Clifford Stoll beat the Russians, then made useless, wondrous objects (2016)
alumni.berkeley.edu
alumni.berkeley.edu
Dr Stoll was _incredibly_ friendly during the process of buying all of these (I tried to keep it organised but I did ask him to send eight different packages to something like eight different locations!) and I bought his smallest-model Klein bottle for myself at the same time. It and its accompanying propaganda is one of my prized possessions, sitting on a shelf next to a wild boar's tusk, a 1920s brass charting compass, and other Really Cool Things.
If you read this and happen to remember me, Dr Stoll, I'm very grateful -- plus, I have no idea how to top that gift for my team next time we have a new release out. The next one is later this year. How can I do better than that? I genuinely don't know what to get them next :)
If you're interested, this is his website: https://www.kleinbottle.com/ It has far more than just normal Klein bottles. There are Klein hats. Klein earrings. Klein Erlenmeyer flasks...
Cliff, very unrelated, but your book "The Cuckoo's Egg" was assigned reading during my junior year of HS in my AP Computer Science class. It got me so excited about the material and industry, and here I am nearly 20 years later as a professional software engineer. I really appreciate the impact you had on me!
Who'd've thought...
From all the other comments, it seems many people got as much out of it as I did. I especially liked your description of the Emacs bug that allowed outside access to Berkeley's computers. It brought out my great fascination with finding and fixing security holes. Thank you so much for this!
Cliff, if you read this comment, are there any books that impacted you as much as your book impacted all of us? Since reading The Cuckoo's Egg, I've searched for similar books but have yet to find any that feel just as enjoyable. I'm open to recommendations from everyone else as well. :)
I know he has an HN ID, and has chimed in, from time to time.
I’ve always enjoyed sharing this planet with him. He’s an oddball, but a wonderful one.
Cheers, and carry on the Wonderful!
A company called Bourbon Barrel Foods also sometimes sells bourbon-barrel aged, lightly smoked sugars which are another fun way to do it (though volume for taste much more expensive than a cheap shot of bourbon).
I bought a Klein mug and agree wholeheartedly. Both the mug itself, and the propoganda is on the \shelf of cool stuff\.
One thing that humans don't really manage well is understand how much an activity will change you in the process. It's a cliché, if you fight a monster you become a monster, because you're forced to use some methods that will have an impact on your psyche. The book delves in how the chase of this hacker bled into the author's personal life, and how his simplistic worldview was not enough to manage the different conflicts that were at play. Yet the direction into which he was pulled was so opposite to his own inclinations that it forced him to reflect on it in a more conscious manner. This thought process was both interesting, relatable, and illuminating.
I don't see that mentioned anywhere but that left a strong impression on me (hopefully I'm not wrong, this was more than 15 years ago...).
You said it. I hadn’t thought about who I was or anything beyond my techy life in Berkeley. I figured that I was an apolitical Berkeley longhair, attending Dead concerts and biking along verdant streets.
It took a directed attack against my systems, my colleagues, and my community, to wake me up.
I'm still reading that yellow book The Cuckoo's Egg btw ..totally amazed me ..
If you wonder, at the time, the company was doing claims processing for a big insurance company in the US
If an author's personal political and morality views change your enjoyment of books you'd only be able to read things from the last decade.
As far as I remember homosexuality didn't even really come up in Ender's Game, its prequels mor sequels.
I read Songmaster by OSC as a teenager, and that wasn't what I took away from it.
There was a gay relationship that was at times hard to read for me as it went into such detail.
Being straight it helped me see things' from the other side' so to speak.
It wasn't until I was a grown adult and had already read everything OSC had written that I found out he was a conservative Mormon.
Not necessarily enjoyment, but they definitely change my perspective on the books. I read them, I sometimes love them, but I read them differently knowing what I do about the author. I don't need or want to agree with every view an author has. But I do want to read their writing in context, including historical context. You should still read Ender's Game, and you can definitely still like it (I know I do!).
> homosexuality didn't even really come up in Ender's Game
Yeah, that's fair. Lots of adjacent things did though: masculinity, sexuality, and violence in that context (for example, in the shower fight scene). I think his views on homosexuality are reflected in how he addresses those topics, even though it's not the main idea of the book. So yes: tinged. Not ruined, or unreadable, or canceled. But definitely there.
I mean no offense I just honestly do not understand.
I've read the entire series and EG in particular more times over than I can remember- more than any other books and I just don't see what you do, but I guess reading a story is a personal journey we all take alone.
