
A strong defense of Clifford Stoll - Articulate
http://www.articulateventures.com/articulate-blog/category/a-rabid-defense-of-mr-clifford-stoll
======
bronson
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
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
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...](http://boingboing.net/2010/02/26/curmudgeony-essay-
on.html#comment-723356)

------
aaron695
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
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
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
Thank you. He's a great man.

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

~~~
Articulate
Thanks!

------
0xdeadbeefbabe
But what about Martha?

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

Makes fantastic Klein bottles too.

