A Book report on The Cuckoo?s Egg by Cliff Stoll - A Cuckoo?s Fledgling :: essays research papers

A Book report on The slits Egg by Cliff StollA Cuckoos Fledgling Although the 1980s are not generally perspective of as a decade of innocence, there were, however, a few pockets of novel utopia. One such example was the rapidly expanding online society, with its assortment of up-and-coming networks that were, to umteen technically inclined users, a virtual McDonalds Play swan with slides, ball pits and winding tubes to explore, all rapped in a security covert of innocence. Not until a bully invaded, did another bastion of delayed-maturity, Cliff Stoll, run across that Big Bother was not eager, or perhaps unable, to repel the encroacher on his behalf. This led Cliff to take responsibility and nucleotide up to his assailant, causing a transformation throughout many facets of his life. The Cuckoos Egg is the story of Cliff Stolls maturation into an adult, mirrored by the loss of innocence and youthful-trusting-openness taking place in the network community at the time, catalyz ed by a hacker halfway around the world, and necessitated by a nonchalant attitude among the governmental agencies supposed to be prudent for computer security. A question all parents, and some elder siblings, remove at some point is, when should I let Jr. stand on his own? and while it was only a case of bureaucratism not being equipped to quickly respond to a situation, this privation of response forced a man out of his comfort zone, gave him something to portion out about, and eventually made for an interesting book. It could even be hypothesized that Cliffs decision to marry was aided by the paradigm shift he experienced during the course of his hacker chase (Stoll 356). The delay of intervention on the part of the government agencies forced Cliff Stoll to leave the sidelines of his life, take responsibility, and blend in "pro-activealmost rabidabout computer security (370). At the source of his story, Cliff portrays himself as an academic dreamer (1), literally a sop up gazer he seams to be fumbling though life without a coiffure to get behind, and for that matter not really looking for one. Then when he starts chasing a hacker, thinking that he, might learn about phone traces and networks (35), he struck a blow to a tar-baby that would not let him go back to his life of indifference. The entanglement in pursuit of the hacker was elongated, significantly, by the fact that the government did not have contingencies in place to respond to computer crime, coupled with the simple fact that without a quantitative dollar value they did not take losses seriously.