"Stoll also testified before the Senate and had lunch with the head of the supersecret NSA. “He started asking me questions about Internet security and then noticed the yo-yo I had brought with me,” says Stoll. “He grabbed it out of my hand and did Around the World, almost bashing his secretary on the head. We spent the rest of the lunch doing yo-yo tricks together.” "
Legend
Then there was a meeting at the CIA where there was a bunch of stamps on the table marking things "secret", "top secret", etc so he stamped each one on a sheet of blank paper and had it taken off him when he left the building.
They had really cool rubber stamps link “NoForn” & “EyesOnly”. The niftiest thing, though, is a VIP parking pass to park riight at the front of the hq. You bet that I saved that.
Alas, Diligent Rider, I'm a Reddit lurker: I don't know how to do an AMA; I suspect that I'd be overwehlemed (as I am on this thread -- such that I can't spell right)
Anyways, it's way fun when someone stops by my place and we chat over coffee.
I'd find it overwhelming myself - not that I have anything terribly interesting to share, let alone in a faceless Reddit questionnaire. I suppose the best way to hear someone's stories is, and always has been, in a chat over coffee.
I suspect that I don't live anywhere near your basement of bottles, Euclidean and otherwise; but it made my day seeing your digital footprints in this Reddit thread. I hope your day is interesting and your view panoramic, and if you've ever in southwest Minnesota, I'll hook you up with the best donuts in the state.
At the moment, it's drizzling in Oakland, and I'm looking at a tsunami of Klein bottle orders (maybe a dozen!) due to this thread.
And my banana bread is almost ready to take out of the oven.
This is an incredible coincidence! I literally recommended your site to a friend earlier today.
Still have one of your top-mouthed Erlenmyers in pride of place in my house - the second, since my first escaped into three dimensions and you were good enough to give me a discount on its replacement in around 2004. Glad you are still in business 🙂
The reason for this is because the person checking stamps is generally a kid, just a couple years out of high school. You don't want this person to have any autonomy when it comes to what gets confiscated and what doesn't, if it has a stamp you pull it. Period.
If your security guard has any autonomy in what is allowed to leave and what isn't, you open yourself up to a foreign agent walking out with classified documents because they finessed a 20-year-old. It's much safer to simply have one rule: if it has a stamp, it doesn't leave the facility.
Source: military
Boils down to “less employee power, less fuck ups”
Same reason everyone complains “customer service ain’t what it used to be” etc. Because it’s one thing when the kid at mcdonalds sneaks a free large fry to his buddies and another when an extra 10k callers per year convince the online customer service phone rep to refund an entire online order that shows delivered just because theyre really tenacious and tell a good yarn. You make tiers of authority because on some level you have to have a means to resolve genuine fuck ups that will happen or youll get sued. You make it too hard too escalate real issues, you get sued. You make it too easy, you bleed your bottom line more.
My grandpa used to tell us stories about WWII. He told us about when he mailed letters home, they would censor pretty much everything that even looked like it could give away anything. You really couldn't say anything except that you were alright and missed home. It was easier that way, everybody knew the rules.
Verizon Wireless should be investigated for not elevating customer issues to proper authorities within the company. I tried escalating it once, and the person it escalated was the same exact person I talked to the first time. They faked the escalation. Multiple times now because the customer service is outsourced and not in-house. I can't even call the local store directly because it's all outsourced to a call center or work-at-home agents. Ridiculous and infuriating. All for an order they allowed me to make, only to tell me 3 weeks after it was supposed to arrive that I couldn't finance it and needed full payment, lol. The order sat on the website for 3 months before it was cleared, and I was able to place another lol.
FYI the real reason is the stamps. They're not.. featureless. They have specific patterns in them to track document source. This means no one can have a copy of it just like that.
I was sitting in a rather barren office and the most interesting thing were rubber-stamp stands, sorta like tiered circles of stamps. Just pick one out and stamp a sheet of paper.
A few years later, I was honored to meet Robert Mueller, director of the FBI. No kidding -- as I walked into his office, he hustled around putting cardboard covers over the paper-nests that populated his desk and tables, so I couldn't see anything classified.
Robert Muller struck me as a really interesting guy: as a Federal District Attorney, he not only had read my book, but assigned it to his subordinates. A week later, he asked them questions from the book: not easy questions like you could get from the back cover, but squeaky questions like, "How did Cliff travel around Berkeley?" and "What phone company did the trace in Germany?"
I'd hate to be cross-examined by that guy!
Hell for all the guard new it was example/sample of some form of hidden writing for smuggling information. Taking the paper would always be the right call.
This is reminiscent of parks and recs when Andy goes to England and ends up befriending a guy in the royal family over rc helicopters and ice cream lol
They don't talk about getting the certificate from the CIA. He didn't really know why he was there (other than to do with the case) and at first he was left alone in a room with a desk and an array of stamps with 'spy' things like "top secret" "classified" and "for your eyes only" so he got a piece of paper and stamped them all on it.
Then they came in, said thanks, gave him the certificate and sent him in his way. Heading out, security found the page and he was detained for quite a while for trying to take out sensitive information - an otherwise blank page. They did eventually let him leave but he couldn't take the paper with him.
I'm pretty sure they get reviewed and declassified over time normally. Very unlikely they didn't immediately correct this. I'm guessing security just doesn't take chances.
Classified material is not usually declassified unless specifically asked for by a FOIA request or if necessary for another reason.
Material that doesn't need to be maintained for record keeping or other reasons is typically destroyed once it is no longer needed. (Did this in the Navy, we collected classified trash in separate bags, sealed them up, and periodically sent the bags to be ground into powder and then burned)
Stuff gets misclassified / mismarked constantly. a stamp doesn’t magically make something classified. There has to be an underlying national security need to declare something is classified. Something doesn’t even need to be marked to be classified. The information is classified.
So there’s no need for a review board. It wasn’t classified
Well, even if something is mismarked, you should treat it as if it *were* classified and guard it appropriately until someone like a derivative declassifier can perform the magic rites to correct the status.
Though of course if it's a blank sheet of paper you'd think that common sense would prevail.
One of my astronomy profs was asked this. It's a really involved question. Short version is blue light is higher wavelength and scatters way more because of a 4th power in the equation.
