Home > Work > The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage

The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage QUOTES

The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage QUOTES

1 " The hacker didn't succeed through sophistication. Rather he poked at obvious places, trying to enter through unlock doors. Persistence, not wizardry, let him through. "

― , The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage

2 " Life was full: no hacker is worth missing a Dead concert for. "

― , The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage

3 " Of course. NSA is rumored to tape record every transatlantic telephone conversation. Maybe they’d recorded this session. "

― , The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage

4 " Cliff, I’d like to take over, but our charter prevents it. NSA can’t engage in domestic monitoring, even if we’re asked. That’s prison term stuff. "

― , The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage

5 " So what? Somebody’s always had control over information, and others have always tried to steal it. Read Machiavelli. As technology changes, sneakiness finds new expressions.” Martha "

― , The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage

6 " VI was predecessor to hundreds of word processing systems. By now, Unix folks see it as a bit stodgy—it hasn’t the versatility of Gnu-Emacs, nor the friendliness of more modern editors. Despite that, VI shows up on every Unix system. "

― , The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage

7 " Over the past decade Stallman created a powerful editing program called Gnu-Emacs. But Gnu’s much more than just a text editor. It’s easy to customize to your personal preferences. It’s a foundation upon which other programs can be built. It even has its own mail facility built in. Naturally, our physicists demanded Gnu; with an eye to selling more computing cycles, we installed it happily. "

― , The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage

8 " Astronomers saw me that way. “Cliff, he’s not much of an astronomer, but what a computer hacker!” (The computer folks, of course, had a different view: “Cliff’s not much of a programmer, but what an astronomer!” At best, graduate school had taught me to keep both sides fooled.) "

― , The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage

9 " it’s a part of the Internet, a computer network that cross-links a hundred other networks. "

― , The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage

10 " Richard Stallman, a free-lance computer programmer, loudly proclaimed that information should be free. "

― , The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage

11 " Ich langte in meine Tasche nach einem Milky Way - was sonst für einen Astronomen - und machte es mir bequem, um den Hacker auf meinem grünen Monitor zu beobachten. "

― , The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage

12 " Not often—with six-letter passwords a hacker had a better chance of winning the lottery than randomly guessing a particular password. Since the computer hangs up after a few log-in failures, the attacker would need all night to try even a few hundred possible passwords. No, a hacker couldn’t magically enter my system. He’d need to know at least one password. "

― , The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage