The Cuckoo’s Egg
In 1986, Clifford Stoll and his coworkers were frustrated by what they thought was a billing error of 75 cents in their monthly accounting. Suspecting a software bug, the new guy (Clifford) was put on to working out the error as a starter problem while he got familiar with the systems he was to manage... I've been home sick this week with a chest infection, and what with having a limited oxygen supply I didn't feel like I was braining super well. So what better way to pass the time between naps than another old book I've read before? This is another book I must have read before I started blogging such things, but discussions of old computing systems made me a bit nostalgic for a good gold fashioned tale of computer hackery. The story has some historical significance too, as shown by this quote from Wikipedia: This was one of the first — if not the first — documented cases of a computer break-in, and Stoll seems to have been the first to keep a daily logbook of the hacker's activities. There are a few things which strike me about this story -- Stoll was lucky. He arguably committed…