It's easy to dunk on Cliff Stoll for this, but a lot of the stuff that he was wrong about didn't really get PROPERLY solved until almost 20 years later! The Wo

It's easy to dunk on Cliff Stoll for this, but a lot of the stuff that he was wrong about didn't really get PROPERLY solved until almost 20 years later! The World Wide Web as we think of it today (browsers accessing websites over HTTP) was still nascent. SSL was only just announced 1 year earlier. The first Kindle wouldn't show up until 12 years after. And until the COVID pandemic most of the world still would have thought we weren't ready to effectively telecommunicate for work full time. (Arguably a lot of us still think that it's not sustainable long-term) Meanwhile, the late 90's were full of big dreams and exceedingly high expectations about what the Internet could be capable of, and the gap between expectations and reality is what contributed to the .com crash of the early 2000's Meanwhile, meanwhile, on a key subject which is the nature of TRUST of information on the Internet, we've come full circle as the last 4 years have shown that more access to better information does not guarantee a better informed populace if powerful forces with an interest in manipulating others have access to powerful platforms like Facebook where they can target their misinformation to the most radicalizable group. I would bet most people on this forum would not be able to predict accurately the next 25 years of technological progress, and if we tried, most of us would look as ridiculous as Cliff Stoll. His mistake was saying everything with as much certainty as he did.