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Comment by alsetmusic | Hacker News Reader

A coworker suggested that I read The Cuckoo's Egg and I sorta shrugged it off. When I got around to reading it, I was pretty happy that it exists. It's a real time-portal to a pre-security internet. You can skip all the descriptions about how tech works, which are included for normies. Imagine not using passwords or just using 'password' or all the other stuff that we did when we were young and stupid. Then imagine government agencies doing the same. What? Yep. That's what the book is about.

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It wasn't quite a time of innocence, more like a time of trust-through-ignorance. The entire network was built on people who relied on each other for connectivity, software, and support. I once got slapped down for suggesting that we put passwords on an astronomy computer: "What have we got to hide?". (Turned out that someone had set up a bulletin board server on that system, without anyone's knowledge.) Cheers, -Cliff

I watched the talk and you had quite a lot of run-ins with feds.

It seems they kind of had some idea about this stuff especially after what you uncovered. There was a movie from 1983 called "WarGames" !?!?

Why oh why cyberspace was only recognised as 5th operational domain only in 2016? Why do we have all kinds of cyber regulations kicking in past 3-4 years (well GDPR was already 10 years ago).

I guess you don't have the answers (asking Cliff Stoll but whoever else feels like responding I will be happy as well) for that but I think it still a fun question to ask. I obviously don't want to call out anyone stupid but somehow I cannot believe it took all that time to grow and become what it is today with all the regulations and "important" people recognising the issue.

I'm European so when I read your book I read the first time about the NSA and I totally got the wrong impression of them, might also be, that they changed a lot since then

> "It's a real time-portal to a pre-security internet."

It wasn't that long ago where the network traffic of every website was transmitted in the clear via http, not https. Literally anyone at a coffee shop could listen to the WiFi network and see everything being sent and received in plain text. GMail didn't move to https until 2010, and I think it was one of the first webmail sites to do it. Browsers only started flagging non-https sites just in the past few years.

It already seems far fetched, honestly.

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