The first time I lived in Italy, in the mid-90ies, the internet was not the ubiquitous thing that it is now so I was not very well connected with the rest of the world, and getting English language books was not so easy. I had a copy of that book that I think I read 5 times. I was also getting into Linux, so the whole thing was super cool and motivational.
“I was asking what I thought were reasonable questions: Is the electronic classroom an improvement? Does a computer help a student learn? Yes, but what it teaches you is to go to the computer whenever you have a question, rather than relying on yourself. Suppose I was an evil person and wanted to eliminate the curiosity of children. Give the kid a diet of Google, and pretty soon the child learns that every question he has is answered instantly. The coolest thing about being human is to learn, but you don’t learn things by looking it up; you learn by figuring it out.”
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.)
Oh, but your note resonates with me — we’ve slowly changed our what we expect of a learned person. Once, understanding was central. Increasingly, we mainly care about getting the right answer. Or, in the case of AI, something that looks and feels like the right answer.
Your comment made me think a future world where AI is powerful but capped to the limits of human knowledge. In that world AI makes almost all people (economically) worthless. The exception are the people who take the challenge and study, work and research to expand the human knowledge. Whether this is an utopia or dystopia, I guess depends on how the relationship of these two groups work out.
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
Sigh — for all the time it saves me in carrying boxes from the crawlspace under our house … I probably spend as much time fixing, maintaining and improving the thing. Much fun, of course — I’ve built a line following device for it and played with PyTorch to get it to semiautomaticly pick boxes from stock. Yep - every minute it saves me goes right back into fooling around with the three-wheeled beast.
Well I happen to think that's a good general strategy to live life. Replace non-fun labour and time with fun labour and time. No matter then, if the fun version is all about automating the non-fun version (or vice versa)!
Oh boy! Ever since I listened to The cuckoo's egg I wanted to reach out to tell you how much I loved it, I enjoyed ever single minute out of the almost 13 hours so thank you very much for it.
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.
Yeah, not only the story was really interesting from a technical point of view but the storytelling and the social aspects of his relationship with his SO and their social circle were really enjoyable.
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.
Heh - it's a "project" - myself, between learning to do 3d printing, in order to build parts/widgets to get my diode laser running for etching/engraving/cutting, it is an endless stream of tweaking this or that. OTOH, I am able to repair/replace things that would have been junk. (For example, I have a keyboard slider tray, where during a move, I lost the plastic sliders - those little parts paid for the cost of the 3d printer)
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")
Cliff, I just wanted to take a moment to say that The Cuckoo's Egg was formative in my youth and was definitely one of things that led me into getting into IT and programming. You just seem like such a nice, wonderful, fascinating human. Hope you have a great day!
Thanks to you, GTMTDI! May your career be as satisfying (but hopefully less interesting) than mine.
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.
The longer i think about projects such as this, the more convinced i am that a small rail system such as it is for hollywood, and little wagons with containers would be ideal for such a house storage space. Just one motor and a linear distance index and you can turn that space into a storage on rail.
And come to think of it, that rail system could fit anywhere.. have old AC ducts? Rail Storage. High Rooms? Rail Storage behind a drop ceiling! Garagespace? But rails on a rack..
Have rubys in a mine? Goto put it on rails.
Idea runaway exception thrown..
A problem that recurs in my little storage system is precise 4 degree-of-freedom positioning in a complex environment. Locating the forklift to centimeter accuracy (X,Y, Z and theta) has been a programming challenge, as well as properly handling palletized boxes. Much fun to figure out, but it's still way more efficient to guide the forklift using cameras and remote hand-control.
I'm no expert, but perhaps reckoning from the cart‘s position is the wrong approach. When you run the thing by hand, most of what you are doing is keeping some waypoint or other centered in the camera view. Perhaps it would be easier if that's what your automation did.
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.
I have one of his bottles on my desk. We paid him a visit once afternoon and can confirm he's just the nicest geek you've ever met. Plus a chance to meet one of my childhood heroes in person...
I don't know if he still encourages visitors, but if he does, I highly recommend it.
My happy greetings to you, BJee. I certainly appreciate your kind note, not to mention your help with m’kid’s tuition. Math & Computing folk do continue to visit, perhaps encouraged by the free admission to the East Bay (we charge $7 to get out, by way of the Bay bridge)
Cuckoo's Egg is so much more than a hacking story. It's a history of a time when the internet was tiny and people assumed good faith. It's a history of a time when very few people were interested in or believed that computer crime was real or had any impact.
I remember that humor from Silicon Snake Oil, it was a wonderful book. I think back to it when working in an industry where everyone takes a tractable problem and makes it intractable for "job security".
Weren't they 2800, not 2400? I always liked the sounds they made when they were dialling up.
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!
After I read The Cuckoo's Egg many years ago, I sent you a goofy fan email and you replied! Totally amazed by this whole instant world connectivity thing. 1 1 was a race horse... Still got a dot matrix printout of it somewheres... :)
I ordered one of these as a gift recently and his email as well as the extensive paperwork that comes with the bottle or fantastic works of science fiction in and of themselves. Didn’t realize he wrote the cuckoos egg
Thank you, indeed — hadn’t thought of my topological propaganda as exactly science fiction, but I guess you’re right. Same with my dissertation on Jupiter’s atmosphere, but for slightly different reasons.
i bought one of his bottles during the pandemic because i needed to gussy the place up a bit for spending more time in. highly recommended. i think i have his handwritten note ... somewhere around here ...
