Flash Back - Cliff Stoll

Clifford Stoll's role in catching hacker Markus Hess in the 1980s, while Stoll was employed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, led to his authoring the book The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage (1989, ISBN 0-7434-1146-3). That book was/is a fascinating read and should be required reading for every security practitioner.

His 1995 follow-up book Silicon snake oil: Second thoughts on the information highway was a much more skeptical look at technology and one that was critically reviewed by many. However, I found many of his views to be very poignant and as worthwhile noting today as they were a decade ago...

"When I'm online, I'm alone in a room, tapping on a keyboard, staring at a cathode-ray tube. I'm ignoring anyone else in the room. The nature of being online is that I can't be with someone else. Rather than bringing me closer to others, the time that I spend online isolates me from the most important people in my life, my family, my friends, my neighborhood, my community."

He currently sells Klein bottles on the Web, is a "mostly" stay-at-home dad and teaches eighth graders about physics at Tehiyah Day School, in El Cerrito, California.

"A box of crayons and a big sheet of paper provides a more expressive medium for kids than computerized paint programs."

"Why is it drug addicts and computer afficionados are both called users?"

- Clifford Stoll, Silicon Snake Oil, 1995