The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll is a book about a German student,
a hacker actually. This hacker had a strange hobby breaking into military
sites. Bad guys from KGB forced him to bring some US military documents. The
hacker did not know that KGB guys already obtained everything they wanted
using girls and vodka instead of Internet. These backward Russians usually
rely on good old tricks. Anyway, even if they obtained something useful it
was almost always lost in the huge bureaucratic machine KGB was, or left by
drunken agents somewhere in the subway. Cliff Stoll, an astronomer turned UNIX system administrator, (this kind of
disaster happen with astronomers quite often nowadays) works at Lawrence
Berkeley Lab. He was going over some problems when he found a 75-cent
accounting error (girls should beware dating with former astronomers). Cliff found a hacker on the system and alerted the CIA/FBI. Since no one
would listen to him because the hacker hadn't stolen more than a million
dollars or "How to make an A-bomb" FAQ, he started his investigation alone.
Cliff hooked up his computer, so that every time the hacker logged on, his
beeper would ring. He tried to imitate Sherlock Holms and even get a logbook
which he put all his information in. Now when his PC was hooked he could not
play Red Alert in his working hours anymore. That made him uncomfortable and
he tried to pursue the hacker with double energy. At last the hacker broke in again and tried to log on by using stolen
passwords. This was the day Cliff was waiting for. The FBI/CIA was finally
interested, but they only took information from Cliff, never giving any back.
They never treated him well and Cliff was always left out in the cold in his
own investigation. They traced the hacker throughout the globe and eventually
discovered that he was somewhere in Germany. Since the hacker always tried to get documents from army bases, Cliff made
up hundreds of fake military documents and planted them in the computer.
Imitating military documents was a very difficult job, (most of them are
usually so stupid). But Cliff was diligent and worked around the clock. Some
of these documents were actually much better than the real. The hacker was delighted to get Cliff's documents and sent Cliff a letter
asking for more information. Unfortunately, it was intercepted first by FBI
and then had found its way to CIA. Bad guys from FBI/CIA didn't let poor
Cliff to know who the hacker was and why he was doing this. Cliff had no
choice but to follow their instructions. He felt like a pawn. All in all, he had spent the whole year chasing the hacker. With a
miserable result of some fuzzy links to the hacker instead of his own planet.
Tragically he was unable to go back to astronomy and even to UNIX system
administration. All he wanted was to be interviewed or to chase other
hackers. Basically he sacrificed his love life and his job at the Lawrence
Berkeley Lab. Now he was good only for interviews. He will never discover a
new planet. His beeper always rang when he was with his girlfriend, and
eventually she got really mad at him. His life and his career were ruined and
out of desperation he became a security consultant. The main idea of the book is that every time the hacker went onto the
Internet and wrote a program, it was like a cuckoo laying an egg. Each time
the hacker would lay his egg and leave it to Cliff to hatch. And after
hatching several eggs it's too easy to became a kind of cuckoo and start to
give interview after interview. It's a darker side of the story. On a
positive side the book could serve as a warning for young people. It teaches
us that could happen when some people have too much zeal in catching a hacker
and especially in giving interviews. Like in stock trading, too much zeal in
interviews make them no good. Anyway, you never know who is who on the Internet. 6/2/97 3:42 PM
and adapted for alt.security
by Nikolai Bezroukov
Newsgroups: rec.humor.funny
From: ms0p+@andrew.cmu.edu (Michael Gordon Shapiro)
Date: 2 Apr 91 11:30:03 GMT
Keywords: computer, smirk
From www.castle.net/~tina/computer.html -- Computer Jokes
(Left on the blackboard by students in a Real-Time Systems course)
"It's 5:50 a.m., Do you know where your stack pointer is?"
[ No, and my program doesn't, either! ]
The recent submission of "How to program in C" left out some very important rules.
I have come up with the following list of additional rules in order to give the serious student some aid and the professional a refresher.
Note: If you still have a Job/Degree objective/Wife/Mind/etc
after utilizing the above rules then you simply aren't trying hard
enough.
See also Tina's Humor Archives main page