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The Cuckoos Egg: Cliffs Persistence
The Cuckoo's Egg: Cliff's Persistence The Cuckoo's Egg: Cliff's Persistence By Clifford Stoll "The Cuckoo's Egg" is a story of persistence, love for one's work and is just plain funny! The story starts out with Clifford Stoll being "recycled" to a computer analyst/webmaster. Cliff, as he is affectionately called, is a long-haired ex-hippie that works at Lawrence Berkeley Lab. He originally was an astronomer, but since his grant wore out, he became a mainframe master. He was glad that instead of throwing him out into the unemployment office, the Lab recycled their people and downstairs he went, to the computer lab. A few days after he becomes the master of the mainframe, his colleague, Wayne Graves, asks him to figure out a 75cent glitch that is in the accounting system. It turns out that a computer guru, "Seventek" seems to be in town. None of his closest friends know that. The Lab becomes suspicious that it might be a hacker. To fill you in who Seventek is, he is a computer guru that created a number of programs for the Berkeley UNIX system. At the time, he was in England far from computers and civilization. The crew does not what to believe that it would be Seventek, so they start to look what the impostor is doing. Cliff hooks up a few computers to the line that comes from the Tymnet. Tymnet is a series of fiber-optic cables that run from a major city to another major city. So if you were in LA and wanted to hook up to a computer in the Big Apple you could call long distance, have a lot of interference from other callers and have a slow connection, or you could sign-up to Tymnet and dial locally, hop onthe optic cable and cruise at a T-3 line. The lab had only five Tymnet lines so Cliff could easily monitor every one with five computers, teletypes, and five printers. That was the difficult part, where to get all that equipment. At graduate school they taught Cliff to improvise. It was a Friday, and not many people come to work on Saturday. Since it was easier to make up an excuse than to beg for anything, he "borrowed" everything he needed. Then programmed his computer to beep twice when someone logged on from the Tymnet lines. The thing is, since he was sleeping under his desk, he would gouge his head on the desk drawer. Also, many people like to check their E-mail very late at night, so not to get interference. Because of that his terminal beeped a lot! The next day, he was woken up by the cable operator. Cliff said that he must have smelled like a dying goat. Any way, the hacker only logged on once during the night, but left an 80 foot souvenir behind. Cliff estimated a two to three hours roaming through the three million dollar pieces of silicon that he calls a computer. During that time he planted a "Cuckoo's egg." The cuckoo is a bird that leaves its eggs in other bird's nest. If it not were for the other species ignorance, the cuckoo would die out. The same is for the mainframe. There is a housecleaning program that runs every five minutes on the Berkeley UNIX. It is called atrun. The hacker put his version of atrun into the computer through a hole in the Gnu-Emacs program. It is a program that lets the person who is sending E-mail put a file anywhere they wished. So that is how the hacker became a "Superuser." A superuser has all the privileges of a system operator, but from a different computer. Cliff called the FBI, the CIA, and all the other three lettered agencies that that had spooks in trench coat and dark glasses (and some of them had these nifty ear pieces too!) Everyone except the FBI lifted a finger. The FBI listened but, they stated that if they hadn't lost millions of dollars in equipment, or classified data, they didn't what to know them. The hodgepodge of information between the CIA, NSA,and Cliff began to worry his lover, Martha. A little background on her. She and Clifford have know each other since they were kids, and lovers since they turned adults. They didn't feel like getting married because they thought that was a thing that you do when you're ...This is ONLY a preview of the article. If you would like to view the entire document, you must subscribe to Electronic References. Please register below now! Get This Full Article After Registration
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