -- still prefer a dead-tree book. For me, this has been something of an eye-opener recently: I started taking dance classes with my girlfriend a little while back, and the classes take place in a used book store. With my busy schedule and the internet at my fingertips, I haven't been visiting the book stores like I once did. But look! There's a great book on statistics! Oh, and Fluid Mechanics! Oh, and a sci-fi novel! And a history book!

Browsing Amazon just doesn't get quite the same reaction as wandering through the shelves of a good used book store. Amazon has other strengths; a local store can't possibly have a copy of everything, so if I'm looking for a specific title, Amazon might be a better bet. But, it doesn't completely take the place of a local store.

While he might have failed to predict the extent to which technology would evolve and invade so many people's daily lives, I don't think he was wrong to criticize technology's impact on those lives.

"I think this indicates some serious shortcomings in current technology, and a severe gap between technologists and non-technologists -- one which is incredibly difficult to communicate to technologists."

Personally I'm very aware of this gap, but I've never yet been convinced by the "serious shortcomings in current technology" part, except in a strictly commercial sense. Can you expand or provide references that might convince me?

Probably not, but I don't mind trying. Most of this is based off of my experiences with my various clients; I haven't kept anything better than mental notes, so this is also all off the top of my head.

First, let's have a unification of user interfaces. As it stands right now, novices find it incredibly challenging to tell when to left click, when to right click, when to click once, and when to double-click. They can't tell the difference between their "desktop" and their "web browser", and if you step back and think about it for a moment, it doesn't make any sense that they should have to.

I would also like to see the notion of everything in a computer being a metaphor for something in real life come to a blessed end. There's no reason that computers need to have a "desktop", and "files" and "folders" don't make much sense to novice users. Most of them are totally incapable of organizing their information in a useful way, and inconsistencies with file save and open dialogs don't help this. I often hear from people who just need help finding the file that they know they saved, but can't find on their computer. I've also had to reconcile vast hierarchies of folders for users that had been saving different versions of the same file to different locations.

I would like to see a new internet-distributed file system, where data is separated into regular chunks, and then those chunks are saved in multiple locations around the internet in a fast rootless node structure. Public chunks are unencrypted; private chunks are encrypted. To access all of your information from anywhere in the world, you simply sign in to a portal from any computer; your login decrypts a small chunk file which contains encrypted references to all the rest of your data. This would make the very idea of a "backup" completely obsolete and would solve data portability and storage issues for anyone with a broadband internet connection. It would also -- at least for a while -- completely halt viruses and malware.

I want to see consumer devices become more upgradeable and more modular. At least once a week I have to explain to a customer that their entire motherboard (or, often, laptop) needs to be expensively replaced, because the DC circuit failed, or a graphics chip overheated (thankyouverymuch HP).

I think there needs to be a serious effort to upgrade the communications infrastructure in the U.S.; I'm aware of the challenges presented by the geography in this country and current and past building practices. However, much of this build-out has already been paid for [1]. Instead, customers find themselves having to call tech support every time they think their email has stopped working, only to be told that their computer is currently in the process of downloading a 10MB attachment from someone.

I believe that there needs to be a much greater importance placed on performance in software. I think that the current commonly-accepted principles in software development -- ship early, ship often, and hardware is cheap so don't spend too much time making it fast or small -- is wrong-headed, and I think that's obvious to anyone who actually interacts with their customers on a regular basis. The fact that products like McAfee and Norton can have such massive impacts on system performance that the customer is left wondering what died and went to hell in their computer is a problem that needs to be addressed.

This is just for starters. I could go on like this for a long time. I think that all new construction should be wired up for gigabit, right alongside phone & power; I'd like to see cars with upgradeable powerplants; etc.

It's not that I think that current technology isn't improving, or that it's bad necessarily, but I do think there are many problems that it presents that its developers really aren't even aware of, or that they care to address. We keep getting more and more time sinks in the form of shiny new "social" networks where less and less of substance is shared in each iteration, while basic principles of design and infrastructure continue to languish in the shadows.

[1]: http://www.newnetworks.com/BroadbandScandalIntro.htm -- not the very best reference, but it's getting harder to dig this story up anymore.

For the truly hardcore avid readers I know, their initial scepticism about e-Ink readers is overcome once they try it out and realise that the decrease in the romanticism of the experience is outweighed by the fact that they can take their entire bookshelf away on holiday with them.

For real readers, who get through a novel every day or two, the sheer mass of paper books is an annoying encumbrance.

He also wrote Silicon Snake Oil in 1996, which seems to have been an expansion of the argument he made in this Newsweek article.

I knew that author's name sounded familiar. I also read and enjoyed that book.

Your Wikipedia link is broken, try this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_%28book%29

edit: OP fixed his link

Woops, forgot to say thinks for pointing out the link.

So thanks! :)

A hint: search the title along with the filetype: feature to find the whole book ;)

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