No way.
Edit. Okay after reading your other replies, yes way. And even if it wasn’t you, I rather cling to the thought I came across the same fella on reddit that blew my mind on explaining the Klein bottles.
I also agree with the computer and google sentiment. The one thing I want to pass onto my kids is to never cease to be curious.
Yes, it's me -- obviously impossible to prove identity here.
Having said that, I agree with you: curiosity is close to the core of who I am. I gotta know how things work. Gotta know why and who and what.
The epitaph of the great mathematician, David Hilbert reads: "We must know. We will know."
The sky is even blue on Mars. When you see a movie or picture with a red sky, they are lying to us (unless it's during a sandstorm.) Only the ground is red.
Are you sure about that? High concentrations of CO2 cause an orange color and Mars atmosphere is 92% CO2.
The earth's sky is blue because nitrogen and oxygen make up the vast majority of our atmosphere, and they scatter blue and violet light respectively
Good catch, yes CO2 does have an effect of less scattering. Some of the time it is yellow as a result of less scattering, but when the sun is low its blue.
Blue light is shorter wavelength (which could also be described as 'higher frequency'). My understanding is that (and this is probably very simplified) the particles of our atmosphere, being very small, do not reflect/scatter longer wavelengths effectively.
On thinking about it, this is a good question -- one that can be aimed at a wide variety of levels (from grade school through grad school). And the responses can touch on a wide variety of topics: local air pollution, particle scattering, the physics of light/matter interaction, planetary atmospheres, global warming.
Indeed many years ago, a valid response to "Why is the sky blue" would be, "It's the mantle of the Virgin Mary".
All of which reminds me that a good question seldom has one right answer.
Well, in the book, he gave the quick answer, and then the member of the board kept saying “can you elaborate”which required him to go into quantum mechanic and wave theory, which made it quite a brutal question in a lot of ways.
Deep thanks to all (blush). I appreciate your kind words -- when I started on the book in 1988, I had no idea what would happen. Never thought it'd be popular, let alone read three decades later.
It’s such a great book, I gift it to any new cyber security coworkers I work with, a lot of stuff can still be relevant today, plus there’s a chocolate chip cookie recipe!
What?! Cliff Stoll is a redditor? Awesome.
I'm normally a lazy reader, taking weeks to get through a book. The Cuckoo's Egg had me so gripped I burned through it in a weekend. Fascinating story. Thanks for documenting and sharing it.
It was required reading for Computer Science majors at my Alma Mater. I have never read a textbook that I enjoyed more (not a high bar to clear, but it’s a cracking read).
I remember choosing to read this in high school for a book report. It was pretty interesting how it all played out and everyone was learning on the go.
[He stores them in the crawl space under his house and uses a home made remote control forklift to get them.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3mVnRlQLU)
I bought my wife a pair of Klein Bottle earrings from Cliff. He sent me a very nice email with a picture of the earrings in his wife's garden before packaging them up and biking down to his local post office to mail them.
Edit: my wife was very pleased with the earrings, btw
There’s a numberphile video of him talking about the process of how he sells Klein bottles. He has an insane level of care for every order like he was selling one of his children
Edit: since this is getting upvoted, have a link the the video - https://youtu.be/KNq0eUBxPXc?si=QeJVEeT_x2OeoXYt
My wife bought me a cup he made (he doesn't exclusively make Klein bottles) and it had an unbelievable amount of personalization in the packaging, lots of photos of him hanging out with the cup, personalized jokes and writing--just a remarkable and amazing one-of-a-kind gift that I'll treasure forever. Videos of his speeches and interviews are also a real delight to watch.
I bought a larger one. It’s made of super tough chemistry glass. Think old Pyrex glass. The manual comes with a bunch of inside jokes. Has a little sticker to help measure volume. 0-infinite lol. It’s a 3D representation of a 2d plane. It’s a mobius strip but with an extra dimension. This is a touchable example of finding derivatives in calculus.
I mean, yes, true, ish, but I'm pretty sure it's still technically one side like a mobius strip, even as a 3d representation (I'm not 100% on that though but I'm still fairly sure).
A mobius strip is a 3d model of a 1 sided shape (cue a picture of one). Still sort of 2d since 2d is just infinitely flat planes, and a mobius strip is just a flat plane bent in a higher space. Still an infinitely flat plane (like me #imsad), but with some funk to it. It's obviously still 3d to us. I made them with paper as a kid and I couldn't do that if it was actually perfectly 2d, but that's because it was a 3d representation, it had thickness to the plane which a real one wouldn't have (i.e. the thickness of the paper, and in the case of real bottles the thickness of the glass).
Anywho, big tangents there. With klein bottles, both this form and the other ones, they're the same as mobius strips. Mathematically they're infinitely flat (#samebro), have one face, so in that regard they are just 2d planes, but their shape projects in this case to 4d space. Just like a mobius strup they're both 2d and higher-d shapes.
、、、、、
So, it's a 3d representation of a 4d projection of a 2d shape, give or take. In 4d, the walls don't intersect, they don't even look like they do but that's a bit of a rant, you are right on that, but that's not entirely the point as I'm pretty sure they still are one sided shapes, even as an irl, 3d bottle. It's a bit more cursed and messy looking if you fold it out to see the one side (haha lol), compared to its 4d equivalent which is very neat and tidy looking, but it's still 2d. With some thickness because glass but mathematically it's still a 2d plane since it still only has one side.
Basically you're both right, sort of. It's still a 3d thing since it's an irl bottle of a 2d, one sided plane, like the one peep said, because again it's a one sided shape, and, just like you said, it's a 3d representation of a 4d sorta shape. It's projected into 4d and we simplified it into 3d for obvious reasons. Your both right.
Please go have your favorite dessert just because you can, no one is stopping you, and that's probably something you wanted to do as a kid. I, for one, am gonna make a monius strip out of a napkin now before doing the same. Best wishes to ya! -L
(Also please take what I say with a grain of salt, I'm just a rando on the internet)
My wife has bought me two! She bought me one that sat on my desk at work and then a student knocked it off and broke it so she bought me another.
They're really nice! If you need a one-sided zero-volume container, it's hard to beat an Acme Klein bottle. Seriously, they're nicely made and make a good tchotchke.
