Cliff Stoll was an unwelcome demonstration that not all adults are as clueless as they appear to disaffected, smarter-than-thou teenagers.
Cliff showed that a smart adult with an outsized curiosity and more than a bit of persistence, could keep up -- and even marshal resources to reassert the dominance of order and adulthood.
This was a good lesson, at the right time, for many people!
Also, Cuckoo's Egg is an entertaining story. I read it again a few years ago, and I enjoyed it more this time than I did when it was published. :)
My warm greetings and smiles to my Hacker News friends — I’m honored by both your kindness and attention. Like many of you, I began computing as a teenager (in 1965: assembler on an IBM 1620); like many HN contributors, I’ve had fun with science, math, technology, and crafts.
HN has connected me with insightful and over-the-top competent people; I’m happy to be considered one of the gang. To the many who’ve helped me understand things from time crystals to homotopy theory, my deep thanks!
While I’ve tiptoed away from many turbulent scenes, I remain curious (just discovered that a biocide used as a paint additive to kill mildew is an ingredient in my shampoo). Still hacking & coding (handful of rasp pi’s), still sewing (finished an appliqué quilt last week), and still making these odd onesided shapes.
From a across the ether and across the decades, my warm wishes to those who’ve made this forum an inviting and occasionally inspiring place!
Thank you for your incredible book Cliff. I found a copy when I was in high school about ten years ago and it changed my trajectory. It got me into hacking and tinkering with computers and led me to a career I love today. I always make a point of loaning my copy to anyone I see who was my age then with an interest in computers.
And thank you for your kind note -- the technology in the book feels antique today, but I suspect that many infosec people recognize both the story and my attitudes. Best wishes to you in your computing career!
Same. I don’t know where I’d be without it honestly. But certainly not where I am. It was the first and only thing that ever really clicked for me. Only I found it back in the early 2000s. Quite how I found it, I’ll never remember, but I found it at a dark time in my life and it had a profound impact then, through now.
Thanks, oh Shackleford. Dark times (in life, at night, or during an eclipse) can lead to remarkable observations and insights. I'm honored that m'book played a part in your own story.
Thanks for everything, Cliff. I discovered _The Cuckoo’s Egg_ as a child, and was taken in. I wrote a book report on it... and then I wrote a book report on it the next year... and the next year...
At some point, I stopped trying to drag my pre-teen schoolmates along with me, but I still have my original hardback and re-read it regularly.
Your book taught me many things - perhaps most importantly, that one can educate about complex topics in engaging and understandable ways. And now I’ve landed in a job that focused on security.
One of the things that I’ve been doing in this job is, well, trying to educate about complex topics in engaging and understandable ways. I’ve thought about your book in every blog post I’ve written lately.
Thanks for all the writing. I read Cukoo's Egg when it came out and enjoyed but it took at least 10 years before I really followed it. As I remember I got started getting more involved in IT and Unix shortly after I read it and there would be conscious or even sub conscious moments were I'd be running some command or learning some networking concept and what I was learning at the moment would be a bit clearer for having read the book. Or maybe the book would be a bit clearer because I'd seen the reality on my screen.
> Cliff Stoll was an unwelcome demonstration that not all adults are as clueless as they appear to disaffected, smarter-than-thou teenagers.
One of the most important things people underestimate is just how powerful a group of “average” people working 9-5 for years if they get you in their cross hairs.
You just have to mess up once, get lazy once, make a wrong assumption once. Meanwhile, they only have to be right once.
I think they are referring to hackers. So - as a hacker you only need to slip up once to possibly be found by a group of average folks working 9-5 to catch you.
> Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.
> Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.
Topkek. Stoll always struck me as nothing more than an opportunist with little actual technical acumen who happened to be in the right place (a university computer lab) at the right time (dark ages of computer security, and the last decade of the cold war). At best he was a siren, being one of the first to sound the alarm about the importance of security, but he could hardly do anything to actually prevent the unauthorized accesses he dramatized, and I wonder if he even would have discovered them had his adversaries cared more.
From the HN guidelines: "be kind." I do not think your comment fits that _at all_.
My converse opinion: Dr Stoll is an extraordinarily humble, kind, and enthusiastic person who I've only ever interacted with online, but found to be one of the best human beings on the planet.
There's extraordinary value in being smart, dedicated, and in the right place at the right time. He was all three. His book, I think, definitely recognises the role both luck and determination played.
As for the web being nirvana... ten years ago, I would have thought he was overly pessimistic. (And many luminaries have written things about the future that were not accurate: even Bill Gates wrote books that have IMO not aged well.) But now, in 2024? I feel he was not a "siren" but a "python": an oracle a quarter century ahead of his time. The web is not nirvana, and I don't think that Google or Facebook have made the world a better place. Wikipedia has. It's not all bad. But I'd side far more towards his article's view this decade than I would have last decade.
Back in the 1980s you had plenty of human contact. You would hang out at the newsagent of your town and wait to find out who bought the other two copies of your favorite computing magazine. And teenagers would swap floppy disks and try them out on the display machines of department stores in bigger cities. There were also computer clubs, and people met up to play computer games.
What destroyed a lot of that is that you can play on the network without organizing a co-player to play with; everybody "meets" only online. The worst of this is teenagers call these remote acquaintances "friends".
> There is nothing inherently wrong or lesser about online interactions that makes them inferior to “irl” interactions.
They are inherently lesser because they lack full spectrum of senses man has evolved to have. In person we don’t just see and hear our counterparties, but are able to exercise all our senses. We touch when we shake hands; we can smell someone else in the room with us; we can even taste should we kiss, whether as a greeting or romantically. We can sense the heat rising from others, and see all their body language in full resolution, not just the lower-resolution, in-camera subset. In person, your buddies can slap you on the back; you can interact physically; you can enjoy one another’s presence. In comparison, an online interaction is awfully weak sauce.
I suppose there are some things that an in-person meeting lacks than an online one does — a full database of all previous interactions sure would be helpful. And it’s convenient to be able to fully consider one’s response, rather than have to answer immediately (but does convenience equal goodness?).
Viewing it as black and white as 'inherently wrong' is missing that it's an area that can have both good and bad aspects. (In the context of Dr Stoll's prescient viewpoint, the negative ones are severe.)
I'm about 10,000 kilometers from most of my friends right now and have been for several months. I can stay in touch with them in a way that would never have been possible several decades ago. This is a wonderful thing.
Equally, the negative effect of social media on teens, its impact on depression and suicide rates, is a terrible thing. Let's look at [4] below:
> There have been increases in adolescent depression and suicidal behaviour over the last two decades that coincide with the advent of social media (SM) (platforms that allow communication via digital media), which is widely used among adolescents. This scoping review examined the bi-directional association between the use of SM, specifically social networking sites (SNS), and depression and suicidality among adolescents.
This isn't 'old man shaking fist at cloud'. It's real negative (life and death!) impact on the young, growing, and vulnerable.
Of course, online interactions are inferior to irl interactions as a lot of sensory input just isn't been catered for and/or its use is suppressed. Might at some point change or humans will evolve to no-longer use them but until then there is huge difference.
Also, "kinetic options" generally are not on the table online, so the risk profile of an online interaction is different, too.
Online, humans interact with what are "reduced" versions of humans.
I've got no idea how far we are from useful bio-printing, as I've been seeing the same headlines for the last 30 years: here's some cartilage and by the way we're also working on internal organs.