Could be that what colors the glasses we view the stories through are our own personal experiences.
Appreciate you taking the time to help me understand.
He keeps already-made klein bottles in the crawlspace under his house, and built a remote controlled fpv mini-forklift to retrieve them on demand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3mVnRlQLU
I'm looking forward to reading or listening to Silicon snake oil and High tech heretic but those are not available in Storytel so I'll have to wait until I have time to read them in paper.
It sat on a shelf for a few months, and then I casually picked it up late one workday evening ... and didn't put it down again until the last page.
Just in time to leave for work the following morning, lol.
I even chuckled when he got mad and went to the garage to sand stuff (I won't spoil the rest) because of how close to home the entire thing hit.
I think sometimes it's all about the journey, not the destination.
The automater's slightly underwhelming battle cry! :-D
My day? Oh, it looks like I'll be sending out Klein bottles (thanks to Hacker News people!). I suspect that I'm the only shipping clerk in Northern California with a degree in planetary physics.
Go next level - implement a QR code label and recognition system, so it can find the correct box automatically. (Sorry, couldn't resist)
Also - thank-you for your books, I read "The Cuckoo's Egg" when I was 18 and it was one of the most amazing things I had read to that point. (I also loved "Silicon Snake Oil" - but missed "High-Tech Herectic")
People used to talk about how the brain had to solve differential equations to catch a baseball until they noticed that all a ball-catching player really does is move their body so as to keep the ball centered in their vision.
Have rubys in a mine? Goto put it on rails. Idea runaway exception thrown..
Mr. Stoll occasionally drops by this site ( https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=CliffStoll ), so if he sees this: thanks!
I actually ran into him on Reddit of all places a couple weeks ago. I was looking into air filters for my Mac Studio and I found a post where he had built a special stand with a cut up furnace filter to help protect his Mac Studio from dust. I recognized his garage from Numberphile and asked if it was him, sure enough.
I mean to actually build something like his contraption. My old house collects so much dust.
We have two wonderful cats who enjoy shedding cat hair around my desk. The new Mac Studio draws cooling air from the tabletop ,resulting cat fluff clogging the air passages. As you saw, it’s a chance to research how filter media work, and to home brew a solution that keeps everyone happy: computer, Cliff, and cats.
His explanations of the inner workings of networks and computer operating systems both moved the story along, and helped bridge the gap between Logo and BASIC programming and the impenetrable technical manuals for the computers I was using at the time.
It also helped that the commands he listed in the book worked on my school's A/UX computers.
I think reading all of that strengthened my confidence to explore programming and systems without either feeling overwhelmed by information, or restricted to narrow specializations.
It's easy to forget all the nerd stuff we do is supposed to be serving the interests of society, mankind, real people, however you want to think of it. And, sometimes, the question that should be asked is not "can we do it?" but "should we do it?" Social media, for example, should probably have done a bit more introspection before turning us into click-farmers.
Most of the Stoll fans on the early internet were expecting some futurist pablum, which he certainly could have sold out and done, but instead offered a polemic.
I read both "The Cuckoo's Egg" and "Silicon Snake Oil" as a young teen and it shaped and tempered my view of technology.
When I wrote a critique of the early internet, my sister warned me of the costs: Nobody thanks Cassandra.
But -as techies- I believe it's our responsibility to speak against thick hyperbole and unrealistic projections. Progress grows from realistic evaluations and honest criticisms.
I like how this contains more characters than ok123456
Everything’s changed: today, almost nobody has a 2400 baud modem, hardly anyone knows of the Arpanet, and pocket pagers are a rarity.
Nobody will ever miss pagers, IMHO. I used to have to carry one to support a trading server at a bank (Credit Suisse, somewhat topically) and I used to dread it going off in the middle of the night because something had gone horribly wrong in Hong Kong. We eventually re-wrote the server so it was trivial to restart & managed to shuffle off responsibility for it to the locals. Bye-bye pager and good riddance!
Liked your books, BTW!
Unless you're a retained or volunteer firefighter, he said, looking at the box of a thousand pagers that need programmed up and sent out.
Those times opened my eyes as well. It marked a watershed between days of computing innocence (an academic playground) and the era of a global commercial system with deep implications of security.
I recently, within last few years finally picked up the book and read it. It is just a great story. I feel like everything Cliff said, in certain aspects, we still deal with today. I highly recommend the book and watching the documentary.