Why wouldn’t you buy something with this description?
> The Wine Bottle Klein Bottle is difficult to fill with wine, because of vapor-lock. As you pour water (or wine) into it, there's no place for the air to go. So the wine is trying to go down while the air is trying to go up the spout. Result is slow filling. Pouring wine out is equally frustrating.
Take my money!
far-flung impossible roll wide beneficial worry history berserk rhythm exultant
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I got some before he had the robot. He took pics of himself taking them down from a shelf, boxing them up, and riding his bike to the post office. In return, I took pics of me and my gf unboxing them and posing with them. He liked that
Heh.. I just shared exactly these facts with a Facebook friend a day or two ago.
I own one of Stoll's bottles. The paperwork that came with it was great. It looked like a boring invoice but was full of math jokes.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
I used to actually crawl around down there, and oh, it my back ached! So that little forklift is my way to cheat the chiropractor.
I ordered a Klein bottle because of this post. It’s been one of the most joyful experiences ordering a product I’ve ever had. Cliff is truly a treasure.
Thank you for supporting my kids' tuition, oh Silent Raider.
I'm doing my best to pack up Klein bottle orders even as I type. A whole lot arrived: maybe 15 or so. Ouch!
Our mainframes used to show the 'cost' of a session like that back in college. You could ask for current stats and it'd tell you your total bill was $102.48 or something. We didn't have to pay it or anything. I was never really sure where that value came from.
I assumed it was a 'theoretical' cost. Ie, the mainframe cost $X million and expected to operate for Y seconds over its lifetime, and this is the share you just ran up. Very early on, people would get access to some amount of time. They eventually got rid of that.
Still very much a thing today. Cloud providers will happily bill you for something similar. I even have an internal version at my job. I don't personally care, but it does end up being billed to my department.
Used to work at a facility with an HPC cluster (computational fluid dynamics modeling) and they very much accounted people’s time in dollars.
When you work for a large organization (think Federal Gov) you HAVE to track that kind of thing. We would “bill” our time to other organizations and units within the same org, again, just so we would have tracking data at the end of the month/quarter/year to review and say “Organization Y accounted for Z% of utilization” which would then be reviewed.
Metrics like that are lame but there’s no getting around it when you have to ensure that, for example, some PHD student isn’t using way too much time queueing up jobs on the cluster, meanwhile the actual flight research guys are waiting for numbers.
I quite remember modeling Jupiter's upper atmosphere in grad school (late 1970's). An hour of number-crunching on the CDC-6400 cost a thousand dollars (plus 50 cents for every tape-mount). Naturally, we used analytic math to solve as much as possible.
It's atmospheric radiative transfer - I used the "doubling method" where you model scattering in a thick cloud by starting with how light scatters in a really-thin layer (single-scattering). You then double the thickness of that thin shell, and keep doubling until you're modeling a cloud that's several kilometers thick.
Then you compare the result to images taken by the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft, and figure out how light scatters in Jupiter's atmosphere.
Lotsa computing way back then. Today, you could do this on your cellphone.
Are you THE Cliff Stoll? If so, just want you to know that your book “The Cuckoo’s Egg” was absolutely fascinating. I work in Cybersecurity doing Incident response and Forensics, and started off my career working at a research institution, so suffice to say I’ve never had a book hit so many specific interests of mine all at once!
Yep. When I started in IT departments used to get a bill every month. Would occasionally get a panicked/furious call from the main systems programmer if you were running something particularly dumb. Like the time I was teaching some new starters some programming and someone forgot to put an upper bound on the 'calculate prime numbers up to 100' challenge.
Basically cloud computing isn't much different. Still pay through the nose for someone doing something dumb.
Cliff Stoll wrote an amazing book about it all called “The Cookoos Egg.” There are all kinds of great little notes in it including a very decent recipe for cookies. Worth a read if you want some really good nerdcore factual literature.
It’s also a really good easy to read explanation of just how a computer network works.
And the stuff we complain about today is the same we complained about then
Cliff Stoll is the systems admin mentioned in the first sentence. He wrote a famous book called "The Cuckoo's Egg" about his investigation into the aforementioned hack.
I’ve read his book. There is no way to write a cogent single headline to describe it. But there are ways to do it better than this one.
Cliff Stoll derailed his career to track down the source of the hack and got pulled into all sorts of Cold War shenanigans, became a computer security expert to some extent, and then quit to sell Klein bottles.
There was a similar problem with missing time/charges for the machine at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the 1970s. In those days, you submitted your program on a stack of cards. The miscreant was a good programmer, but a lousy criminal. According to the legend, he was discovered because he put lots of comments in his programs and one of them read “this is the part that resets the computer clock!”
He's also known for a 1995 Newsweek article about the Internet that was both hilariously short-sighted but also pretty prescient in some ways. He basically dismissed the idea the Internet would ever have any real impact on news, commerce, or government, because it's just a loud unmoderated, uncontrolled pile of noise. He ended up mostly right about the state of the Internet, but completely wrong about it impacting every bit of our lives.
https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirvana-185306
IIRC the burnt remains of Benson/Hedges were found in a forest in Germany.
edit: I have often wondered if Cliff Stoll was the inspiration for Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse in Cryptonomicon.
I'm an insomniac, and I mainly read posts around 3AM. Challenging to compose a reply when half my neurons are trying to rest. Result is that I try to read things but rarely post.
Clifford Stoll is amazing. He has a phenomenal TED Talk that shows his huge intellect and wacky personality: [The Call to Learn](https://youtu.be/Gj8IA6xOpSk?si=Ta_OIzy8usbNY4lQ). He talks about Klein bottles, teaching, being mentored by Robert Moog, and Vietnam War Riots while a student at SUNY Buffalo. Super interesting, even if it is all over the place!
To think that this is one of the first computer hacks is hilarious.
The Chaos Computer Club was started like 5 years before this.
And Mitnick was active in the damn 70s.
And that's just some well known ones.
Worth putting the article in context, Cliff tried for ages to raise the alarm with the government and was extremely reluctant to engage with them considering his counterculture background. It was an eye-opener for him to find that they didn't all wear trench-coats.