Specifically, think about what The Thought Emporium is trying to do: make a living meat robot. Imagine they succeed. I have no idea how long this will take, so your imagination is all you have for now. Flesh on the outside, robot brain on the inside.
Done right, I doubt we could tell them apart from real humans.
Worse: I'm sure we'll falsely convince ourselves that there is a way distinguish nature from artifice, and many natural humans will be dehumanised and killed as a result. (And that's a separate question to "have we made a machine that has qualia?")
But for now, sure, it's easy to tell humans and robots apart when you get to meet them in person.
Or you were somewhere rural and had nothing of that & were isolated. Now you can reach out a communicate with your community, even if niche & if you are somewhere remote or rural.
I grew up rural and luckily at the same time as the internet was sort of gaining pace.
People can shit on the internet and all it enables today all they want, because it’s very easy to do from a position of privilege of having had so many more options available to them. Options not available to all then or now.
Unless experienced, most people will simply never be able to comprehend what the internet brought to people like me, people who would have been effectively cut off from society and culture otherwise (as I was for many, many years during my formative youth.)
I always wondered whether smartphones were the cause or smartphones just exposed the true nature of life, hence bringing depression with that realization.
The view of life through smartphone apps that have automatically adjusting skinner boxes purposely designed to get you addicted ("""engaged""" they call it) and have you churn through rage bait and """content""" is the least authentic depiction of reality that has ever existed, maybe only behind minstrel shows.
It's like when people call video slot machines "video games". No, not even close.
> Stoll always struck me as nothing more than an opportunist with little actual technical acumen who happened to be in the right place (a university computer lab) at the right time (dark ages of computer security, and the last decade of the cold war).
The kinder and more accurate interpretation is that he was an ordinary (ordinary-ish: I mean, he was a PhD working in a national lab) guy who dealt with an extraordinary situation with persistence and curiosity, and then wrote about it.
I've observed that Cliff gets a lot of respect from a lot of security people who are normally quite combative because he never pretended to be a security genius - and he's a lovely, brilliant person in his own way.
> he could hardly do anything to actually prevent the unauthorized accesses he dramatized, and I wonder if he even would have discovered them had his adversaries cared more
That his adversaries were also ordinary (ordinary-ish: how ordinary are you if you're selling secrets to the KGB?) made the story that Cliff wrote more compelling, not less.
I read Silicon Snake Oil soon after it was published (1996) and I felt Cliff Stoll's views were excessively pessimistic at the time. He was definitely out of tune with the Dot Com Zeitgeist. But a quarter of a century later he might be experiencing a degree of Schadenfreude.
Computers have still not successfully replaced newspapers.
Computers have still not successfully replaced teachers.
Computers have still not changed the way government works.
Computer technology has undoubtedly had enormous effects on many aspects of society but it has failed to produce benefits that many early technology idealists and entrepreneurs predicted, and it has made some things a lot worse.
We have lost the quality journalism that was nurtured by the old broadsheet newspapers because they no longer have the necessary money nor inclination to do it.
Education systems are in decline everywhere. Teacher quality has declined. The best teachers find jobs outside the education systems. Student performance has declined despite vast investments in technology for education. Student attention spans have declined and mental health problems have greatly increased along with increased exposure to technology.
Governments at least have benefited from technology in that has enabled mass surveillance and control of their citizens. But other areas of government administration for public benefit, such as health administration and education have not improved. Yet governments have wasted vast amounts of taxpayer money in failed technology projects. Wider citizen participation in democracy? Not so much.
What Cliff Stoll seems to have underestimated is people's willingness to put up with cheaper, lower-quality technological alternatives to quality newspapers, good teachers and public administration.
> Computers have still not successfully replaced newspapers.
I never read print newspapers. I do read print magazines.
> Computers have still not successfully replaced teachers
Largely institutional inertia. Those of us who do not send our kids to school have found the technology incredibly useful.
It is also not just a matter of replacing teachers, but greater access to them and how one interacts with them. My daughter has remote tutors, one where I could not find a subject specialist (currently classical civilisation and Latin, previously astronomy, all for GCSEs for those familiar with the British system) easily near where we live. She is set and submits work online. She is doing an online course for another subject with assignments marked by a tutor.
My older daughter's school (college for A levels) made good use of technology, particularly during lockdown, but also before that. Her university seems to use a lot of remote assessments and submission of assignments etc. (I do not know how well though).
> Computer technology has undoubtedly had enormous effects on many aspects of society but it has failed to produce benefits that many early technology idealists and entrepreneurs predicted, and it has made some things a lot worse.
I agree. That is why the middle aged of us here are so cynical. We saw the promise and feel cheated.
> We have lost the quality journalism that was nurtured by the old broadsheet newspapers because they no longer have the necessary money nor inclination to do it.
That is also because people are too lazy to look for alternatives. There are blogs by experts in every field. You can get your economic analysis for an economist, your foreign news from people in other countries.
Do not get overly nostalgic for old broadsheets - the lack of diversity of sources also meant their errors and sloppiness was never spotted by most people. Gell-Mann amnesia was rampant.
> Education systems are in decline everywhere. Teacher quality has declined. The best teachers find jobs outside the education systems.
I do not think that can be blamed on technology. We have that problem in the UK, and it is clear to me that the biggest problem is the tendency to manage by target setting. League tables and metrics dominate. Teachers leave because they hate the working environment and cannot do their jobs properly.
> Governments at least have benefited from technology in that has enabled mass surveillance and control of their citizens. But other areas of government administration for public benefit, such as health administration and education have not improved. Yet governments have wasted vast amounts of taxpayer money in failed technology projects. Wider citizen participation in democracy? Not so much
Governments do not necessarily want what citizens want. Politicians have one set of values, civil servants another. The big influential groups (media and big business) have yet another set of interests. None are aligned with what the population at large want (even when their is a consensus) nor their interests.
Are you laughing because we lost most newspapers to garbage online news, because schools are digitalized with no benefits, because social media made us less democratic, or because fake products are sold on the most successful online stores?
For sure he underestimated the impact, but he was not /wrong/. Most things did not get replaced by computers, they were lost to computers.
Read the whole thing. Maybe there are undigested kernels of truth and foresight amongst the excrement, but on the whole, it's easily one of the worst, most unimaginative, and most dogmatically narrow-minded futurist thinkpieces to have ever been written:
> Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.
He wrote those words in 1995, a year after Amazon was founded, and just two years before its IPO.
I have read it fully now - I agree he had some rough blindspots (like requiring in person salesmen for capitalism).
But my opinion is the opposite: maybe there are some rotten pieces in the otherwise delicious meal. On the whole it's a wise piece; if perhaps too optimistic that people would evaluate fairly the (negative) value that the internet brings in some areas and stick to the better offline options. But that might be a transient state, the future is long (or so I hope).
We still (by and large) don't buy newspapers online! They're ad-funded, and the whole media industry has gone away from pay to read.
What does everyone do when we find a paywalled article? Use a site that bypasses it. We don't buy news in 2024.
We do buy books. I grant that :) I don't want to be seen as agreeing with the article wholly, but I think that predicting the future is a hard game. I'm inclined to be sympathetic towards it.
There's something nice about this community where heroes and leading figures are still present to some extent or another.
