After he finishes giving me a tour of his workshop, Stoll sits me down in his cluttered dining room lined with books, including a full volume set of the Oxford English Dictionary, one of the first things he says he bought with his Cuckoo's Egg advance. The police found that Hess, along with four other hackers, had together decided to sell their stolen secrets to the Soviets. Hess recognized Stoll, and began asking him in English why he had so doggedly pursued him.
He believes Hess, who was given a month suspended sentence for his intrusions, likely felt the same. At this point in the story, Stoll becomes silent and his face twists into a pained expression. He startles me by pounding his fist on his dining room table. You have a responsibility to those who have built those systems, those who maintain those networks, who built the delicate software.
You have a responsibility to your colleagues like me to behave ethically. For Stoll, it seems to stem from a time few other internet users remember, a time before the World Wide Web even existed and when most denizens of the internet were idealistic academics and scientists like him. Before the hackers—or, at least, the criminal and state-sponsored ones—arrived. He never imagined, 30 years ago, that the internet would become a medium for dark forces: disinformation, espionage, and war.
His mind bopping and dithering, Stoll grabs two plastic bottles, shakes them, and with more enthusiasm than Mr. Wizard ever mustered, displays a swirling vortex of colored water. A moment later, he slips an object under a powerful microscope that sits on a table in the dining room.
He stares for a minute, then joyfully waves his visitor over for a look, practically pushing his head to the eye pieces. Zoom in and a colorful, multi-textured world appears. It looks like a city as viewed from a blimp, like meticulously plowed fields or an abstract painting.
All Sections. About Us. B2B Publishing. Business Visionaries. Hot Property. Times Events. Times Store. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options. But the former hero of the hyper-hip is sounding the warning about cyberspace.
A certificate of appreciation from the CIA, which is stashed somewhere in his attic. Stoll also testified before the Senate and had lunch with the head of the supersecret NSA. We spent the rest of the lunch doing yo-yo tricks together.
Stoll had stepped through another wall, as well, into the numinous realm of fame, as the burgeoning tech world went wild with adulation. Every stop I made, there would be flowers waiting for me at the hotel. Someone even made a T-shirt with my face on it! He was more famous than he ever could have dreamed, and he hated it. But all people cared about was my computing. These people who are shouting out futures contracts, their jobs are going to be replaced.
He was further soured after a visit to the Berkeley Public Library. Stoll articulated his disenchantment in his next book, Silicon Snake Oil , published in , which urged readers to get out from behind their computer screens and get a life. Does a computer help a student learn? Yes, but what it teaches you is to go to the computer whenever you have a question, rather than relying on yourself. Suppose I was an evil person and wanted to eliminate the curiosity of children.
Give the kid a diet of Google, and pretty soon the child learns that every question he has is answered instantly. It was not a popular message in the rise of the dot-com era, as Stoll soon learned.
Boy, was I wrong! The flames and hate mail started piling up, and erstwhile fans now urged readers to picket his book appearances. In he tried to answer his critics with another book, High-Tech Heretic, but they were having none of it. Still, he is firm in his beliefs. Are antique stores, booksellers, taxi drivers, librarians, travel agents, and journalists the enemy of society?
They are being destroyed by our friend, the Internet. So he looked around for a way to make some money. Remember high school geometry class, when your teacher had you take a strip of paper, give it a half-twist, and tape the ends together? The result is a loop with only one side and one edge. In , another math wiz named Felix Klein took it up a level, essentially fusing two such loops together.
The result was a bottle with no inside and no outside, just one continuous plane. Ribet recalls seeing his first Klein bottle at the home of a colleague and deciding he wanted one. Clean, your hands would go right through each other. And it gets even worse. Good luck trying to get DNA to replicate, because protein folding will be very weird. At first, Stoll had a hard time finding someone to make Klein bottles.
Full of restless energy, he jumps from one topic to the next, darting back and forth across the stage. You may not be sure where he's going, but the ride is always part of the adventure. An astronomer though his astronomy career took a turn when he noticed a bookkeeping error that ultimately led him to track down a notorious hacker , researcher and internationally recognized computer security expert -- who happens to be a vocal critic of technology -- Stoll makes a sharp, witty case for keeping computers out of the classroom.
Currently teaching college-level physics to eighth graders at a local school, he stays busy in his spare time building Klein bottles.
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