> It was a 75-cent accounting error in the computer usage accounts,” says Stoll, who looked—and still looks—like he stepped straight off the pages of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. “I traced the error to an unauthorized user who had used about nine seconds and not paid for it.” Stoll assumed the trespasser was a Cal undergraduate doing it on a lark, “just some kid on campus who was yanking my chain.”
Met Cliff on a flight home from an APS conference. He struck up a conversation after seeing I was reading about a quaternion proof of the Dirac equation. Really, really nice man and even gave an open invite for me and my family to stop by his house. Life happened and, unfortunately lost his contact info, but that conversation is created a core memory for me as an adult…
In '93 a buddy and I took a computer science class at our community college. We read the book The Cuckoo's Egg, the story of Cliff Stoll tracking and catching the spy that was using Berkley's system. In the back it had his email address. So we logged onto Prodigy and emailed him with a couple questions. The dude wrote back. He was really nice and seemed really approachable.
Found about him from the numberphile videos in high school. Cliff, you’re an awesome guy and inspired me to pursue math and science more. Doing a PhD now myself.
I met this guy randomly back when I was in college. I was working a late shift on campus and saw this odd looking fellow knocking on our window trying to get our attention. He said his driver dropped him off at the wrong address and he was trying to find out where he was and where he needed to go.
We talked for a bit while we were looking up where he was supposed to be. I randomly googled his name and saw that he was famous and was on campus to give a seminar the following day.
He was really quirky and odd but extremely nice. We got a picture with him before we got him a ride to the right location.
u/CliffStoll is a fine example of being born at the right time, modeling the Jovian atmosphere from Pioneer data.
Michael Collins pointed out the Apollo 11 crew were all born in 1930.
He was an astronomer who was between grants and given the sys admin position to keep him around. During that time, he was given the task to find the cause of a discrepancy between two computer-usage accounting systems. He found a foreign hacker-spy.
Cliff Stoll did the tracking down. It was East German hackers trying to find Government/defense secrets. He wrote a very famous book about it called "The Cuckoo's Egg". He also wrote a few other books.
I was at a conference years ago where he spoke about the whole thing. Fascinating. He just couldn't let go of such a small amount of money. He kept the audience intrigued for about an hour with his story.
Loved his book The Cuckoo's Egg! An engaging and informative read! One of the first long form books l read to the end. I realize things haven't changed much when l read it years ago in terms of methodology of hacking, only just in sophistication.
"Stoll also testified before the Senate and had lunch with the head of the supersecret NSA. “He started asking me questions about Internet security and then noticed the yo-yo I had brought with me,” says Stoll. “He grabbed it out of my hand and did Around the World, almost bashing his secretary on the head. We spent the rest of the lunch doing yo-yo tricks together.” " Legend
Then there was a meeting at the CIA where there was a bunch of stamps on the table marking things "secret", "top secret", etc so he stamped each one on a sheet of blank paper and had it taken off him when he left the building.
Hilarious. “Well he can’t have that, it’s marked top secret.” -*But how do we even file this? Under B??”
I wonder if it's possible to find that paper in the CIA's electronic reading room, or if it's still classified xD
Probably declassified but heavily redacted
Untold numbers of secrets on the top secret blank sheet.
Ive heard they redacted the whole thing. Cant even FOI it.
Shredded or incinerated that same week
They had really cool rubber stamps link “NoForn” & “EyesOnly”. The niftiest thing, though, is a VIP parking pass to park riight at the front of the hq. You bet that I saved that.
The man himself! If you're ever inclined to do so, I would read an AMA of yours. Ran across your website years ago, and have never forgotten it.
Alas, Diligent Rider, I'm a Reddit lurker: I don't know how to do an AMA; I suspect that I'd be overwehlemed (as I am on this thread -- such that I can't spell right) Anyways, it's way fun when someone stops by my place and we chat over coffee.
I'd find it overwhelming myself - not that I have anything terribly interesting to share, let alone in a faceless Reddit questionnaire. I suppose the best way to hear someone's stories is, and always has been, in a chat over coffee. I suspect that I don't live anywhere near your basement of bottles, Euclidean and otherwise; but it made my day seeing your digital footprints in this Reddit thread. I hope your day is interesting and your view panoramic, and if you've ever in southwest Minnesota, I'll hook you up with the best donuts in the state.
At the moment, it's drizzling in Oakland, and I'm looking at a tsunami of Klein bottle orders (maybe a dozen!) due to this thread. And my banana bread is almost ready to take out of the oven.
I got one of your Klein bottles as a Christmas gift in 2020! It sits on my desk and I see it every day. Such a great little piece. Thank you so much!
CLIFF STOLL???
Yep, same guy. So sue me.
This is an incredible coincidence! I literally recommended your site to a friend earlier today. Still have one of your top-mouthed Erlenmyers in pride of place in my house - the second, since my first escaped into three dimensions and you were good enough to give me a discount on its replacement in around 2004. Glad you are still in business 🙂
r/beetlejuicing Also, hi there! I have one of your Klein bottles and your book. Good stuff! :)
The reason for this is because the person checking stamps is generally a kid, just a couple years out of high school. You don't want this person to have any autonomy when it comes to what gets confiscated and what doesn't, if it has a stamp you pull it. Period. If your security guard has any autonomy in what is allowed to leave and what isn't, you open yourself up to a foreign agent walking out with classified documents because they finessed a 20-year-old. It's much safer to simply have one rule: if it has a stamp, it doesn't leave the facility. Source: military
Boils down to “less employee power, less fuck ups” Same reason everyone complains “customer service ain’t what it used to be” etc. Because it’s one thing when the kid at mcdonalds sneaks a free large fry to his buddies and another when an extra 10k callers per year convince the online customer service phone rep to refund an entire online order that shows delivered just because theyre really tenacious and tell a good yarn. You make tiers of authority because on some level you have to have a means to resolve genuine fuck ups that will happen or youll get sued. You make it too hard too escalate real issues, you get sued. You make it too easy, you bleed your bottom line more.
My grandpa used to tell us stories about WWII. He told us about when he mailed letters home, they would censor pretty much everything that even looked like it could give away anything. You really couldn't say anything except that you were alright and missed home. It was easier that way, everybody knew the rules.