There's no investing forum I'm aware of where Warren Buffett occasionally drops in to post nor any NFL one that you'll occasionally see Tom Brady commenting in.
Cliff Stoll also operates kleinbottle.com selling Klein bottles.
I bought one and he included a personalized note and all sorts of fun material. I’ve never shopped from a store where I felt the owner loved his product as much.
And he blogs about how he automates the inventory process. What an interesting story and how I imagine all old programmers ending up.
I read Silicon Snakeoil when I was much younger in the internet's infancy and though it was completely out of touch. I think even he has admitted it didn't pan out has he predicted.
Now that the internet is reaching its final form I'm not so sure anymore
And even back then he wasn't completely wrong. Yes, people laugh at his assertion that "nobody would want to shop online rather than go to a mall" but the dot-com crash of 2000-2001 did kill off most online shopping venues. Of course Amazon survived, but it was the rare exception, like the ancestors of modern birds surviving the asteroid.
nobody would want to shop online rather than go to a mall
But we do have Best Buy, where you can inspect the product before you buy it. And the wife complains about Walmart grocery shopping, where the Walmart employee picked bad vegetables or made really silly substitutions.
I bought this book on Audible based on a random recommendation, not really knowing anything about it. On the page to buy it, it said it was released in 2020. I spent the first 80% of the book thinking that it was written in the 2010s, but intentionally written as if it were the 1980s. That is, with explanations that didn't presage the development of the Internet, and using analogies that would be understood by the people of that era. I was impressed with how perfectly the author was able to channel that era without anachronism, and even told a couple friends about this.
When I learned it was written in the 1980s, I wasn't exactly shocked. But then, I learned it was written by the Klein bottle guy, and that really was shocking. It's become one of my favorite books.
Cliff Stoll has been a frequent guest on youtube's Numberphile [0] - what an amazing personality. Quesera's comment that he has an "outsized curiosity" seems apt!
I remember watching these when growing up. At the time, he was just the "eccentric klein bottle guy" to me, so learning that he's had such a storied and interesting life from this thread came as a welcome surprise. Shouldn't judge a book by the cover and all that. Speaking of which, I definitely want to read the book now.
@CliffStoll is one of my childhood heroes. I ordered a Klein bottle and he drew a picture on the invoice and it melted my heart. It is now a prized possession framed on a wall next to Kevin Mitnick's business card.
I read the hacker hunting story of Cliff Stoll 35 years ago from a Thai computer magazine when I'm 12. I think he is a fairly good looking person from the photo in that monotone magazine. And I thought he must have a sage like personality.
I remember his name and search for him on the internet out of curiosity when I'm in my thirties. Whoa, he is indeed a mad scientist. :)
Cliff's book was my first introduction to cybersecurity - a fantastic read with principles that hold true today. Stealing the Network: The Complete Series Collector's Edition and Kevin Mitnick's books are also great.
Stoll found a microscopic discrepancy in the accounting of a computer he was in charge of, and he got curious what might be the root cause.
He (a FORTH-programming raido astronomer) than discovered that a hacker was in "his" computer, and he followed him around the world (through the network).
The hacker, a person with links to communism from Germany, later committed suicide.
The fellow who committed suicide, Karl Koch, was only one part of a group of four. The person who was actually caught with Cliffs help was Markus Hess.
Cliff Stoll told all of the adults in my life constantly on television that home computers were creating criminals and that you should be suspect of anyone in life that isn't professional that seems to know too much about computers. This rhetoric is apparent in this clip:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C2gujnjLrQG/
His premise was that only those who were working for the government or working on real computers at big companies should be trusted with their immense power. And this was sort of a second act to try to keep being invited on to TV shows or something.
I'm glad he is inspiring but I just can't forgive him for this. My school system talked about getting rid of all of our computers pretty much solely because of the fear of hackers he spread.
That isn't what the clip says. He says that technology in schools is expensive and that the educational value is unclear.
As a teacher-- and a lover of technology, teaching engineering in middle and high school-- this is a true statement even today. I definitely see some benefits to ed-tech, but it is overused, has unclear educational value, and invites abuse.
The software he was talking about at the time, and my mother did her master's thesis on the several years before that clip, included Math Blasters, Oregon Trail, and several other Commodore 64 titles. Interactive media like this was absolutely foundational to my entire computing career from typing, to gaining procedural literacy. I'm sorry your software experience hasn't been as rich as my entire educational experience to professional learning software and things like Duo Lingo. And social media and news sites. Where do you think it went wrong and what kinds of products are you talking about? Matlab?
This type of practice has been shown to be harmful compared to conventional math practice.
> Oregon Trail
Oregon Trail was great. The dozens of hours I spent playing Big Top, One on One, Lode Runner, Pipe Dream, Test Drive I, etc, in schools--- less so.
And even for Oregon Trail, you got most of the value out of a couple of playthroughs. And mostly it's to learn "life on the frontier was hard" and "it's fun to shoot buffalo." You could have basically the same fun and more learning with a classroom-scale simulation.
(Rocky's Boots was fantastic, too).
> things like Duo Lingo.
Things like Duolingo, MathCounts Trainer, etc-- they have limited educational value but there's a huge subpopulation of students who will become addicted to them and use them in amounts that are well past the point of diminishing returns and a distraction to their learning overall.
> Where do you think it went wrong and what kinds of products are you talking about?
There's also a big tendency as instructors to pick up things like Kahoot/Quizizz/Khan and just give them to your class instead of actively instructing. It's easy. It takes little prep.
Small amounts of these things with adequate supervision can absolutely enrich the educational environment and provide feedback on how things are going. But they are overused and harm is readily observable. Not to mention that you need to be vigilant as a hawk to prevent cyberbullying, gaming, and abuse in alternate tabs.
There's a zillion edtech vendors who tell you they can sell you something to make your classroom run better. But in the end, the way a school really works is based on a social relationship between the students and the instructor, and excessive use of technology gets in the way of this. And when I say "excessive", I really mean "more than a little bit."
I'd love to read these criticism sources. I guess I believe there was a holistic educational experience of the computer products of this kind that many modern vendors, for example, consider LLMs to foster, but I definitely agree with the idea that LLM benefits are a kind of illusion and harm.
Is it normal, that this clip has no sound? Then it is hard to check the rhetoric. Also instagram is aweful, even more so for those without an account. Scrolling a bit down (looking for colume control) ends the clip and tells me to register to watch it again. No thank you, but so I cannot review your criticism.
Maybe you could use videosources that do not offer such a horrible user experience?
But you don't have to and I don't have to check your links.
Edit: seriously, I won't click any instagramlinks anymore. After reloading, yes, there is a little volume button, but it was half hidden under the "register popup" "check this out" banner etc. Which went away after scrolling down. Then there is no timeline. No replay like mentioned.
And the content: nothing about teenage hacker criminals
Not sure what you want me to do dude, I'm sorry I'm speaking my truth and it is upsetting I guess. Take care.
Edit to your edits: he wrote several books talking about computers, or more specifically, the computers of the 80s and 90s, being worthless and would lead us all astray.
And as I've discussed with you elsewhere-- I feel like most of that criticism is spot on.
Computers in education are great for:
* Education on how to use computing or programming (... though when I teach these subjects, I do a whole lot of it offline)
* Independent research (though you'd better stand at the back of the classroom and monitor what's going on very closely... and do this sparingly).
* Occasional rapid feedback through a Kahoot about how much your class understands a given set of subject matter.
