| Cliff Stoll has a remote-controlled mini forklift equipped with two onboard video cameras. He uses it to retrieve boxes of hand-blown Klein bottles he stores in the crawl space under his Berkeley, California, house. As Andy Greenberg writes this week on Backchannel, the storage retrieval system is emblematic of the serious whimsy that Stoll—a polymath astronomer-physicist-cybersecurity guru—brings to every aspect of his life. He's perhaps best known as the author of The Cuckoo's Egg, his 1999 account of tracking down the hackers who infiltrated the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, where Stoll worked at the time in the IT department. Thirty years later, Greenberg explains, the book has taken on greater meaning: "It has become a kind of legend: the ur-narrative of a lone hacker hunter, a text that has inspired an entire generation of network defenders chasing their own anomalies through a vastly larger, infinitely more malicious internet." In other words, Stoll's legacy lives on. Mark Robinson | Features Editor, WIRED |
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