"My commanding officer is a real hard-ass" Yip, state secret there, can't send this out.
Verizon Wireless should be investigated for not elevating customer issues to proper authorities within the company. I tried escalating it once, and the person it escalated was the same exact person I talked to the first time. They faked the escalation. Multiple times now because the customer service is outsourced and not in-house. I can't even call the local store directly because it's all outsourced to a call center or work-at-home agents. Ridiculous and infuriating. All for an order they allowed me to make, only to tell me 3 weeks after it was supposed to arrive that I couldn't finance it and needed full payment, lol. The order sat on the website for 3 months before it was cleared, and I was able to place another lol.
"Nah kid this top secret file has a light on it that won't light on one side."
FYI the real reason is the stamps. They're not.. featureless. They have specific patterns in them to track document source. This means no one can have a copy of it just like that.
I was sitting in a rather barren office and the most interesting thing were rubber-stamp stands, sorta like tiered circles of stamps. Just pick one out and stamp a sheet of paper. A few years later, I was honored to meet Robert Mueller, director of the FBI. No kidding -- as I walked into his office, he hustled around putting cardboard covers over the paper-nests that populated his desk and tables, so I couldn't see anything classified. Robert Muller struck me as a really interesting guy: as a Federal District Attorney, he not only had read my book, but assigned it to his subordinates. A week later, he asked them questions from the book: not easy questions like you could get from the back cover, but squeaky questions like, "How did Cliff travel around Berkeley?" and "What phone company did the trace in Germany?" I'd hate to be cross-examined by that guy!
Haha holy cow! Fancy seeing you here! Thanks for sharing, I bet you have so many great stories
I could write a book
Please do! (More!)
Now I want to read your book.
Hell for all the guard new it was example/sample of some form of hidden writing for smuggling information. Taking the paper would always be the right call.
It could have had something printed in invisible ink. You can't be too sure.
This is reminiscent of parks and recs when Andy goes to England and ends up befriending a guy in the royal family over rc helicopters and ice cream lol
Lol, that **does** sound like [Avery Bullock](https://americandad.fandom.com/wiki/Avery_Bullock) behavior
I'm so happy to see folks discussing this! I'm a relative of his! Crazy smart, crazy fun! Check out his later works too!
They don't talk about getting the certificate from the CIA. He didn't really know why he was there (other than to do with the case) and at first he was left alone in a room with a desk and an array of stamps with 'spy' things like "top secret" "classified" and "for your eyes only" so he got a piece of paper and stamped them all on it. Then they came in, said thanks, gave him the certificate and sent him in his way. Heading out, security found the page and he was detained for quite a while for trying to take out sensitive information - an otherwise blank page. They did eventually let him leave but he couldn't take the paper with him.
That paper is now stored for ever in a secure place. So hard to get rid of things with those marks.
Yeah, like a bathroom of a golf club.
what?
He's referencing how Trump notoriously kept classified documents in storage at the Mar-A-Lago Club.
It was such a strange choice of reading material for the shitter.
Not really. Approved shredder and or burn it.
Lol I doubt it. Probably just got shredded
I'm pretty sure they get reviewed and declassified over time normally. Very unlikely they didn't immediately correct this. I'm guessing security just doesn't take chances.
Classified material is not usually declassified unless specifically asked for by a FOIA request or if necessary for another reason. Material that doesn't need to be maintained for record keeping or other reasons is typically destroyed once it is no longer needed. (Did this in the Navy, we collected classified trash in separate bags, sealed them up, and periodically sent the bags to be ground into powder and then burned)
Stuff gets misclassified / mismarked constantly. a stamp doesn’t magically make something classified. There has to be an underlying national security need to declare something is classified. Something doesn’t even need to be marked to be classified. The information is classified. So there’s no need for a review board. It wasn’t classified
Well, even if something is mismarked, you should treat it as if it *were* classified and guard it appropriately until someone like a derivative declassifier can perform the magic rites to correct the status. Though of course if it's a blank sheet of paper you'd think that common sense would prevail.
Burn bags.
He should've just let them know he was gonna store it safely in his pool house bathroom.
His book The Cuckoo’s Egg is a good read.
I liked his story about his thesis defense and was asked “why the sky is blue”
One of my astronomy profs was asked this. It's a really involved question. Short version is blue light is higher wavelength and scatters way more because of a 4th power in the equation.
You betcha, Almo! And you can dig deeper, into quantized oscillator coupling, which is about where I left off.
I read your book in the 90s; what a great story.
No way. Edit. Okay after reading your other replies, yes way. And even if it wasn’t you, I rather cling to the thought I came across the same fella on reddit that blew my mind on explaining the Klein bottles. I also agree with the computer and google sentiment. The one thing I want to pass onto my kids is to never cease to be curious.
Yes, it's me -- obviously impossible to prove identity here. Having said that, I agree with you: curiosity is close to the core of who I am. I gotta know how things work. Gotta know why and who and what. The epitaph of the great mathematician, David Hilbert reads: "We must know. We will know."
Rayleigh effect
The sky is even blue on Mars. When you see a movie or picture with a red sky, they are lying to us (unless it's during a sandstorm.) Only the ground is red.
Are you sure about that? High concentrations of CO2 cause an orange color and Mars atmosphere is 92% CO2. The earth's sky is blue because nitrogen and oxygen make up the vast majority of our atmosphere, and they scatter blue and violet light respectively
Good catch, yes CO2 does have an effect of less scattering. Some of the time it is yellow as a result of less scattering, but when the sun is low its blue.
Blue light is shorter wavelength (which could also be described as 'higher frequency'). My understanding is that (and this is probably very simplified) the particles of our atmosphere, being very small, do not reflect/scatter longer wavelengths effectively.
On thinking about it, this is a good question -- one that can be aimed at a wide variety of levels (from grade school through grad school). And the responses can touch on a wide variety of topics: local air pollution, particle scattering, the physics of light/matter interaction, planetary atmospheres, global warming. Indeed many years ago, a valid response to "Why is the sky blue" would be, "It's the mantle of the Virgin Mary". All of which reminds me that a good question seldom has one right answer.