* Letting students write and revise a paper quickly now and then
* Occasional individualized practice through something like Khan.
On the other hand, they're greatly overused even today. Instructors do things like:
* Use a Kahoot every class to convey key learning material, which results in a disorganized, flash-card experience.
* Perform enough of the work on computers that plagiarism and academic integrity become a huge concern.
* Displace valuable classroom practice performing labs or doing arithmetic with inferior virtual eqiuvalents.
* Allow students (without any type of learning or physical disability which would necessitate this) to take notes online, which under the best of circumstances is demonstrably inferior to paper note-taking for retention and also invites massive amounts of abuse.
I feel like the case was similar in the 1990s: there was little evidence of benefit. There was less of the online abuse of computing, but there was still a lot of abuse and misuse.
> Maybe you should leave computers to professionals?
Seriously?
You're the one that linked to Insta, and to a clip that doesn't feature Clifford warning of hackers but to Clifford making the valid point that at a particular time in history a great deal of money was being spent on computers in education that largely sat idle for a shortage of teachers, courses, supporting resources.
Just referencing his opinions ironically. He didn't have a valid point either. He simply didn't understand computers enough to see how they were being used.
Sure, just barely enough to wing it as a systems administrator at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and to last just a few years as a school physics teacher.
It's not like he had any first hand experience of either computers or computers in schools /s
You might not like his opinions but they were his and of that time.
> Any computer undergrounder can identify with and appreciate Stoll's obsession and patience in attempting to trace the hacker through a maze of international gateways and computer systems. But, Stoll apparently misses the obvious affinity he has with those he condemns. He simply dismisses hackers as 'monsters' and displays virtually no recognition of the similarities between his own activity and those of the computer underground. This is what makes Stoll's work so dangerous: His work is an unreflective exercise in self-promotion, a tome that divides the sacred world of technocrats from the profane activities of those who would challenge it; Stoll stigmatises without understanding (Thomas 1990).
https://insecure.org/stf/them_and_us.txt
Just because I don't like his opinions or that they are old doesn't make him right for doing this. The appeal to his alleged authority of the time was part of the problem.
"He simply dismisses hackers as 'monsters' and displays virtually no recognition of the similarities between his own activity and those of the computer underground."
Intention matters. His intention was to stop some hackers from espionage and possible sabotage. The KGBs hacker main intention was money.
Otherwise I don't know anything about Cliff Stoll, nor read the book.
But what I know about the KGB hack, they were no innocent curious boys playing with computers anymore, checking out what's possible. They sold their service to the KGB.
Very fair points. He has really worked hard seemingly to scrub the memory of the incomplete nature of his sensationalism at the time. You Google around and he is considered a vanguard of computer security, but his book capitalized on the sensationalism of film and television fiction of hackers at the time and other hacks in the news. A lot of this criticism only exists in the text files of BBSes from the time and his damaging opinions only on early evening tabloid tv of the era that isn't on YouTube. He eventually recanted a lot of this ideas a decade later, but has made no effort to address these criticisms head on that I can find. I guess it makes for compelling amateur sleuthing but what the governments of the time were dealing with are probably all still classified and were to him at the time as well. So his declarations of being first to many things are unfalsifiable.
Really? You did not see that there is a button in the lower right that enables audio? It looks like a loudspeaker, the universal symbol for "audio". Although there's no volume control, so turn down your speakers first (the audio is rather loud)
he was(may still is) type of people trying to control people, exactly like the current OpenAI's Sam, why they have that kind of mindset, build in their DNA?
yeah, and he made sure the public thought that the "hacker" that got into his system was a dangerous communist criminal, when it was a fact just a scool kid that even got killed as a result of that whole ordeal.
Mr. Stoll has (or at least had) a weird sense of right and wrong, and if what happened to Karl Koch would happen today, he would surely get canceled into oblivion.
He might have started the actual "cybersecurity" idea, but he did it with methods similar to todays companies that paint security researchers as evil hackers or "the bad guys"
Edit: I just want to add the disclaimer that it's hard to fault him for what he did though, times were different back then, and the cold war was still ongoing... So probably every American would have acted in a similar way
> yeah, and he made sure the public thought that the "hacker" that got into his system was a dangerous communist criminal, when it was a fact just a scool kid that even got killed as a result of that whole ordeal.
Hess sold information to the KGB. He was 26 years old at the time of the Cuckoo's Egg. He was prosecuted successfully for espionage. As far as I know, he is still alive.
You're referring to one person in the ring that penetrated US governmental facilities, Karl Koch. He was 20 at the time. He had been granted immunity from prosecution. He died 3 years later, potentially from suicide.
There was an additional edit. I agree with that sentiment, I don't necessarily blame Mr. Stoll and I would probably do the same if I were in his shoes to be honest, but the exaggerations had a major developmental detriment to me. The god damned bottles are pretty amazing. The damn criminals were wrong, and it is good that he was able to bring justice. For all the things I have fault with, he increased visibility on a lot of issues.
Cliff Stoll was an unwelcome demonstration that not all adults are as clueless as they appear to disaffected, smarter-than-thou teenagers.
Cliff showed that a smart adult with an outsized curiosity and more than a bit of persistence, could keep up -- and even marshal resources to reassert the dominance of order and adulthood.
This was a good lesson, at the right time, for many people!
Also, Cuckoo's Egg is an entertaining story. I read it again a few years ago, and I enjoyed it more this time than I did when it was published. :)
My warm greetings and smiles to my Hacker News friends — I’m honored by both your kindness and attention. Like many of you, I began computing as a teenager (in 1965: assembler on an IBM 1620); like many HN contributors, I’ve had fun with science, math, technology, and crafts.
HN has connected me with insightful and over-the-top competent people; I’m happy to be considered one of the gang. To the many who’ve helped me understand things from time crystals to homotopy theory, my deep thanks!
While I’ve tiptoed away from many turbulent scenes, I remain curious (just discovered that a biocide used as a paint additive to kill mildew is an ingredient in my shampoo). Still hacking & coding (handful of rasp pi’s), still sewing (finished an appliqué quilt last week), and still making these odd onesided shapes.
From a across the ether and across the decades, my warm wishes to those who’ve made this forum an inviting and occasionally inspiring place!
-Cliff (on a cloudy Thursday morning in Oakland)
Thank you for your incredible book Cliff. I found a copy when I was in high school about ten years ago and it changed my trajectory. It got me into hacking and tinkering with computers and led me to a career I love today. I always make a point of loaning my copy to anyone I see who was my age then with an interest in computers.
And thank you for your kind note -- the technology in the book feels antique today, but I suspect that many infosec people recognize both the story and my attitudes. Best wishes to you in your computing career!
Same. I don’t know where I’d be without it honestly. But certainly not where I am. It was the first and only thing that ever really clicked for me. Only I found it back in the early 2000s. Quite how I found it, I’ll never remember, but I found it at a dark time in my life and it had a profound impact then, through now.
Thanks, oh Shackleford. Dark times (in life, at night, or during an eclipse) can lead to remarkable observations and insights. I'm honored that m'book played a part in your own story.
Thanks for everything, Cliff. I discovered _The Cuckoo’s Egg_ as a child, and was taken in. I wrote a book report on it... and then I wrote a book report on it the next year... and the next year...
At some point, I stopped trying to drag my pre-teen schoolmates along with me, but I still have my original hardback and re-read it regularly.
