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Comment by phrop | Hacker News Reader

Cliff is a national treasure!

A legend in his own bathtime.

According to my Amazon order history, I've bought 4 copies of The Cuckoo's Egg. One was for me, and I gave the other 3 away to friends/family.

I'm genuinely considering buying another 10 copies so that I have a bunch on hand to give away to anyone who I think would benefit.

Thanks for writing such a great book :)

Hmmm: Thank you, Complex Lamda! Assuming they’re paperbacks, you’ve contributed the munificent sum of 24 cents to my kids’ tuition and/or bail fund. Yep, royalties generate about six cents a copy.

When the mailbox money is less than the stamp it is mailed with =)

Here here. I love Cliff and have my own Acme Klein bottle, a wedding present from my wife.

I read the book ages ago of course, but I just discovered the NOVA documentary last week. It's quite amazing to see the original people involved recreating events just a few years after they took place (docu was released in 1990). So... I can't believe Cliff's wife agreed to do a shower scene as part of a recreation for the documentary... Just sayin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe5AE-qYan8

Oh Man of DOS, you don’t know the half of it: that Nova was filmed (yup, 16mm Kodachrome) maybe a year after I quit chasing those hackers. So it was not only fresh in my mind, but the technology was properly state of the 1988 art: 9 track tapes on Dec Vaxes, dial up modems, my trusty Mac plus with 512k of memory. Heck, pay phones and 1200 baud modems. I do remember that shower scene - it happened in in our 1915 era claw foot tub.

Yep, I’m a fossil.

I was meaning to ask, was the group of German hackers you encountered affiliated with the CCC/Chaos Computer Club at all? It's been a while since I read the book and NOVA didn't go into any detail there.

I know some of the CCC folks went on to start the SSDev lockpicking club. The first time I attended the TOOOL lock picking conference in Sneak NL I met some of the SSDev guys and their then-president mentioned that they "learned lessons" from the early days of the CCC and applied those when they started SSDev. Lessons such as having members/friends "disappeared" by the Stasi/etc. and trying to play nicer with the authorities this time. It had never occurred to me until recently that the guy who met an unfortunate end in the woods in The Cuckoo's Egg could be related to these other stories I had heard years later.

I've not followed the German hackers who I tracked. A couple years ago, I heard that one or two of them were active in the Chaos Computer Club, at least they showed up to a meeting and described what had happened to them.

Every now and then, I think about doing a talk on "Stalking the Wily Hacker 40 Years Later". It'd be fun, but I'm not sure about a venue.

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