Reddit reviews CUCKOO'S EGG
We found 10 Reddit comments about CUCKOO'S EGG. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Reddit reviews CUCKOO'S EGGWe found 10 Reddit comments about CUCKOO'S EGG. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
He's a pretty neat guy. He first became fairly well known for discovering one of the earliest cyberspying cases:
> A 75-cent discrepancy in billing for computer time led Stoll, an astrophysicist working as a systems manager at a California laboratory, on a quest that reads with the tension and excitement of a fictional thriller. Painstakingly he tracked down a hacker who was attempting to access American computer networks, in particular those involved with national security, and actually reached into an estimated 30 of the 450 systems he attacked. Initially Stroll waged a lone battle, his employers begrudging him the time spent on his search and several government agencies refused to cooperate. But his diligence paid off and in due course it was learned that the hacker, 25-year-old Markus Hess of Hanover, Germany, was involved with a spy ring. Eight members were arrested by the West German authorities but all but one were eventually released.
His book on the incident is an outstanding read.
Something that's not on there but which I would heartily recommend is The Cuckoo's Egg, which is 100% hard computer storytelling because it's a true story of a thing that actually happened, and the sneaky espionage / counter-espionage that a sysadmin and a hacker got in to against each other.
The whole point of this article is to get people to wander off into useless details after they lead you past the correct path right at the beginning. Read the Cuckoo's Egg. It's about a very early internet hack job by the Russians that was tracked down by a random sysadmin who wanted to figure out who was relaying shit through his server. See, even back then the Russians were making their connection through many hops. They compromised MANY servers in order to make it difficult to trace their activities back to their origin. No hacker worth a shit would only compromise one server directly from his address in Romania. It's just too stupid to even think about.
Not sure if you are into security tech but some of my favorites....
Also thought I'd include some that I have purchased but not finished yet in case you'd be interested.
You can read the book, too! It's one of my absolute favorites; I read it every couple of years. The Cuckoo's Egg
The concept may have been first practically demonstrated by some German hackers who found ways to link several separate international education and military webs illegally.
I read this years ago: The Cuckoo's Egg
Anyone interested in the history of the web and how it developed should read it.
If you want to know what it was really like, from two perspectives, read this http://www.amazon.com/CYBERPUNK-Outlaws-Hackers-Computer-Frontier/dp/0684818620 and http://www.amazon.com/CUCKOOS-EGG-ebook/dp/B0083DJXCM/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1381774834&sr=1-5&keywords=cuckoos+nest
I didn't know many women into it, but mostly it was just guys, sitting around Denny's all night, trading disks and showing eachother tricks all night. After the movie, it seemed like everyone was interested, but they all wanted it to be like a video game. My friends, for decades, got together once a year or so and watched the movie making fun of it. Some of the stuff is close ... but either exaggerated, or just 'hey, they just opened a copy of Phreak and took it verbatim'. Lot's of that stuff was bullshit.
It's weird to have to explain to someone, but back in the day, with BBS systems, people could write up entire 'zines, and never really have them fact checked. You would see one Zine that would swear playing tones from a mincro-recorded into a phone would work, but it almost certainly never did. The tones were nearly inaudible, and needed to be generated at home, on a tone generator, and recorded digitally, to have the volume and quality to have any effect. Even then ... well, it would have been more realistic if they'd shown them doing it several times to get it to work once.
They had 'phone couplers', what we called them, but the way they were used in the movie was fiction.
Phreaking was mostly about boxes, but by the mid-ninety's, most phone companies had pretty much figured out how to fix those problems.
If you wanted to see phreaking, you should have seen weird boxes soldered together and a few guys nervously standing around a phone line. Seldomly a payphone, which was seriously overused in the movie. You know, most buildings phone wires just ran out through a hole in the wall, to a box that MIGHT have a padlock on it. If you wanted a line, all you had to do was walk in an alley, late at night, and strip some wires. Payphones would be stupid to use, by comparison.
I could go on, forever it seems, but the bottom line is that it wasn't very realistic. It got the details all wrong, no one wore clothes like that, there was no 'cyber-club' that anyone knew about, the only realistic 'hacking' scene is in the bedroom where they have five people pouring over one keyboard, trading ideas and fucking around all night. Hell, if the whole movie had been just THAT, it would have been the most realistic old school hacking movie ever made.
This book any good? I've got the sample sitting on my kindle but haven't actually cracked it open.
I was personally a fan of Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stool, as well.
Because despite the privacy issues of previous bills, cyberattacks are an ongoing problem, especially for U.S. companies, and solutions of some sort are needed.
Right now it's not even clear if a company like Google could legally cooperate with a company like Microsoft on detecting and responding to cyberattacks on their networks, and these problems are not theoretical.
For all that you guys are worried about NSA, don't forget that there are other nations with perfectly good foreign intelligence agencies, such as Russia and China, and these nations have been trying to break into U.S. company networks since the Internet existed.
It's hard enough to defend corporate networks when you have employees who will click on random stupid emails and when finding software vulnerabilities seems to be simply an issue of digging for long enough, without the problems introduced by preventing companies from cooperating. In the military we'd call this "defeat in detail", but you probably could see this in those fancy online multiplayer games too, where your team cooperates to gang up on one opponent at a time to bring them all down. It works with networks too, since we're all interconnected to each other, we are as vulnerable as our weakest link.
This is doubly troubling because the U.S. is almost completely dependent on cyber technologies in a way that many other nations are not, so the U.S. has much more to lose than nations like Russia and China.
The fact that previous bills have been used to try to enforce copyrights from the MPAA/RIAA and other such shenanigans has never meant that there wasn't a need to give U.S. businesses and ISPs the ability to defend themselves (since the U.S. government can't protect them by itself). If they've finally delivered a bill that focuses on that and only on that I'd probably support it; it will have been long overdue.
The other replies have shown you what it is used for in astronomy. If you want a fascinating real-world example of what else it is used for, check out Clifford Stoll's book The Cuckoo's Egg:
>Cliff Stoll was an astronomer turned systems manager at Lawrence Berkeley Lab when a 75-cent accounting error alerted him to the presence of an unauthorized user on his system. The hacker's code name was "Hunter"—a mysterious invader who managed to break into U.S. computer systems and steal sensitive military and security information. Stoll began a one-man hunt of his own: spying on the spy. It was a dangerous game of deception, broken codes, satellites, and missile bases—a one-man sting operation that finally gained the attention of the CIA . . . and ultimately trapped an international spy ring fueled by cash, cocaine, and the KGB.
PBS did a really cheesy (but good) documentary of his book if you want a taste before you dive all the way in, but the book is better.