Your book taught me many things - perhaps most importantly, that one can educate about complex topics in engaging and understandable ways. And now I’ve landed in a job that focused on security.
One of the things that I’ve been doing in this job is, well, trying to educate about complex topics in engaging and understandable ways. I’ve thought about your book in every blog post I’ve written lately.
Thanks, again.
Thanks for all the writing. I read Cukoo's Egg when it came out and enjoyed but it took at least 10 years before I really followed it. As I remember I got started getting more involved in IT and Unix shortly after I read it and there would be conscious or even sub conscious moments were I'd be running some command or learning some networking concept and what I was learning at the moment would be a bit clearer for having read the book. Or maybe the book would be a bit clearer because I'd seen the reality on my screen.
Thanks Cliff, i am reading your comment and writing this reply from Hannover, Germany. Yes, that of all places.
> Cliff Stoll was an unwelcome demonstration that not all adults are as clueless as they appear to disaffected, smarter-than-thou teenagers.
One of the most important things people underestimate is just how powerful a group of “average” people working 9-5 for years if they get you in their cross hairs.
You just have to mess up once, get lazy once, make a wrong assumption once. Meanwhile, they only have to be right once.
What people underestimate this? Who are you even talking about?
I think they are referring to hackers. So - as a hacker you only need to slip up once to possibly be found by a group of average folks working 9-5 to catch you.
https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv...
> Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.
> Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.
Topkek. Stoll always struck me as nothing more than an opportunist with little actual technical acumen who happened to be in the right place (a university computer lab) at the right time (dark ages of computer security, and the last decade of the cold war). At best he was a siren, being one of the first to sound the alarm about the importance of security, but he could hardly do anything to actually prevent the unauthorized accesses he dramatized, and I wonder if he even would have discovered them had his adversaries cared more.
From the HN guidelines: "be kind." I do not think your comment fits that _at all_.
My converse opinion: Dr Stoll is an extraordinarily humble, kind, and enthusiastic person who I've only ever interacted with online, but found to be one of the best human beings on the planet.
There's extraordinary value in being smart, dedicated, and in the right place at the right time. He was all three. His book, I think, definitely recognises the role both luck and determination played.
As for the web being nirvana... ten years ago, I would have thought he was overly pessimistic. (And many luminaries have written things about the future that were not accurate: even Bill Gates wrote books that have IMO not aged well.) But now, in 2024? I feel he was not a "siren" but a "python": an oracle a quarter century ahead of his time. The web is not nirvana, and I don't think that Google or Facebook have made the world a better place. Wikipedia has. It's not all bad. But I'd side far more towards his article's view this decade than I would have last decade.
> What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. ... Computers and networks isolate us from one another.
Look at Instagram and its effects on teens. Look how smartphones have increased depression. Man oh man was he right.
Back in the 1980s you had plenty of human contact. You would hang out at the newsagent of your town and wait to find out who bought the other two copies of your favorite computing magazine. And teenagers would swap floppy disks and try them out on the display machines of department stores in bigger cities. There were also computer clubs, and people met up to play computer games.
What destroyed a lot of that is that you can play on the network without organizing a co-player to play with; everybody "meets" only online. The worst of this is teenagers call these remote acquaintances "friends".
Gonna be real with you: this has big “old man shakes fist at cloud” energy.
There is nothing inherently wrong or lesser about online interactions that makes them inferior to “irl” interactions.
> There is nothing inherently wrong or lesser about online interactions that makes them inferior to “irl” interactions.
They are inherently lesser because they lack full spectrum of senses man has evolved to have. In person we don’t just see and hear our counterparties, but are able to exercise all our senses. We touch when we shake hands; we can smell someone else in the room with us; we can even taste should we kiss, whether as a greeting or romantically. We can sense the heat rising from others, and see all their body language in full resolution, not just the lower-resolution, in-camera subset. In person, your buddies can slap you on the back; you can interact physically; you can enjoy one another’s presence. In comparison, an online interaction is awfully weak sauce.
I suppose there are some things that an in-person meeting lacks than an online one does — a full database of all previous interactions sure would be helpful. And it’s convenient to be able to fully consider one’s response, rather than have to answer immediately (but does convenience equal goodness?).
Viewing it as black and white as 'inherently wrong' is missing that it's an area that can have both good and bad aspects. (In the context of Dr Stoll's prescient viewpoint, the negative ones are severe.)
I'm about 10,000 kilometers from most of my friends right now and have been for several months. I can stay in touch with them in a way that would never have been possible several decades ago. This is a wonderful thing.
Equally, the negative effect of social media on teens, its impact on depression and suicide rates, is a terrible thing. Let's look at [4] below:
> There have been increases in adolescent depression and suicidal behaviour over the last two decades that coincide with the advent of social media (SM) (platforms that allow communication via digital media), which is widely used among adolescents. This scoping review examined the bi-directional association between the use of SM, specifically social networking sites (SNS), and depression and suicidality among adolescents.
This isn't 'old man shaking fist at cloud'. It's real negative (life and death!) impact on the young, growing, and vulnerable.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S245195882...
[2] https://www.apa.org/monitor/2022/03/feature-minimize-instagr... -- notes both good and bad effects
[3] https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2022/02/right-now-social-med... -- adults, not just kids and teenagers!
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7392374/
Of course, online interactions are inferior to irl interactions as a lot of sensory input just isn't been catered for and/or its use is suppressed. Might at some point change or humans will evolve to no-longer use them but until then there is huge difference.
Also, "kinetic options" generally are not on the table online, so the risk profile of an online interaction is different, too.
Online, humans interact with what are "reduced" versions of humans.
Well irl I genuinely have an easier time determining real people from machines...
For now.
I've got no idea how far we are from useful bio-printing, as I've been seeing the same headlines for the last 30 years: here's some cartilage and by the way we're also working on internal organs.
The famous mouse — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacanti_mouse
History from a research lab — https://school.wakehealth.edu/research/institutes-and-center...
TED-Ed: Printing a human kidney - Anthony Atala — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bX3C201O4MA
The Thought Emporium: This Machine Grows Living Flesh — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_ZGq8Tah0k
Matt Gray is Trying: biomedical research — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DvJauB0KyU
Specifically, think about what The Thought Emporium is trying to do: make a living meat robot. Imagine they succeed. I have no idea how long this will take, so your imagination is all you have for now. Flesh on the outside, robot brain on the inside.
Done right, I doubt we could tell them apart from real humans.
Worse: I'm sure we'll falsely convince ourselves that there is a way distinguish nature from artifice, and many natural humans will be dehumanised and killed as a result. (And that's a separate question to "have we made a machine that has qualia?")
But for now, sure, it's easy to tell humans and robots apart when you get to meet them in person.
Or you were somewhere rural and had nothing of that & were isolated. Now you can reach out a communicate with your community, even if niche & if you are somewhere remote or rural.
I grew up rural and luckily at the same time as the internet was sort of gaining pace.
People can shit on the internet and all it enables today all they want, because it’s very easy to do from a position of privilege of having had so many more options available to them. Options not available to all then or now.
Unless experienced, most people will simply never be able to comprehend what the internet brought to people like me, people who would have been effectively cut off from society and culture otherwise (as I was for many, many years during my formative youth.)
This is literally one of the best upsides and not even on the list of bad things about computers and networks.