Same with computing - you put yourself in the shoes of your student.
IMO, the second lesson of Google is to never trust the first Google hit, or the second or the third... the Internet doesn't really teach you how to investigate questions on your own - then again, what does but experience - but it does teach you the art of detecting bullshit. Even on sites like Stack Overflow, I find myself looking at the top answer, going "no, that's obviously wrong, next, next, next... ah, this answer added two years late at zero votes looks promising." If you just follow the first thing Google tells you, you'll fall on your face pretty reliably.
Behind a pi-hole, those first google hits tend to be blocked ads, so some people follow follow your advice by default.
What I remember most of the book is the talks with Luis Alvarez, and the influence it had on how you examined the attacker. So while you didn't turn me into a (professional) astronomer, you might have managed to turn me into a scientist.
BTW, even if the computer stuff is completely outdated, the problem solving attitude that speaks out of the book is a reason why I still recommend it to youngsters. I recently bought an English edition to read it in the original language, too.
BTW2, regarding dinosaurs, my old professor could never get the hang of this new-fangled windows stuff. We always saw him struggling with notepad, typing stuff like :wq in it and cursing when it didnt work. One day, we took pity on him and installed cygwin and a windows-compatible vi. Good times ;-)
Since then, I scribble it on every box I mail, in honor of her.
Thank you, Cliff, for all that you've done. Clearly, you've left a mark on many souls... and we're all the better for it. :-)
Short story: Around 1996, my wife laughed at me when I told her that I was ordering 25 Klein bottles. “You’ll never sell that many,” she said. “Hardly anyone knows what these are, and nobody needs one. You’ll take most of ‘em to the dump.”
Thank you, Thanatos for helping prove her wrong.
Note: never liked his Silicon Snake Oil book :(
No worrying about tampered logs, or any of that.
Of course, he had physical security at Lawrence Berkeley Lab.
I wouldn't want to play that game if I was in an insecure location. It's just not fun.
Still, good book. Formative in my youth.
Thanks for being a truly good person, Cliff. ;-)
The question is coming up yet again with current LLMs and other AI. The previous waves displaced some people but generally modernized by automation many manual processes. Will this wave or the next or the next one after that be the one that displaces the need to learn altogether such that we are totally dependent on the machine and find ourselves unable to proceed without it having lost our aptitude to lean? Of course there will be people who keep on learning because of momentum or because they have an affinity for the old ways, just as we have hose riders, despite modern transportation, but not enough to sustain the system were the future generation of AI to fail (for whatever catastrophic reason like solar blast, etc.)
“After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students had memorized everything, but they didn’t know what anything meant.”
—http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education
I hope curiosity, genuine understanding, and joy remain central for our species.
Thank you for your wonderful work and inspiration, Mr. Stoll!
I need to buy a bottle as a token to have something to remind me of those things long past when my memory alone can do it.
Learning all the default VMS passwords definately didn't get me in trouble during High School with the state's herd of Vaxen... I mean the book was right there, in the library! Wink wink :P
Blushing slightly, my high school had an IBM 1620, where I learned machine coding, assembler, and that most modern language, Fortran. 1965: punch-cards and blinking panel lights.
Yep, I feel like a fossil.
Still, I grew up at a time just before computers were a normal part of everyone's life, and now they dominate my time and attention and other resources in a way I don't think anyone could have imagined circa 1985. We see enough articles on this site about the consequences of ...excessive computing (?) on sleep and mental health and physical health, we should be able to agree generally that there are some negative effects, as with all technologies. From there, it's only another step to start to find some common ground with Mr. Stoll's views on it, and I hope he sees that happen.
I don't know if he still encourages visitors, but if he does, I highly recommend it.
Dr Stoll -- if you're reading this -- your book _The Cuckoo's Egg_ made such a lasting impression on this young, precocious teen, who read everything in he could lay his hands on. This is the very late 80s or early 90s - and I had read some excerpts in _Reader's Digest_, out in the middle of nowhere, in a village in India. It (among other books) inspired me to study computer networking in my undergrad (thank the IITs) and started my career in the networking industry.
When I found myself in the US in the mid-90s, with barely a few dollars in my wallet, yours was the first book I purchased from that lonely bookstore in the strip mall in Los Angeles. I was so poor that I had to choose between getting my copy of the book, or a half-a-week's worth of dinner. I chose the former, and it made all the difference. It still sits here on my shelf, now accompanied by a few hundred other books, but it will always have a special place in my heart.
