A strong defense of Clifford Stoll

A strong defense of Clifford Stoll(articulateventures.com)

34 points by Articulate 12 years ago | 14 comments

bronson 12 years ago |

This seems like a glass half empty / half full situation. "Why The Web Won't Be Nirvana" got a lot wrong, true, but it also got a lot right. His prediction of books not being sold on the web was incorrect, but his explanation of why (cold, less fun at the beach) still applies. Yes, the Eternal September happened, but it wasn't as bad as some feared. I haven't read Silicon Snake Oil but I did read the original The Road Ahead. Silicon Snake Oil can't be much worse than that, can it?

So... Many years ago my Tek 7904 oscilloscope fried itself. Again. I realized I just don't have the time to keep it limping along. I bought a soulless DSO then posted a Craigslist ad for my whole setup (12+ plugins including 7CT1N, probes, cart, ...) at an absurdly cheap price. This machine that I had been trusting for a decade, it had to go. Quick, because this was depressing.

One person responded to the first ad. Cliff complimented the squigglescope and chatted about how great these old tools can be and how he uses them in high school classes because the new stuff just doesn't teach as well. He said he couldn't do anything about mine but offered some suggestions and that he'd keep an eye out for a suitable home.

That made my day.

The scope sold second try. Hope it's fixed and keeping someone's bench warm somewhere. No doubt Cliff is still resisting technology and doing his part to make the world a more welcoming place.

6cxs2hd6 12 years ago | |

He definitely got a lot right. To pick 3 of his "predictions":

1. "No online database will replace your daily newspaper" OK, he's wrong here. (Well, wrong, soon. Although clearly newspapers are struggling, they're not extinct, yet.)

2. "No CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher" How is this wrong? To the extent MOOCs replace face-to-face teaching, they might require fewer competent teachers. Anyway I took his point to be that learning is about more than viewing static content like a CD-ROM.

3. "No computer network will change the way government works" How is this wrong? It's overly optimistic to say that computer networks have transformed government. (For the better. They've clearly transformed the efficacy of tracking people.) You could argue that money in politics is worse than ever, and actual democracy is weaker than ever. I don't see how technology has improved this substantially or is likely to in the near future. We can hope and try, and kudos to civic hackers chipping away at this from the bottom up.

Although I love the internet and disruption, I don't see how we can laugh at him for being unduly skpetical.

bsirkia 12 years ago |

I posted this in the comment section of that article when it was posted here earlier, his response in 2010 made me love the dude, even if he couldn't see 15 years into the future:

"Of my many mistakes, flubs, and howlers, few have been as public as my 1995 howler.

Wrong? Yep.

At the time, I was trying to speak against the tide of futuristic commentary on how The Internet Will Solve Our Problems. Gives me pause. Most of my screwups have had limited publicity: Forgetting my lines in my 4th grade play. Misidentifying a Gilbert and Sullivan song while suddenly drafted to fill in as announcer on a classical radio station. Wasting a week hunting for planets interior to Mercury’s orbit using an infrared system with a noise level so high that it couldn’t possibly detect ‘em. Heck – trying to dry my sneakers in a microwave oven (a quarter century later, there’s still a smudge on the kitchen ceiling)

And, as I’ve laughed at others’ foibles, I think back to some of my own cringeworthy contributions.

Now, whenever I think I know what’s happening, I temper my thoughts: Might be wrong, Cliff…

Warm cheers to all, -Cliff Stoll on a rainy Friday afternoon in Oakland"

http://boingboing.net/2010/02/26/curmudgeony-essay-on.html#c...

aaron695 12 years ago |

A bit strawperson-ey

No one hates him, he wrote a very funny book on catching a computer hacker.

But he's just totally hopeless at predicting the future. Nothing to do with that article but he's one of the first non fiction authors I read (Silicon Snake Oil) and realised he just doesn't get it. He's a bit of a Luddite(In a non offensive way)

tsotha 12 years ago | |

I still think much of what he said in Silicon Snake Oil is right on the mark, particularly the part about computers in the classroom.

gdubs 12 years ago |

I read his books when I was young and impressionable, and impress upon me they did. Wrong or not, I think his alternative perspectives about technology are more than healthy. For all the good, there's definitely a lot of snake oil out there, and there's definitely a lot of good in enjoying life's simple things: friendships, food, gardening, music.

Negroponte is a freak of nature (a compliment). I read an older book of his recently, and he was incredibly accurate about so many predictions. Interesting to go back and read predictions (both the wrong ones and the right ones) and try to understand the frame of mind that those with insight possess. Steve Jobs (by way of Wayne Gretzky) called it "skating to where the puck is going to be". Paul Allen called it "reading the chips" (like "reading the tea-leaves", you could say).

Anyway, it's really worth reading Stoll's books. They're entertaining, well-written, and are a nice counter-balance to the hype we ingest on a daily basis.

chris_wot 12 years ago |

Thank you. He's a great man.

bazzargh 12 years ago |

I reread the Cuckoo's Egg only last week, it's still very enjoyable. One striking thing, given recent relevations, was the role of the NSA - Stoll had slight counterculture suspicions of what they were capable of, but generally they were treated as trustworthy security experts. This line - when Stoll hears about a vulnerability in VMS 4.5 - is especially funny in retrospect:

"Wait a second. That operating system was certified by NSA. They tested it and certified it secure."

georgemcbay 12 years ago | |

As a 40 year old who was hacking in his early teens (by both meanings of the word), this isn't that striking to me. It was common for people back in this time frame (the events of Cuckoo's Egg) to half-jokingly make "Echelon keyword" lists where they would insert dubious words as postscripts in email or on usenet posts. I spent quite a bit of time hanging around the MIT Media Lab building (where GNU/FSF was located at the time) and it was an open secret (and source of lots of joking) that one of the always-locked doors there lead to a "spook closet" where some guy nobody there really knew would come and pick up mag tapes once in a while (with the implicit assumption that the tapes were a traffic dump of data going through the routers there).

The NSA revelations of late aren't really that surprising in context with my prior experience, other than that it was surprising that the leaks so thoroughly confirmed a lot of suspicions and showed that their tentacles into commercial service providers were even more extensive than originally thought.

bazzargh 12 years ago | | |

Yup, I used spook.el back then too. And as I said, Stoll had suspicions - he thought the NSA listened to all the traffic, and why not - it was all unencrypted telnet sessions.

But the common impression then was that the NSA knew how to crack ciphers because they had the researchers, and that their unexplained changes to standards were improvements (for example, they changed DES to resist differential cryptanalysis 20 years before that technique was "discovered"). The notion that the NSA did more than just restrict key lengths to weaken crypto is recent.

elwell 12 years ago |

It's spelled "silicon", and "klein bottles".

Articulate 12 years ago | |

Thanks!

0xdeadbeefbabe 12 years ago |

But what about Martha?

logjam 12 years ago |

Cliff Stoll is a fantastic guy: warm, creative, super genius smart, and a truly giving human being.

Makes fantastic Klein bottles too.