If you can’t find that handscribbled note, you can substitute this finger-poked reply, Inconcee. I do try to write something on each kleinbottle order — indeed, I try to have fun with my zero-volume business.
Many years ago Cliff would only charge for the prime-numbered bottles in your order, so I got a group of friends together and we ordered 16 to save money by only paying for 7. I don't see that offer on the website anymore!
Wow! You’re right! 25 years ago, when I startedAcme Klein Bottle, I wondered how to properly do quantity discounts.
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.”
I have once of his Klein bottles. It came in the most amazing personally decorated package that I've kept that too, and value it almost as highly as the glassware.
Once, a postal letter-carrier asked me why I scribbled “nonorientable” on my package. I began to tell her the mathematical meanings of the word, and she interrupted me to say that she knew its meaning - she wanted to know what kind of topological shape was in the box. Wow: she knew topology!
Since then, I scribble it on every box I mail, in honor of her.
Every few months I keep telling myself I need to buy one of Cliff's Klein bottles to go alongside my (very dogeared) paperback copy of The Cuckoo's Egg :)
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
You used VMS in high school? You must be old enough to vote!
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.
Those Numberphile videos? It’s way fun when Brady stops by my house. I try to have two or three ideas somewhat organized. Some are simple flops or stumbles; others just seem to click. Like any improv performance.
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.
I have a vague memory of reading his book (or a similar account). The one specific thing I remember is a philosophical rant about how you can never be sure that a hacker will leave a trace within the digital inner world of a computer that they control. For example log files can be edited to remove suspicious activity. So he set up the system so it would log straight to a printer. Much harder to redact paper logs. :)
Not to mention that it was way easier to use clipleads to connect teletypes and printers to incoming lines. And since the intruders had root access, how do you hide an OS based logger?
I still type `ps ax` because that's the syntax I picked up from Cuckoo's Egg. Learnt that command several years before I installed Linux for the first time. <3
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.
My fingers, too, were trained so long ago. The ls command? -lastF no matter what version. Still find myself using /more/ rather than /less/ or any of the more modern versions. Yep, there are still a few dinosaurs left…
Behind a pi-hole, those first google hits tend to be blocked ads, so some people follow follow your advice by default.
I got your book before I got my first 80386 based computer. I upgrade from ps ax to ps axu, but apart from that, you learned me some UNIX before I got a computer.
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 ;-)
Cliff Stoll is a super interesting character. His Numberphile videos are amongst my favorites.
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.
Thank you Donat — your happy note brings a smile to this tired astronomer’s face,
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.
Read his book in the early 90s, as result of a presentation he's given in Chicago. Working on SUN Sparcstations running Solaris, at the time, made his entire story extraordinarily exciting for the much younger me, and was one of the deciding factors to drop all that I was doing (had a PhD in engineering, and was using the computers for math modeling of fluid dynamics), go back to school, get my CS degree and move onto a completely different professional world. Thank you, Cliff!
And you’re very welcome, NetFort. Sparcstations? Oh my - zippy little guys that outgrew the VME crates of earlier Sun boxes. Like you, I loved the astonishing speeds of new computers - 25, 50, even 100MHz clocks. And in such small packages — why all that power could fit in an office!
I was an exchange student in Germany when the wall came down. I was a computer science major, and a friend sent me a copy of the Cuckoo's Egg. That book made me feel excited about my future profession and opened my eyes to a world that I was largely unaware of. It also convinced me that grad school was something I had to experience. The book altered the path my life was on in a very good way. Thank you, Cliff!
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 bought one of Cliff's Klein bottles years ago and it still has pride of place on one of my bookshelves. I cannot describe how excited I was to find someone actually making them and that they were affordable!
What an amazing person. I first learned about Clifford when he did his TED talk, and I was immediately a fan. The quote from the Hayes Hall Bell Tower resonated, and stayed with me, for all the years since. I'm deeply grateful that people like him exist, sharing their experiences and knowledge while still being simply kind and approachable. If you're reading this, thank you!
At 2AM on a rainy Oakland night, thank you very much, BestV.
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 . . .
155 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadWe 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!
Mr. Stoll occasionally drops by this site ( https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=CliffStoll ), so if he sees this: thanks!
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!
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
https://automatetheboringstuff.com/
I think sometimes it's all about the journey, not the destination.
The automater's slightly underwhelming battle cry! :-D
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.
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")
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.
Have rubys in a mine? Goto put it on rails. Idea runaway exception thrown..
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.
I don't know if he still encourages visitors, but if he does, I highly recommend it.
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.
https://www.kleinbottle.com/
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.
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. :-)
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.
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.
Thanks CliffStoll!
Maybe this weekend…
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 ;-)
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.
Note: never liked his Silicon Snake Oil book :(
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.
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.
https://malicious.life/episode/episode-210/
It's amazing to see how little he's changed.
> Give the kid a diet of Google
Google was founded in 1998, this quote must be from a later edition of the book.