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

A Book report on The Cuckoos Egg by Cliff StollA Cuckoos Fledgling Although the 1980s are not generally thought of as a decade of innocence, there were, however, a few pockets of insubstantial utopia. One such example was the rapidly expanding online community, with its assortment of up-and-coming networks that were, to many technically inclined users, a virtual McDonalds Play Place with slides, testis pits and winding tubes to explore, all rapped in a security blanket of innocence. Not until a bully invaded, did another bastion of delayed-maturity, Cliff Stoll, find that Big access was not eager, or perhaps unable, to repel the invader on his behalf. This led Cliff to take responsibility and stand up to his assailant, causing a revolution 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 consecrate in the network community at the time, catalyzed by a hacker halfway around the world, and necessitated by a nonchalant attitude among the judicatureal agencies sibylline to be responsible for computer security. A question all parents, and some elder siblings, ask at some point is, when should I let jr. stand on his own? and while it was only a case of bureaucracy not being equipped to quickly respond to a situation, this overleap of response forced a man out of his comfort zone, gave him something to care about, and eventually made for an interesting book. It could even be hypothesized that Cliffs conclusiveness 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 become "pro-activealmost rabidabout computer security (370). At the beginning of his story, Cliff portrays himself as an faculty member dreamer (1), literally a start gazer he seams to be fumbling though life without a cause to get behind, and for that matter not truly 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 institutionalise to respond to computer crime, coupled with the simple fact that without a quantitative dollar value they did not take losses seriously.