To be honest, I contemplated a career in security, but other fields called my name. FWIW, I now work on autonomous vehicles. Yours is a book I gift any one of my friends/nephews/nieces who I think has the potential to be inspired. So far, I've given it to about half a dozen people.
FWIW, when I read the _Silicon Snake Oil_, I wasn't impressed as much.. But over the years I have come to respect the sentiments behind it. Life is better, far richer, outside, and with a few loved ones, than in front of the computer, whatever form it may have taken. I believe a lot of people have come to the same conclusion, with or without agreeing with your theses.
Now that I am in the Bay Area (twists of fortune), I would love to get myself one of your Klein Bottles.
<3
It's amazing to see how little he's changed.
That TED talk was a bit strange for me - I’d prepared a 1 hour talk: just before going onstage, they told me that I had only 18 minutes.
So I did what I learned in grad school: talk fast and don’t give ’em a standing target.
And the chase across campus? Yep happened petty much as I told it. Even now, in the middle of the night, tapping on an iPad, I can remember: All truth is one. In this light . . .
Again, thank you.
Maybe this weekend…
Cliff, not sure if you're still reading this thread but you are an absolute treasure and one of the people that made (makes?) Berkeley such a great place.
Have you cried for horseback couriers? Hell, there are hundreds if not thousands of industries that died with the rise of automobiles. I suppose it's alright to mourn for things that we lose to history, but I don't think it's right to denounce technological progress, especially when it has given us so much.
For all the problems in the world, technology is just there to assist in our own self-destruction. The unfortunate reality is that it is us, human beings, who are our own undoing or remaking in every way; our efforts to do so are just magnified by technology.
I loved the most recent small-business-oriented Numberphile, by the way :)
Thanks, of course for your smile about that recent video - yep, I did it offhand a couple years ago; I’d pretty much forgotten about it when -zooks- suddenly I’m staring at 3 dozen Klein bottle orders to send out.
Brady Haran, incidentally, is a terrific interviewer and producer. It’s a joy to work with him.
Not that SDI was going to work, but I will never understand this "we shouldn't build anti-nuke defenses because it might make the people pointing nukes at us angry" attitude.
My personal view is that we should build them to shield from states like the DPRK, but the contrasting view is that it destabilizes Mutually Assured Destruction. We don't know how many of their missiles we'll be able to intercept in the event of a mass strike, so it could make our leaders overly confident to take actions that would escalate. That's the critique, and I think it has some merit, but I also think that there are people that I admire, like Jeffery Lewis, that hold that view or something similar to it.
For whatever it is worth, I've personally worked on arms control and in intelligence, so this opinion is not coming out of the blue.
Further, the way to deal with anti-nuke defenses is to just send more nukes and/or lots of dummies too. Things like iron dome are 90% effective (reportedly, some think that number is too high and has a significant propaganda element)... You dont need a huge success rate for your nukes to be effective. Besides the consequences of a destroyed nuke are not great either, there's still a lot of uranium and plutonium getting dumped into the atmosphere.
If your goal is to end nuclear proliferation, things that increase said proliferation are not ok.
The US is already at a significant disadvantage. Russia's nuke-based nuclear interceptor missiles are an order of magnitude more effective than America's explosive and kinetic-based interceptors.
It was different times, and the overwhelming desire to not escalate or provoke was very real, in a way that just doesn't exist anymore today.
If Reagan finished SDI, other nations like China/Russia could feel the need to develop a similar program. They would at a minimum start researching ways to work around the insanely expensive SDI program, which would cause it to be obsolete.
The cycle continues and everyone loses money and resources that could be spent on other problems.
Wisdom.
Just purchased a klein bottle as well!
> Give the kid a diet of Google
Google was founded in 1998, this quote must be from a later edition of the book.
Thanks CliffStoll!
We need details on how this was accomplished.
The book he wrote on it [0] is a great read
[0]https://www.amazon.com/CUCKOOS-EGG-Clifford-Stoll-ebook/dp/B...
You made me spill my coffee :) Will certainly use that in front of my kids.
(Insomniac Cliff in Oakland,California)
The Central Station in Copenhagen had bookstore that sold "airport literature" but for trains -- I think I bought it there.
Thank you for a good read!
We don't need any more headlines about "beating the Russians" right now. Especially not from cogs of The Machine like Berkeley.