Id put trying to get likes from unknown people all day every day to the top.
I always wondered whether smartphones were the cause or smartphones just exposed the true nature of life, hence bringing depression with that realization.
The view of life through smartphone apps that have automatically adjusting skinner boxes purposely designed to get you addicted ("""engaged""" they call it) and have you churn through rage bait and """content""" is the least authentic depiction of reality that has ever existed, maybe only behind minstrel shows.
It's like when people call video slot machines "video games". No, not even close.
I doubt there is a true representation of life. Life is a product of the things.
People compare 80’s with now. They are not the same and humans alter around the stimulus.
> Stoll always struck me as nothing more than an opportunist with little actual technical acumen who happened to be in the right place (a university computer lab) at the right time (dark ages of computer security, and the last decade of the cold war).
The kinder and more accurate interpretation is that he was an ordinary (ordinary-ish: I mean, he was a PhD working in a national lab) guy who dealt with an extraordinary situation with persistence and curiosity, and then wrote about it.
I've observed that Cliff gets a lot of respect from a lot of security people who are normally quite combative because he never pretended to be a security genius - and he's a lovely, brilliant person in his own way.
> he could hardly do anything to actually prevent the unauthorized accesses he dramatized, and I wonder if he even would have discovered them had his adversaries cared more
That his adversaries were also ordinary (ordinary-ish: how ordinary are you if you're selling secrets to the KGB?) made the story that Cliff wrote more compelling, not less.
I read Silicon Snake Oil soon after it was published (1996) and I felt Cliff Stoll's views were excessively pessimistic at the time. He was definitely out of tune with the Dot Com Zeitgeist. But a quarter of a century later he might be experiencing a degree of Schadenfreude.
Computers have still not successfully replaced newspapers. Computers have still not successfully replaced teachers. Computers have still not changed the way government works.
Computer technology has undoubtedly had enormous effects on many aspects of society but it has failed to produce benefits that many early technology idealists and entrepreneurs predicted, and it has made some things a lot worse.
We have lost the quality journalism that was nurtured by the old broadsheet newspapers because they no longer have the necessary money nor inclination to do it.
Education systems are in decline everywhere. Teacher quality has declined. The best teachers find jobs outside the education systems. Student performance has declined despite vast investments in technology for education. Student attention spans have declined and mental health problems have greatly increased along with increased exposure to technology.
Governments at least have benefited from technology in that has enabled mass surveillance and control of their citizens. But other areas of government administration for public benefit, such as health administration and education have not improved. Yet governments have wasted vast amounts of taxpayer money in failed technology projects. Wider citizen participation in democracy? Not so much.
What Cliff Stoll seems to have underestimated is people's willingness to put up with cheaper, lower-quality technological alternatives to quality newspapers, good teachers and public administration.
> Computers have still not successfully replaced newspapers.
I never read print newspapers. I do read print magazines.
> Computers have still not successfully replaced teachers
Largely institutional inertia. Those of us who do not send our kids to school have found the technology incredibly useful.
It is also not just a matter of replacing teachers, but greater access to them and how one interacts with them. My daughter has remote tutors, one where I could not find a subject specialist (currently classical civilisation and Latin, previously astronomy, all for GCSEs for those familiar with the British system) easily near where we live. She is set and submits work online. She is doing an online course for another subject with assignments marked by a tutor.
My older daughter's school (college for A levels) made good use of technology, particularly during lockdown, but also before that. Her university seems to use a lot of remote assessments and submission of assignments etc. (I do not know how well though).
> Computer technology has undoubtedly had enormous effects on many aspects of society but it has failed to produce benefits that many early technology idealists and entrepreneurs predicted, and it has made some things a lot worse.
I agree. That is why the middle aged of us here are so cynical. We saw the promise and feel cheated.
> We have lost the quality journalism that was nurtured by the old broadsheet newspapers because they no longer have the necessary money nor inclination to do it.
That is also because people are too lazy to look for alternatives. There are blogs by experts in every field. You can get your economic analysis for an economist, your foreign news from people in other countries.
Do not get overly nostalgic for old broadsheets - the lack of diversity of sources also meant their errors and sloppiness was never spotted by most people. Gell-Mann amnesia was rampant.
> Education systems are in decline everywhere. Teacher quality has declined. The best teachers find jobs outside the education systems.
I do not think that can be blamed on technology. We have that problem in the UK, and it is clear to me that the biggest problem is the tendency to manage by target setting. League tables and metrics dominate. Teachers leave because they hate the working environment and cannot do their jobs properly.
> Governments at least have benefited from technology in that has enabled mass surveillance and control of their citizens. But other areas of government administration for public benefit, such as health administration and education have not improved. Yet governments have wasted vast amounts of taxpayer money in failed technology projects. Wider citizen participation in democracy? Not so much
Governments do not necessarily want what citizens want. Politicians have one set of values, civil servants another. The big influential groups (media and big business) have yet another set of interests. None are aligned with what the population at large want (even when their is a consensus) nor their interests.
Are you laughing because we lost most newspapers to garbage online news, because schools are digitalized with no benefits, because social media made us less democratic, or because fake products are sold on the most successful online stores?
For sure he underestimated the impact, but he was not /wrong/. Most things did not get replaced by computers, they were lost to computers.
Read the whole thing. Maybe there are undigested kernels of truth and foresight amongst the excrement, but on the whole, it's easily one of the worst, most unimaginative, and most dogmatically narrow-minded futurist thinkpieces to have ever been written:
> Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.
He wrote those words in 1995, a year after Amazon was founded, and just two years before its IPO.
I have read it fully now - I agree he had some rough blindspots (like requiring in person salesmen for capitalism).
But my opinion is the opposite: maybe there are some rotten pieces in the otherwise delicious meal. On the whole it's a wise piece; if perhaps too optimistic that people would evaluate fairly the (negative) value that the internet brings in some areas and stick to the better offline options. But that might be a transient state, the future is long (or so I hope).
We still (by and large) don't buy newspapers online! They're ad-funded, and the whole media industry has gone away from pay to read.
What does everyone do when we find a paywalled article? Use a site that bypasses it. We don't buy news in 2024.
We do buy books. I grant that :) I don't want to be seen as agreeing with the article wholly, but I think that predicting the future is a hard game. I'm inclined to be sympathetic towards it.
I read it last year after it was mentioned here. Thought it was nice that pg had a cameo at the end of the book.
Cliff Stoll is also an HN user and well-known nonorientablesurfacemonger. You can read him in action most recently here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39249938
There's something nice about this community where heroes and leading figures are still present to some extent or another.
There's no investing forum I'm aware of where Warren Buffett occasionally drops in to post nor any NFL one that you'll occasionally see Tom Brady commenting in.
It's something I hope hacker news never loses.
https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=CliffStoll
Yes, I felt honored when he replied to my comment a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29387213
Cliff Stoll also operates kleinbottle.com selling Klein bottles.
I bought one and he included a personalized note and all sorts of fun material. I’ve never shopped from a store where I felt the owner loved his product as much.
And he blogs about how he automates the inventory process. What an interesting story and how I imagine all old programmers ending up.
His Klein bottles seller page was hijacked, then restored:
https://www.kleinbottle.com/Amazon_Brand_Hijacking.html
TIL, I didn't even realize it was the same Cliff Stoll! I've bought a few :)
I read Silicon Snakeoil when I was much younger in the internet's infancy and though it was completely out of touch. I think even he has admitted it didn't pan out has he predicted.
