Date: Sun, 2 Aug 92 18:51:50 PDT
From: brendan@CYGNUS.COM(Brendan Kehoe)
Subject: File 3--Cuckoo's Egg and Life

Life can take you in any number of directions, some of which may bring
you through Andy Warhol's proverbial fifteen minutes of fame.  Cliff
Stoll found himself propelled into that limelight, caught quite
unawares.  The tale of a six-bit accounting discrepancy leading to
spies and intrigue took the world by storm.  His life has apparently
calmed down now, but the results of his experience are still being
realized by the computing community.  Advances in technology, groups
like CERT and companies with full-time security alert personnel are
all, in part, testament to the work represented by his book.

The cosmopolitan appeal of The Cuckoo's Egg cannot be ignored,
however.  Fully half the importance of a message is its capacity to be
conveyed to as many people as possible.  Cliff accomplished this, in
spades.  Rather than limit the audience to technophiles who would eat
up the juicy details, The Cuckoo's Egg offered readers an insight into
how a "diamond in the rough" might go about dealing with what amounted
to an impossible situation.  Following Cliff as he was knocked about
from pillar to post, finding no help at all from those we would assume
are paid to investigate such things, made for truly fascinating and,
sometimes, disturbing reading.

Just over two years ago, I spent Christmas with a friend and his
family, the cost of returning to my native Maine proving prohibitively
high.  While browsing a North Pennsylvania mall, we happened upon The
Cuckoo's Egg in a bookstore, and my friend chose to buy it as a gift
for his father.  Someone I consider to be the perfect example of a not
terribly advanced, but quite comfortable, computer user, his dad was
instantly captured by the engaging story.  He literally inhaled it,
along with dozens of cigarettes, over the course of not more than two
days.  Chapter One on Tuesday, "THE END?" on Thursday evening.  A
flurry of questions hit over the weekend: was the network used at
Widener University, where we were Computer Science majors, capable of
these things?  had we ever seen anything like what had happened to
"that astronomer"?  wouldn't it be cool to have it happen to us?

The notoriety Cliff Stoll gained from what could be termed an ordeal
was not, in my opinion, the reason The Cuckoo's Egg had to happen.
Rather, it accomplished precisely what it set out to do: bring the
concerns of information security into the thoughts and conversations
of thousands of people.  People who would otherwise not have ever
encountered what may well prove to be one of the most decisive factors
in our world's future as we fast approach the new millennium.

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