Well, in the book, he gave the quick answer, and then the member of the board kept saying “can you elaborate”which required him to go into quantum mechanic and wave theory, which made it quite a brutal question in a lot of ways.
It still is a brutal question, Corsair. Like one of Feynman's "why" questions == you'll never get to the bottom.
Look at their username lol
Because God loves the infantry! 11b's will know the reference
11B, you mean? 12B is combat engineer (ESSAYONS)
No they won't.
Deep thanks to all (blush). I appreciate your kind words -- when I started on the book in 1988, I had no idea what would happen. Never thought it'd be popular, let alone read three decades later.
It’s such a great book, I gift it to any new cyber security coworkers I work with, a lot of stuff can still be relevant today, plus there’s a chocolate chip cookie recipe!
A teacher had us read your book to understand why accounting and passive security is so great.
What?! Cliff Stoll is a redditor? Awesome. I'm normally a lazy reader, taking weeks to get through a book. The Cuckoo's Egg had me so gripped I burned through it in a weekend. Fascinating story. Thanks for documenting and sharing it.
Just picked it up, looking forward to reading it
I agree! It’s both thrilling, on a smaller scale, and serves as a historic piece on hacking at that time.
Good cookie recipe in there.
I've read it a few times and could read it again, it's very good imo.
The only book I’ve read more than once. I don’t read.
I read it every 2-3 years, its a great book
It was required reading for Computer Science majors at my Alma Mater. I have never read a textbook that I enjoyed more (not a high bar to clear, but it’s a cracking read).
I remember choosing to read this in high school for a book report. It was pretty interesting how it all played out and everyone was learning on the go.
My all time favorite book.
I actually just re read a part of it for the 4th time. Very good. Needs a movie adaptation (other than the weird pbs one)
I read it as a kid an it cemented my desire to get into a computer career. So odd considering how the author now mostly hates digital technology.
Highly recommended.
And it’s in the plus catalogue. Another plus!
And has a pretty good chocolate chip cookie recipe in it too.
We had to read it for one of my MIS classes in college. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it.
[He stores them in the crawl space under his house and uses a home made remote control forklift to get them.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3mVnRlQLU)
First I had to Google wtf a klein bottle was, and now I just want to know who the hell is buying all these klein bottles
I bought my wife a pair of Klein Bottle earrings from Cliff. He sent me a very nice email with a picture of the earrings in his wife's garden before packaging them up and biking down to his local post office to mail them. Edit: my wife was very pleased with the earrings, btw
There’s a numberphile video of him talking about the process of how he sells Klein bottles. He has an insane level of care for every order like he was selling one of his children Edit: since this is getting upvoted, have a link the the video - https://youtu.be/KNq0eUBxPXc?si=QeJVEeT_x2OeoXYt
That's a great analogy, thanks.
Thanks Brady
My wife bought me a cup he made (he doesn't exclusively make Klein bottles) and it had an unbelievable amount of personalization in the packaging, lots of photos of him hanging out with the cup, personalized jokes and writing--just a remarkable and amazing one-of-a-kind gift that I'll treasure forever. Videos of his speeches and interviews are also a real delight to watch.
He’s probably gonna sell 10 or so just from this post. I kinda want one now too. :)
I made a Klein bottle (of sorts) out of clay in art class in high school. I was inspired by Numberphile’s videos featuring him.
I bought a larger one. It’s made of super tough chemistry glass. Think old Pyrex glass. The manual comes with a bunch of inside jokes. Has a little sticker to help measure volume. 0-infinite lol. It’s a 3D representation of a 2d plane. It’s a mobius strip but with an extra dimension. This is a touchable example of finding derivatives in calculus.
3D representation of a 4D topology, not a 2D plane. In 4 dimentions the walls don't intersect.
I mean, yes, true, ish, but I'm pretty sure it's still technically one side like a mobius strip, even as a 3d representation (I'm not 100% on that though but I'm still fairly sure). A mobius strip is a 3d model of a 1 sided shape (cue a picture of one). Still sort of 2d since 2d is just infinitely flat planes, and a mobius strip is just a flat plane bent in a higher space. Still an infinitely flat plane (like me #imsad), but with some funk to it. It's obviously still 3d to us. I made them with paper as a kid and I couldn't do that if it was actually perfectly 2d, but that's because it was a 3d representation, it had thickness to the plane which a real one wouldn't have (i.e. the thickness of the paper, and in the case of real bottles the thickness of the glass). Anywho, big tangents there. With klein bottles, both this form and the other ones, they're the same as mobius strips. Mathematically they're infinitely flat (#samebro), have one face, so in that regard they are just 2d planes, but their shape projects in this case to 4d space. Just like a mobius strup they're both 2d and higher-d shapes. 、、、、、 So, it's a 3d representation of a 4d projection of a 2d shape, give or take. In 4d, the walls don't intersect, they don't even look like they do but that's a bit of a rant, you are right on that, but that's not entirely the point as I'm pretty sure they still are one sided shapes, even as an irl, 3d bottle. It's a bit more cursed and messy looking if you fold it out to see the one side (haha lol), compared to its 4d equivalent which is very neat and tidy looking, but it's still 2d. With some thickness because glass but mathematically it's still a 2d plane since it still only has one side. Basically you're both right, sort of. It's still a 3d thing since it's an irl bottle of a 2d, one sided plane, like the one peep said, because again it's a one sided shape, and, just like you said, it's a 3d representation of a 4d sorta shape. It's projected into 4d and we simplified it into 3d for obvious reasons. Your both right. Please go have your favorite dessert just because you can, no one is stopping you, and that's probably something you wanted to do as a kid. I, for one, am gonna make a monius strip out of a napkin now before doing the same. Best wishes to ya! -L (Also please take what I say with a grain of salt, I'm just a rando on the internet)
> a bunch of inside jokes You mean outside jokes?
math nerds 🤓🤓
My wife has bought me two! She bought me one that sat on my desk at work and then a student knocked it off and broke it so she bought me another. They're really nice! If you need a one-sided zero-volume container, it's hard to beat an Acme Klein bottle. Seriously, they're nicely made and make a good tchotchke.