Now that the internet is reaching its final form I'm not so sure anymore
And even back then he wasn't completely wrong. Yes, people laugh at his assertion that "nobody would want to shop online rather than go to a mall" but the dot-com crash of 2000-2001 did kill off most online shopping venues. Of course Amazon survived, but it was the rare exception, like the ancestors of modern birds surviving the asteroid.
nobody would want to shop online rather than go to a mall
But we do have Best Buy, where you can inspect the product before you buy it. And the wife complains about Walmart grocery shopping, where the Walmart employee picked bad vegetables or made really silly substitutions.
Definitely read his book The Cuckoo's Egg. Terrific story and prose.
Then check out the old Nova documentary about the story: The KGB, The Computer, and Me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGv5BqNL164
I bought this book on Audible based on a random recommendation, not really knowing anything about it. On the page to buy it, it said it was released in 2020. I spent the first 80% of the book thinking that it was written in the 2010s, but intentionally written as if it were the 1980s. That is, with explanations that didn't presage the development of the Internet, and using analogies that would be understood by the people of that era. I was impressed with how perfectly the author was able to channel that era without anachronism, and even told a couple friends about this.
When I learned it was written in the 1980s, I wasn't exactly shocked. But then, I learned it was written by the Klein bottle guy, and that really was shocking. It's become one of my favorite books.
I gave attendees a copy at my security awareness training back when I was CSO. Very accessible book.
Cliff Stoll has been a frequent guest on youtube's Numberphile [0] - what an amazing personality. Quesera's comment that he has an "outsized curiosity" seems apt!
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt5AfwLFPxWJeBhzCJ_JX...
I remember watching these when growing up. At the time, he was just the "eccentric klein bottle guy" to me, so learning that he's had such a storied and interesting life from this thread came as a welcome surprise. Shouldn't judge a book by the cover and all that. Speaking of which, I definitely want to read the book now.
@CliffStoll is one of my childhood heroes. I ordered a Klein bottle and he drew a picture on the invoice and it melted my heart. It is now a prized possession framed on a wall next to Kevin Mitnick's business card.
I was replying to say the same -- I even kept the shipping box which he decorated as well.
He embodies so much of the genuine intellectual curiosity, creativity, and joy of the early Internet. A really good human!
He inspired me in ways all but two of my primary school teachers ever did.
The Cuckoo's Egg - Really enjoyed reading it when I was growing up. Required reading for everyone.
When I had my little ISP here in Arizona back in the early 90s, I gave every new customer a copy of the Cuckoo's Egg.
Important life lesson everyone should watch: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9yUZTTLpDtk
I read the hacker hunting story of Cliff Stoll 35 years ago from a Thai computer magazine when I'm 12. I think he is a fairly good looking person from the photo in that monotone magazine. And I thought he must have a sage like personality.
I remember his name and search for him on the internet out of curiosity when I'm in my thirties. Whoa, he is indeed a mad scientist. :)
(2019)
Some more discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21830277
I was wondering why they'd run an article with that title. It sounds like an obituary.
Instead, it's just somebody submitting old links.
Nothing wrong with old links on HN! as long as they have been discussed in a while.
Indeed, what's up with the "mad scientist" bit?
I saw him speak at a Dayton Hamvention a few years back. His energy and delivery is very much more than the usual speaker.
His hair is often rather wild, adding to the appearance of a mad scientist.
Given his presentation style, that isn't a farfetched description.
One of my favorite parts of Cuckoo's Egg is when Cliff asks a lawyer if he should wear a tie to court.
The lawyer responds something along the lines of "At your level of abstraction, it doesn't make any difference".
One of my life's highlights was getting to meet him when I went to his house to buy a Klein bottle. Such a great and admirable human being.
I had a similar experience!
https://archive.is/iS8NV
Cliff's book was my first introduction to cybersecurity - a fantastic read with principles that hold true today. Stealing the Network: The Complete Series Collector's Edition and Kevin Mitnick's books are also great.
Mine too. A relative introduced me to it and I took it out of the library. I was amazed.
Stoll found a microscopic discrepancy in the accounting of a computer he was in charge of, and he got curious what might be the root cause.
He (a FORTH-programming raido astronomer) than discovered that a hacker was in "his" computer, and he followed him around the world (through the network).
The hacker, a person with links to communism from Germany, later committed suicide.
Wow - haven’t written Forth in almost 40 years. Worked great for real-time control at observatories;
The fellow who committed suicide, Karl Koch, was only one part of a group of four. The person who was actually caught with Cliffs help was Markus Hess.
God, I just saw his name on HN, and was afraid he'd died.
Rumors of my death are slightly exaggerated - Mark Twain
Look out! Cliff!
https://youtu.be/mJvJJaV6-Pc?si=dnCFKSEw2AZvVa5_
yeah this week has spooky mojo
I also thought this was an obit, relieved it is not
Whenever this story comes up I think of this movie, called 23, that's tells the story from the hackers perspective.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_(film)
Both stories are fascinating.
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Cliff Stoll told all of the adults in my life constantly on television that home computers were creating criminals and that you should be suspect of anyone in life that isn't professional that seems to know too much about computers. This rhetoric is apparent in this clip: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C2gujnjLrQG/ His premise was that only those who were working for the government or working on real computers at big companies should be trusted with their immense power. And this was sort of a second act to try to keep being invited on to TV shows or something. I'm glad he is inspiring but I just can't forgive him for this. My school system talked about getting rid of all of our computers pretty much solely because of the fear of hackers he spread.
> This rhetoric is apparent in this clip:
That isn't what the clip says. He says that technology in schools is expensive and that the educational value is unclear.
As a teacher-- and a lover of technology, teaching engineering in middle and high school-- this is a true statement even today. I definitely see some benefits to ed-tech, but it is overused, has unclear educational value, and invites abuse.
The software he was talking about at the time, and my mother did her master's thesis on the several years before that clip, included Math Blasters, Oregon Trail, and several other Commodore 64 titles. Interactive media like this was absolutely foundational to my entire computing career from typing, to gaining procedural literacy. I'm sorry your software experience hasn't been as rich as my entire educational experience to professional learning software and things like Duo Lingo. And social media and news sites. Where do you think it went wrong and what kinds of products are you talking about? Matlab?
> included Math Blasters
This type of practice has been shown to be harmful compared to conventional math practice.
> Oregon Trail
Oregon Trail was great. The dozens of hours I spent playing Big Top, One on One, Lode Runner, Pipe Dream, Test Drive I, etc, in schools--- less so.
And even for Oregon Trail, you got most of the value out of a couple of playthroughs. And mostly it's to learn "life on the frontier was hard" and "it's fun to shoot buffalo." You could have basically the same fun and more learning with a classroom-scale simulation.
(Rocky's Boots was fantastic, too).
> things like Duo Lingo.
Things like Duolingo, MathCounts Trainer, etc-- they have limited educational value but there's a huge subpopulation of students who will become addicted to them and use them in amounts that are well past the point of diminishing returns and a distraction to their learning overall.
> Where do you think it went wrong and what kinds of products are you talking about?
There's also a big tendency as instructors to pick up things like Kahoot/Quizizz/Khan and just give them to your class instead of actively instructing. It's easy. It takes little prep.
