Talk:The Cuckoo's Egg (book)

Emacs sendmail?

Does GNU Emacs have a "sendmail" function?

Does anyone know where to get a copy of the WGHB video " The KGB, the Computer, and Me "? MST64 (talk) 23:11, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

Bottles?

What's up with him making Klein Bottles and selling them over the internet? Is that some kind of hoax? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.73.10.104 (talk) 04:44, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

No, he really sells these bottles. He has a web site with a price list for various sizes. Sv1xv (talk) 09:32, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Chaos Computer Club reference

“Although Hess was active at the same time and in the same area as the German Chaos Computer Club, they do not seem to have been working together.” – this is highly confusing and needs clarification because it makes it sound as if the CCC was only active or did only exist at that particular time around Bremen. In reality, the CCC still exists, is (according to the Wikipedia article) one of the largest hacker clubs and isn't based at any particular location. Additionally, the club wasn't founded near Bremen (but rather in (West) Berlin), nor was it founded around the same time (but five years earlier).

So, what's the connection between this incident and the CCC? If there's none, why mention it? Could as well say “Although Hess was active at the same time and in the same area as the German national soccer league they do not seem to have been working together.”

Well Cliff himself does mention them ("A guy in Toronto reported that his computer had been attacked by a group from Germany. They called themselves the Chaos Computer Club and seemed to be technocratic vandals." and "As an aside, Bob told me the German Chaos Club was attacking the U.S. Fermilab computer as well. I called Fermilab in Illinois and talked with their system manager. "Yes, some German hackers have been giving us headaches. They call themselves the Chaos Computer Club.""). Cliff also concluded what he was seeing was likely not them ("Still, it seemed like these guys were right. Those hackers were vandals who wanted to create trouble. They attacked universities and scientific institutes— easy pickings. They didn't seem interested in military targets, and didn't seem to know how to navigate the Milnet.")--BruceGrubb (talk) 20:02, 28 May 2016 (UTC)

Rewrite

Removed some parenthetical phrases, some irrelevant information, etc. NightFalcon90909 (talk) 14:05, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Book cover image

Someone should add a book cover image for The Cuckoo's Egg. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gclark06 (talk • contribs) 19:15, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

Cuckoo's Egg project

The reference in the popular culture section to the "cuckoo's egg project" really has nothing to do with this book. I'm not sure why it is here. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.4.115.146 (talk) 01:46, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

Origin of the Title

Can somebody please mention how Stoll got the title? I came here because I recall reading something about how the attacker (Hess) dropped trojans and waited for it to hatch (according to Cuckoo#Breeding 5th paragraphs down, it mentions "Cuckoos have various strategies for getting their egg into a host nest..."). Hidekiai (talk) 22:28, 17 July 2015 (UTC)

Cliff himself mentions this:

"The cuckoo lays her eggs in other birds' nests. She is a nesting parasite: some other bird will raise her young cuckoos. The survival of cuckoo chicks depends on the ignorance of other species. Our mysterious visitor laid an egg-program into our computer, letting the system hatch it and feed it privileges. [...] His problem was to masquerade this special program—the cuckoo's egg—so that it would be hatched by the system."--BruceGrubb (talk) 20:05, 28 May 2016 (UTC)

External links modified

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to one external link on The Cuckoo's Egg. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add {{cbignore}} after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add {{nobots|deny=InternetArchiveBot}} to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:

• Added archive https://web.archive.org/20110806122326/http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~stoll/nova_show.html to http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~stoll/nova_show.html

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true to let others know.

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 5 June 2024).

• If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
• If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—^{cyberbot II}_{Talk to my owner:Online} 21:22, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Republished version

Heard of a republished version with a new intro. True?? 80.108.36.2 (talk) 15:29, 5 June 2016 (UTC)

True, there is a version republished in 2005, "The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage" with a new afterward written by Cliff Stoll, see here.--FeralOink (talk) 11:30, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

First Computer Break-In

The article claims this was or may have been the first ever computer break-in. I don't see any citation for this, and it's a ridiculous claim.

Personally, I and other teenagers were breaking into computers (mainly by guessing passwords) on computers at universities, military systems, and timesharing bureaus all over the country, often using the ARPANET or TTYMNET or TELENET, at least 14 years before the events of The Cuckoos Egg. And we may have been early, but were certainly not the very first.

I don't think Cuckoos Egg was the first "documented" case, either, because magazines had articles about this sort of thing a decade earlier, too. It might be the first published BOOK exclusively on the topic, though. 100.36.114.74 (talk) 12:15, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

I'd have to go re-read it to be sure, but I strongly suspect at least one earlier computer break-in is described in Exploding The Phone. 2601:183:867F:8A0:2AB7:C0C5:7688:F0C3 (talk) 19:16, 18 August 2024 (UTC)