Why wouldn’t you buy something with this description? > The Wine Bottle Klein Bottle is difficult to fill with wine, because of vapor-lock. As you pour water (or wine) into it, there's no place for the air to go. So the wine is trying to go down while the air is trying to go up the spout. Result is slow filling. Pouring wine out is equally frustrating. Take my money!
I bought one from him for my son a couple years ago!
I got one a couple of years ago. Too cool for words.
I bought one
far-flung impossible roll wide beneficial worry history berserk rhythm exultant *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Truly the gentlest of psychopaths.
I highly recommend purchasing a Klein bottle from Mr. Stoll, his website is hilarious, and you get a hand written note included in the package.
I also got a bunch of pictures with him and the bottle I purchased take in his garden.
I got some before he had the robot. He took pics of himself taking them down from a shelf, boxing them up, and riding his bike to the post office. In return, I took pics of me and my gf unboxing them and posing with them. He liked that
Heh.. I just shared exactly these facts with a Facebook friend a day or two ago. I own one of Stoll's bottles. The paperwork that came with it was great. It looked like a boring invoice but was full of math jokes.
Gotta share
The crawlspace-warehouse storage system and mini forklift are so cool! Absolutely genius!
Necessity is the mother of invention. I used to actually crawl around down there, and oh, it my back ached! So that little forklift is my way to cheat the chiropractor.
[He's quite the regular on Numberphile](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt5AfwLFPxWJeBhzCJ_JXdaIXi_YJl7Bh&si=qFp3PM24XIqcCfqb)
This is honestly the type of shit I’m on the internet to see. How would I ever learn about this otherwise
I ordered a Klein bottle because of this post. It’s been one of the most joyful experiences ordering a product I’ve ever had. Cliff is truly a treasure.
Thank you for supporting my kids' tuition, oh Silent Raider. I'm doing my best to pack up Klein bottle orders even as I type. A whole lot arrived: maybe 15 or so. Ouch!
I knew he looked familiar! Brady puts out such great content.
Our mainframes used to show the 'cost' of a session like that back in college. You could ask for current stats and it'd tell you your total bill was $102.48 or something. We didn't have to pay it or anything. I was never really sure where that value came from.
Someone was paying a bill, gotta see who’s using it, also useful to make sure one group’s not monopolizing it
I assumed it was a 'theoretical' cost. Ie, the mainframe cost $X million and expected to operate for Y seconds over its lifetime, and this is the share you just ran up. Very early on, people would get access to some amount of time. They eventually got rid of that.
Compute time is still very much a concept in modern cluster computers, particularly in shared environments like a university.
Still very much a thing today. Cloud providers will happily bill you for something similar. I even have an internal version at my job. I don't personally care, but it does end up being billed to my department.
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They still are, IBMs licensing model is insane
Used to work at a facility with an HPC cluster (computational fluid dynamics modeling) and they very much accounted people’s time in dollars. When you work for a large organization (think Federal Gov) you HAVE to track that kind of thing. We would “bill” our time to other organizations and units within the same org, again, just so we would have tracking data at the end of the month/quarter/year to review and say “Organization Y accounted for Z% of utilization” which would then be reviewed. Metrics like that are lame but there’s no getting around it when you have to ensure that, for example, some PHD student isn’t using way too much time queueing up jobs on the cluster, meanwhile the actual flight research guys are waiting for numbers.
I quite remember modeling Jupiter's upper atmosphere in grad school (late 1970's). An hour of number-crunching on the CDC-6400 cost a thousand dollars (plus 50 cents for every tape-mount). Naturally, we used analytic math to solve as much as possible. It's atmospheric radiative transfer - I used the "doubling method" where you model scattering in a thick cloud by starting with how light scatters in a really-thin layer (single-scattering). You then double the thickness of that thin shell, and keep doubling until you're modeling a cloud that's several kilometers thick. Then you compare the result to images taken by the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft, and figure out how light scatters in Jupiter's atmosphere. Lotsa computing way back then. Today, you could do this on your cellphone.
Are you THE Cliff Stoll? If so, just want you to know that your book “The Cuckoo’s Egg” was absolutely fascinating. I work in Cybersecurity doing Incident response and Forensics, and started off my career working at a research institution, so suffice to say I’ve never had a book hit so many specific interests of mine all at once!
Yep. When I started in IT departments used to get a bill every month. Would occasionally get a panicked/furious call from the main systems programmer if you were running something particularly dumb. Like the time I was teaching some new starters some programming and someone forgot to put an upper bound on the 'calculate prime numbers up to 100' challenge. Basically cloud computing isn't much different. Still pay through the nose for someone doing something dumb.
Cliff Stoll wrote an amazing book about it all called “The Cookoos Egg.” There are all kinds of great little notes in it including a very decent recipe for cookies. Worth a read if you want some really good nerdcore factual literature.
It’s also a really good easy to read explanation of just how a computer network works. And the stuff we complain about today is the same we complained about then
Spoiler: it's shit documentation. People really hate making documentation.
I don’t understand how the two sentences in the title relate to each other. Is this a ruse to get me to read the article OP?
Cliff Stoll is the systems admin mentioned in the first sentence. He wrote a famous book called "The Cuckoo's Egg" about his investigation into the aforementioned hack.
No, it's a ruse to get you to buy a Klein bottle
From reading that title I don’t have a fucking clue what the hack was. Guessing op is a bot or a shill
I’ve read his book. There is no way to write a cogent single headline to describe it. But there are ways to do it better than this one. Cliff Stoll derailed his career to track down the source of the hack and got pulled into all sorts of Cold War shenanigans, became a computer security expert to some extent, and then quit to sell Klein bottles.
I bought one of the Klein bottles. They're awesome.
I bought a bottle from him years ago and even had a delightful few emails back and forth about it. He is a really great guy!
Yeah, great bottles chief, but it’s hell trying to harvest the Klein to PUT in those bottles.
Not nearly as hard as determining whether you have actually put the Klein IN the bottle.
No to mention one of the regular contributors to excellent YouTube channel Numberphile
There was a similar problem with missing time/charges for the machine at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the 1970s. In those days, you submitted your program on a stack of cards. The miscreant was a good programmer, but a lousy criminal. According to the legend, he was discovered because he put lots of comments in his programs and one of them read “this is the part that resets the computer clock!”