Small amounts of these things with adequate supervision can absolutely enrich the educational environment and provide feedback on how things are going. But they are overused and harm is readily observable. Not to mention that you need to be vigilant as a hawk to prevent cyberbullying, gaming, and abuse in alternate tabs.
There's a zillion edtech vendors who tell you they can sell you something to make your classroom run better. But in the end, the way a school really works is based on a social relationship between the students and the instructor, and excessive use of technology gets in the way of this. And when I say "excessive", I really mean "more than a little bit."
I'd love to read these criticism sources. I guess I believe there was a holistic educational experience of the computer products of this kind that many modern vendors, for example, consider LLMs to foster, but I definitely agree with the idea that LLM benefits are a kind of illusion and harm.
Is it normal, that this clip has no sound? Then it is hard to check the rhetoric. Also instagram is aweful, even more so for those without an account. Scrolling a bit down (looking for colume control) ends the clip and tells me to register to watch it again. No thank you, but so I cannot review your criticism.
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Maybe you could use videosources that do not offer such a horrible user experience?
But you don't have to and I don't have to check your links.
Edit: seriously, I won't click any instagramlinks anymore. After reloading, yes, there is a little volume button, but it was half hidden under the "register popup" "check this out" banner etc. Which went away after scrolling down. Then there is no timeline. No replay like mentioned.
And the content: nothing about teenage hacker criminals
All in all, not convincing.
Not sure what you want me to do dude, I'm sorry I'm speaking my truth and it is upsetting I guess. Take care.
Edit to your edits: he wrote several books talking about computers, or more specifically, the computers of the 80s and 90s, being worthless and would lead us all astray.
One book-- Silicon Snake Oil. And criticism of that is worthwhile.
Your exaggeration, on the other hand, is not.
High-Tech Heretic: Reflections of a Computer Contrarian is literally about stopping computer education.
And as I've discussed with you elsewhere-- I feel like most of that criticism is spot on.
Computers in education are great for:
* Education on how to use computing or programming (... though when I teach these subjects, I do a whole lot of it offline)
* Independent research (though you'd better stand at the back of the classroom and monitor what's going on very closely... and do this sparingly).
* Occasional rapid feedback through a Kahoot about how much your class understands a given set of subject matter.
* Letting students write and revise a paper quickly now and then
* Occasional individualized practice through something like Khan.
On the other hand, they're greatly overused even today. Instructors do things like:
* Use a Kahoot every class to convey key learning material, which results in a disorganized, flash-card experience.
* Perform enough of the work on computers that plagiarism and academic integrity become a huge concern.
* Displace valuable classroom practice performing labs or doing arithmetic with inferior virtual eqiuvalents.
* Allow students (without any type of learning or physical disability which would necessitate this) to take notes online, which under the best of circumstances is demonstrably inferior to paper note-taking for retention and also invites massive amounts of abuse.
I feel like the case was similar in the 1990s: there was little evidence of benefit. There was less of the online abuse of computing, but there was still a lot of abuse and misuse.
> Maybe you should leave computers to professionals?
Seriously?
You're the one that linked to Insta, and to a clip that doesn't feature Clifford warning of hackers but to Clifford making the valid point that at a particular time in history a great deal of money was being spent on computers in education that largely sat idle for a shortage of teachers, courses, supporting resources.
Just referencing his opinions ironically. He didn't have a valid point either. He simply didn't understand computers enough to see how they were being used.
Sure, just barely enough to wing it as a systems administrator at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and to last just a few years as a school physics teacher.
It's not like he had any first hand experience of either computers or computers in schools /s
You might not like his opinions but they were his and of that time.
> Any computer undergrounder can identify with and appreciate Stoll's obsession and patience in attempting to trace the hacker through a maze of international gateways and computer systems. But, Stoll apparently misses the obvious affinity he has with those he condemns. He simply dismisses hackers as 'monsters' and displays virtually no recognition of the similarities between his own activity and those of the computer underground. This is what makes Stoll's work so dangerous: His work is an unreflective exercise in self-promotion, a tome that divides the sacred world of technocrats from the profane activities of those who would challenge it; Stoll stigmatises without understanding (Thomas 1990). https://insecure.org/stf/them_and_us.txt
Just because I don't like his opinions or that they are old doesn't make him right for doing this. The appeal to his alleged authority of the time was part of the problem.
"He simply dismisses hackers as 'monsters' and displays virtually no recognition of the similarities between his own activity and those of the computer underground."
Intention matters. His intention was to stop some hackers from espionage and possible sabotage. The KGBs hacker main intention was money.
Otherwise I don't know anything about Cliff Stoll, nor read the book.
But what I know about the KGB hack, they were no innocent curious boys playing with computers anymore, checking out what's possible. They sold their service to the KGB.
Very fair points. He has really worked hard seemingly to scrub the memory of the incomplete nature of his sensationalism at the time. You Google around and he is considered a vanguard of computer security, but his book capitalized on the sensationalism of film and television fiction of hackers at the time and other hacks in the news. A lot of this criticism only exists in the text files of BBSes from the time and his damaging opinions only on early evening tabloid tv of the era that isn't on YouTube. He eventually recanted a lot of this ideas a decade later, but has made no effort to address these criticisms head on that I can find. I guess it makes for compelling amateur sleuthing but what the governments of the time were dealing with are probably all still classified and were to him at the time as well. So his declarations of being first to many things are unfalsifiable.
Really? You did not see that there is a button in the lower right that enables audio? It looks like a loudspeaker, the universal symbol for "audio". Although there's no volume control, so turn down your speakers first (the audio is rather loud)
No, I did not see it, it was covered by a "check out something else" banner on my small mobile screen.
he was(may still is) type of people trying to control people, exactly like the current OpenAI's Sam, why they have that kind of mindset, build in their DNA?
Saying that edtech was a poor investment of public funds and not good for education is hardly "trying to control people."
yeah, and he made sure the public thought that the "hacker" that got into his system was a dangerous communist criminal, when it was a fact just a scool kid that even got killed as a result of that whole ordeal.
Mr. Stoll has (or at least had) a weird sense of right and wrong, and if what happened to Karl Koch would happen today, he would surely get canceled into oblivion.
He might have started the actual "cybersecurity" idea, but he did it with methods similar to todays companies that paint security researchers as evil hackers or "the bad guys"
Edit: I just want to add the disclaimer that it's hard to fault him for what he did though, times were different back then, and the cold war was still ongoing... So probably every American would have acted in a similar way
> yeah, and he made sure the public thought that the "hacker" that got into his system was a dangerous communist criminal, when it was a fact just a scool kid that even got killed as a result of that whole ordeal.
Hess sold information to the KGB. He was 26 years old at the time of the Cuckoo's Egg. He was prosecuted successfully for espionage. As far as I know, he is still alive.
You're referring to one person in the ring that penetrated US governmental facilities, Karl Koch. He was 20 at the time. He had been granted immunity from prosecution. He died 3 years later, potentially from suicide.
Your comment seems either disingenuous or wrong.
There was an additional edit. I agree with that sentiment, I don't necessarily blame Mr. Stoll and I would probably do the same if I were in his shoes to be honest, but the exaggerations had a major developmental detriment to me. The god damned bottles are pretty amazing. The damn criminals were wrong, and it is good that he was able to bring justice. For all the things I have fault with, he increased visibility on a lot of issues.