The cuckoo's egg

I'm usually super into tales about the early days of computers, technology, the internet, and gaming, but I think this one was a miss for me. The author was an astrophysics student at UC Berkeley who accidentally discovers a hacker while trying to explain a 75 cent(!!!) discrepancy in the computer time books. Rather than shut the guy out, Stoll spends months meticulously tracking the hacker's moves through the early 'net and creating a web of connections within basically every letter agency active at the time. Nobody wants to be the one agency to act, so there's a lot of back-and-forth between agencies at various points of the book, until someone finally loses patience, blinks, and the hacker gets caught.

I had a few issues with the book. I understand it's basically a computer period piece of how technology was at the time, but it still got super repetitive about halfway through. The beginning was really interesting, the end was similarly compelling, but the middle was basically a series of "I see the hacker in my systems, here's what he's doing, I wish I could stop him" short segments. I also was mildly annoyed at the author's massive Main Character Syndrome, where he turns the hacker information over to the proper authorities, and then gets all shocked/angry/annoyed at not being immediately privvy to whatever the government does with the information. Long segments of the book are dedicated to the author waxing philosophical about how he's working with The Man and how much he hates not knowing what's going on. It gets kind of annoying.

I did like the glimpse into the computer technology from the period, though. I liked reading about the innovative ways the author used to track the hacker, determine his location, and mess with him to keep him on the line long enough to be traced. Well done in that respect.

Just kind of a mixed bag of a book all around, honestly.

This is a classic computer security tale. The first time I read it, I was a novice programmer and knew absolutely nothing about security, so I found the hinjinks thrilling. Years later, and knowing (dare I say) a thing or two, the idea of someone trying admin passwords against everything they can find connected to the network is the type of thing everyone can expect to see in a log file from time to time, and providers most certainly don't leave default admin passwords (if you enable password login at all!) So it's more a historical artifact of an era just before the internet had fully connecte every network, and when big institutional computers where still exciting compared to PCs or Phones. As a record of that era, especially one founded on contemporary notes rather than fond recollection, is a very nice.

The bulk of the book is about making phone traces, logging activity, and the technical details of the chase. The author's initial suspicion of intelligence types slowly changes as he becomes a security researcher himself, and it's a neat introspective journey. We also get small snapshots of the culture of the era and the area which add some human touches to an otherwise very technical story.

This is the kind of book that will appeal to computer nerds, and perhaps no one else, but since I am a computer nerd I quite enjoyed it. It is a true story involving computer hacking, and one of the earliest ones. The protagonist of this story is Clifford Stoll, who was trained as an astronomer but was managing computers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. One day he asked to look into a $.75 discrepancy in the billing for the computer accounts. With a magnificent obsession he tears into it, and eventually traces everything to a Soviet spy operating out of West Germany. Along the way Stoll has to deal with various agencies that don't really know what to do about this, and wonder if it as even anything they should worry about. After all, a 75 cent accounting error is not a big deal. But when it is clear that a foreign agent is looking for information about the Strategic Defense Initiative (aka Star Wars), it is time to take action.