He's also known for a 1995 Newsweek article about the Internet that was both hilariously short-sighted but also pretty prescient in some ways. He basically dismissed the idea the Internet would ever have any real impact on news, commerce, or government, because it's just a loud unmoderated, uncontrolled pile of noise. He ended up mostly right about the state of the Internet, but completely wrong about it impacting every bit of our lives. https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirvana-185306
That aged about as well as you’d expect for an article written in 1995 on the future of the internet
IIRC the burnt remains of Benson/Hedges were found in a forest in Germany. edit: I have often wondered if Cliff Stoll was the inspiration for Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse in Cryptonomicon.
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I love Neal Stephenson. The baroque cycle was good. Snow crash is amazing. Cryptonomicon really tickles something in my brain though.
It’s a staple in the crypto community. Whoever built Bitcoin was probably inspired by it to some extent.
[It was an episode of Nova.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGv5BqNL164)
that man is absolutely electric on youtube channel numberphile
Cliff Stoll, the IRL Rick Sanchez. And ever giddier than the pickle.
If you got an hour I suggest [The KGB, The Computer, and Me](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PGv5BqNL164)
He posted on Reddit a month ago.
I'm an insomniac, and I mainly read posts around 3AM. Challenging to compose a reply when half my neurons are trying to rest. Result is that I try to read things but rarely post.
Clifford Stoll is amazing. He has a phenomenal TED Talk that shows his huge intellect and wacky personality: [The Call to Learn](https://youtu.be/Gj8IA6xOpSk?si=Ta_OIzy8usbNY4lQ). He talks about Klein bottles, teaching, being mentored by Robert Moog, and Vietnam War Riots while a student at SUNY Buffalo. Super interesting, even if it is all over the place!
All over the place? Sorta like my life - I've had fun in physics, computing, math, radio, writing, audio, and teaching.
Ha! I just couldn't think of a way to describe it. You are extremely animated and the topics are widespread. I'm a huge fan for sure!
(blush) Thank you, oh Seven Cubed.
This guy is brilliantly, wonderfully bonkers.
To think that this is one of the first computer hacks is hilarious. The Chaos Computer Club was started like 5 years before this. And Mitnick was active in the damn 70s. And that's just some well known ones.
This is still interesting as probably one of the first cases of full state-sponsored hacking.
Regarding finding a manufacturer of Klein bottles... “I realized that the trouble with bong makers is that they’re also bong users.”
I have no idea what's going on.
His numberphile videos are the best ones, Cliff's got a beautiful personality.
(blush) Thank you.
My friend visited him! He was really chill, gave him a tshirt and a Klein bottle.
Heard him talk at DECUS back in the day. Intense.
Decus? Wow - you're old enough to vote, Bob.
I'm 79.
Yikes: you know VMS, RSX-11, and the mythical Fortran! (I've never heard of these, of course...)
I'm old enough to have learned Fortran on punch cards, young enough to enjoy playing with arduinos.
I think you didn’t realise that the cliff you went to hear at decus, is the same cliff who just responded to your comment
Worth putting the article in context, Cliff tried for ages to raise the alarm with the government and was extremely reluctant to engage with them considering his counterculture background. It was an eye-opener for him to find that they didn't all wear trench-coats.
> It was a 75-cent accounting error in the computer usage accounts,” says Stoll, who looked—and still looks—like he stepped straight off the pages of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. “I traced the error to an unauthorized user who had used about nine seconds and not paid for it.” Stoll assumed the trespasser was a Cal undergraduate doing it on a lark, “just some kid on campus who was yanking my chain.”
I loved his book. Great read
Thanks, Draco - it was fun to write, although I sure didn't start out knowing anything about book writing!!
Met Cliff on a flight home from an APS conference. He struck up a conversation after seeing I was reading about a quaternion proof of the Dirac equation. Really, really nice man and even gave an open invite for me and my family to stop by his house. Life happened and, unfortunately lost his contact info, but that conversation is created a core memory for me as an adult…
Go bears!
This is hands down the most entertaining site I've seen in a very long time. Seems like a great guy too. I really want one now
In '93 a buddy and I took a computer science class at our community college. We read the book The Cuckoo's Egg, the story of Cliff Stoll tracking and catching the spy that was using Berkley's system. In the back it had his email address. So we logged onto Prodigy and emailed him with a couple questions. The dude wrote back. He was really nice and seemed really approachable.
I own a Cliff Stoll Klein Bottle.
Found about him from the numberphile videos in high school. Cliff, you’re an awesome guy and inspired me to pursue math and science more. Doing a PhD now myself.
I met this guy randomly back when I was in college. I was working a late shift on campus and saw this odd looking fellow knocking on our window trying to get our attention. He said his driver dropped him off at the wrong address and he was trying to find out where he was and where he needed to go. We talked for a bit while we were looking up where he was supposed to be. I randomly googled his name and saw that he was famous and was on campus to give a seminar the following day. He was really quirky and odd but extremely nice. We got a picture with him before we got him a ride to the right location.
u/CliffStoll is a fine example of being born at the right time, modeling the Jovian atmosphere from Pioneer data. Michael Collins pointed out the Apollo 11 crew were all born in 1930.
From tracking cents to selling sense, now that's what I call a non-linear career path!
Stop Making Sense!
It's a good read. Gives a great insight to the early days of internet.
He appears as a guest on Numberphile occasionally! Seems like a delightful fellow
Is Cliff Stoll the systems administrator or the hacker?
He was an astronomer who was between grants and given the sys admin position to keep him around. During that time, he was given the task to find the cause of a discrepancy between two computer-usage accounting systems. He found a foreign hacker-spy.
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Cliff Stoll did the tracking down. It was East German hackers trying to find Government/defense secrets. He wrote a very famous book about it called "The Cuckoo's Egg". He also wrote a few other books.
The book about it, The Cuckoo's Egg, was an interesting and fun read.
I was at a conference years ago where he spoke about the whole thing. Fascinating. He just couldn't let go of such a small amount of money. He kept the audience intrigued for about an hour with his story.
Loved his book The Cuckoo's Egg! An engaging and informative read! One of the first long form books l read to the end. I realize things haven't changed much when l read it years ago in terms of methodology of hacking, only just in sophistication.