The Cuckoo's Egg
43 points by atmosx
43 points by atmosx
There was a recent talk at DefCon for those who enjoy audiovisual content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=656058JxTM0
In July, Markus Hess gave a talk at Hackover, retelling the story from the other side (sadly German only): https://media.ccc.de/v/ho26-124-vom-hacker-zum-spion-die-geschichte-des-kgb-hacks-der-1980-jahre
This talk prompted me to read the book - I'm right in the middle of it now and really enjoying it
Cool guy. Went pretty much off grid after this, but shows up on Numberphile often, mostly to talk about trying to make impossible 3d shapes and surfaces with glass. One of those people that I would love to be the neighbour of.
Went pretty much off grid after this
Well, there's kind of a reason. It's his 2nd book:
It basically denounces the Internet as worthless hype and says that the WWW is useless and will be a total flop. I summarise harshly and crudely, but not unfairly.
I read it. I liked it a lot. But he could not have been much more wrong, and that abruptly ended his sideline as the tech seer of seers, prognosticator of prognosticators.
The title itself is a metatextual reference to this: snake oil is a 19th century term for fake medicine that doesn't do anything, but in tech, it was most memorably used by Ken Olsen, who made 2 big predictions that are widely quoted:
"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home."
And...
"Unix is snake oil."
Olsen was the founder of DEC. It made the family of computers that underpins CP/M, DOS, Windows NT and UNIX. Basically all modern computing. DEC made the Alpha RISC CPU, the first non-x86 processor to which Linux was ported. DEC used some of the lessons from the Alpha to design the fastest ARM chip in the world at the time, the DEC StrongARM, and thus propelled ARM to its heights. (Today Arm is the biggest CPU vendor in the world by about an order of magnitude.) Thus, DEC aided the survival of Acorn RISC OS, perhaps the least Unix-like GUI OS in the world today. Windows 11 and Windows Server 2025 are both based on NT, and NT is based on DEC VMS.
DEC was amazingly influential and Unix was written on a DEC PDP-7 and ported to DEC PDP-11, which is why C was developed and is also how Unix became the first portable OS. DEC kit begat Unix, but DEC's CEO thought Unix was a scam, a pointless, limited, weird frippery compared to the dozens of different OSes that DEC sold.
Olsen, who ran the most influential computer company ever, got Unix badly wrong and it's one small part of why DEC failed.
Cliff Stoll wrote the most influential book about computer hacking, then got The Internet badly wrong and it's a big part of why Stoll failed to become the guru he deserved to be.
And in making his mistake, he tipped his hat to DEC and quoted one of the single biggest mistakes that doomed DEC.
It's almost poetic.
This is super interesting, I never knew about it! Cliff got one thing correct I think:
Life in the real world is far more interesting, far more important, far richer, than anything you'll ever find on a computer screen
Weirdly this has more meaning now than it probably did in the 90s.
Also his later reply to an article on it certifies him as a 'good dude':
Of my many mistakes, flubs, and howlers, few have been as public as my 1995 howler.
Wrong? Yep.
At the time, I was trying to speak against the tide of futuristic commentary on how The Internet Will Solve Our Problems.
Gives me pause. Most of my screwups have had limited publicity: Forgetting my lines in my 4th grade play. Misidentifying a Gilbert and Sullivan song while suddenly drafted to fill in as announcer on a classical radio station. Wasting a week hunting for planets interior to Mercury's orbit using an infrared system with a noise level so high that it couldn't possibly detect 'em. Heck - trying to dry my sneakers in a microwave oven (a quarter century later, there's still a smudge on the kitchen ceiling)
And, as I've laughed at others' foibles, I think back to some of my own cringeworthy contributions.
Now, whenever I think I know what's happening, I temper my thoughts: Might be wrong, Cliff...
In a sense he was right actually, instead of solving all our problems, the internet exacerbated most of them, really solving, what, convenient access to information you may not have in a local library?
There is a lot of good stuff about the internet. It's just a shame that companies wanted to turn it into a huge time sucking addiction machine. That is only a small part of what goes on though
meta: Just saw your profile. Can you list your top10 hacking stories if time allows here? I might have missed some cool ones!
I can highly recommend the book. Not only is it entertaining, it's a fun view into the early days of Unix networking.
Stoll is quite clearly from the tail end of the hippy era.
Stoll is quite clearly from the tail end of the hippy era.
The Internet is quite clearly from the tail end of the hippy era.
"I'd like to teach the world to ping..."
I came to know about him from his Klein bottle shop and only later realized that he's the same person who wrote the book. Quite the personality for sure.
I actually ordered a bottle from his shop a couple of years back. Along my order I wrote him an email and told him of the influence his book had on me when I was a teenager ultimately influencing me on my career path. Got an lovely email back with some photos of him packing my bottle and showing off his garden. Awesome dude.
Yes, to my knowledge he sends photos for every order, he was sure to note it was his wife's garden in one of mine, however - including Fibonacci hiding in their escargot begonia. Definitely an awesome guy.
He's a super cool dude, and really down to earth.... He has his phone number listed on his website, and I called him once in the middle of the pandemic to ask some silly questions about Klein bottles and topology in general. It was a lovely phone call.
All the videos with him on Numberphile are great: Playlist
Earlier this year he also showed up in a quite interesting way on Hacker News: Rumors of my death are slightly exaggerated
I read this as a teenager, like so many others. It's a great book. Cliff Stohl is more than a little nuts, but it's the kind of nuts you want living next door and volunteering in your kids' school.
I see him as a Wonko the Sane figure of modern computing.
He's not nuts. He's the only one that's sane. The rest of us went nuts. That left him looking like a mad prophet shouting in the wilderness.
This book is responsible for me going into the area of information security. Two decades later, I am still on board including a PhD in the field. Must read.
This was one of the formative texts for me, along with Levy's Hackers and various bOING bOING and Mondo 2000 magazines I could scrounge in Western Australia.
Not only a great computer book, it has some nice little asides about what it was like living and working in Berkeley at the time. When I first had the opportunity to visit the US, it turned out I was staying in Berkeley and everything I knew about the place came from The Cuckoo’s Egg (of all places). So, I roped some colleagues into a walk up towards the hill where Lawrence Berkeley Lab is located, got distracted chatting and shouted at by a security guard, then strolled back through UC Berkeley, where none other than Cliff zoomed past us on a bike. It all felt very authentic.