7 ms·

That sucks. Nice write-up of how this scam works, I wasn't aware of the details previously. Also, if anyone is unaware, this is this Clifford Stoll: https://en

by dflock 5y ago

That sucks. Nice write-up of how this scam works, I wasn't aware of the details previously. Also, if anyone is unaware, this is this Clifford Stoll: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Stoll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Stoll - who wrote this brilliant (and true) book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_(book) - which is a really good read and perfect for HN.

adrian_mrd 5y ago
Has anyone read his other book ‘Silicon Snake Oil’ [1] from 1995 lately? Sounds like most of his predictions in it (eg e-commerce will fail, digital books will not be viable, etc) were wildly off the mark - but were any prescient? [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Snake_Oil https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Snake_Oil
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- wombatpm 5y ago
  I read in 1995 when it came out. My take away - searching is not the same as browsing, and something is lost when serendipity is removed from the process. And the internet works for a certain mindset to the detriment of other points of view
- teraflop 5y ago
  Just from skimming through the book, it seems like its central thesis is an enumeration of all the ways in which computers and the Internet are terrible, accompanied by predictions that none of those flaws are ever likely to change. So it's not really a matter of any of his predictions being "prescient", it's just that some things have improved drastically, and others less so. For example, he complains that nobody will want to look up information from computerized databases because CD-ROMs are too slow; consumers won't shop online because they can't pay securely; retailers won't rely on e-commerce because too few customers have Internet access; nobody will want e-books because you can't read them on the subway; there's no way to effectively search for content online; digital art will never surpass clip art and crude photoshops; it's impossible for networks to be secure because data and credentials are unencrypted; and so on. On the bright side, he thinks that at least nobody will need to worry about online privacy, because it will be too cumbersome for anyone to effectively maintain databases of personal information. But on the other hand, with some of his observations, it's at least arguable that they still hold true 25 years later: > Anyone can post messages to the net. Practically everyone does. The resulting cacophony drowns out serious discussion. Online debates of tough issues are often polarized by messages taking extreme positions. > An original IBM PC, now over ten years old, is fully obsolete. Likely, it will still work perfectly and do everything it was build for; after all, the silicon and copper haven't deteriorated. But you can't get software for it any longer. > A word processor may last two years before the next version. These upgrades likely add as many new bugs as are patched, and result in a bigger, more complex program. One that's less and less compatible with old files. [...] Curiously, as computer hardware gets faster, programs run slower. > Photo retouching isn't new. Digital image processing, however, can be so extensive yet undetectable that it undermines the foundation of photojournalism -- that seeing is believing.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  He completely missed the boat about how Moore's Law would improve upon the power of early prototypes. It's a classic case of underestimating the power of exponential growth by visualizing it as low-order polynomial, and missing that "digital is worse than analog" is a problem that can be solved by increasing the scale of digital power. But he was right about tech will enable and amplify the worst in social behaviors.
29athrowaway 5y ago
There's this documentary about him too: "The KGB, the Computer, and Me" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGv5BqNL164 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGv5BqNL164
davidw 5y ago
He has occasionally stopped by this site: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=CliffStoll https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=CliffStoll
- CliffStoll 5y ago
  And, still do occasionally stop by! (woke up from sleeping, and a heavy load on my raspberry-pi web server told me something was happening...)
  - indigodaddy 5y ago
    Hah! That’s funny and cool. I mean hot.
  - billpg 5y ago
    Wait, your web server is a Raspberry PI, and its holding up while being on the HN front page. Do you have a caching service in front maybe?
    - eatonphil 5y ago
      From personal experience, any cheap vps that can serve static pages will stand the front of HN. The blogs that go down here typically back every request by MySQL (ahem, WordPress) which is totally unnecessary and often actively harmful since MySQL has very low default total connections allowed. The point being: don't serve requests backed by a database unless the results are likely to change very dynamically!
      - billpg 5y ago
        If you'll excuse me, I'm going to be looking at HTML cache add-ons for my WordPress site.
        eatonphil 5y ago
        Yes you can do that or there are static site generators backed by MySQL too. So your data and configuration site can still be dynamic but your served site will be completely static. The only difference between this and adding a cache is that the cache is another piece of software in your production stack.
nxpnsv 5y ago
Also, he did a numberphile podcast which was truly fantastic. I laughed and cried. Do listen to it.
- erk__ 5y ago
  Here is a link to the youtube version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxdcBD4ppF0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxdcBD4ppF0 And I will double up and say it is a great episode of a great podcast.
mprovost 5y ago
His TED talk is amazing, his energy for learning is so infectious. I just meant to post the link here but had to watch the whole thing again! https://www.ted.com/talks/clifford_stoll_the_call_to_learn?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/clifford_stoll_the_call_to_learn?l...
- indigodaddy 5y ago
  There’s a Cliff Stoll Ted Talk!?? I’ve read the book and watched the complimentary PBS side piece, but wasn’t aware of a ted talk, thanks!
  - CliffStoll 5y ago
    Sigh - sends me back 15 years or so. I'd prepared a 1 hour talk. When I was about to go on stage, they told me that I had only 15 minutes. So, well, I remembered one of the few things I learned in grad school: talk fast and don't give 'em a standing target. Covered my points and finished in, yep, 18 minutes.
    - arp242 5y ago
      Well, I bought a Klein bottle and knitted Klein hat after seeing that talk many years ago, so it wasn't entirely useless :-) I still have the hat. I no longer have the bottle as I moved to the other side of the world a number of years ago, and after inquiring with some mathematician friends it turned out that four-dimensional glass bottles are not compatible with three-dimensional backpacks :-/ When I got the package it was covered in hand-written notes; gosh, I don't remember what it said exactly, but it was hilarious; somehow you even managed to put some joke in Dutch on it. I wanted to email something back but I was shy and didn't know what to say. So, about a decade too late, thanks! Not only was I very happy with the bottle, the packaging absolutely made my day all those years ago.
    - elwell 5y ago
      I saw that talk a long time ago, but I can still hear you saying "I would dearly love to talk about one-sided objects!" I appreciate your infectious energy.
gfaure 5y ago
He's also a connoisseur and collector of slide rules and the Curta mechanical calculator! Here's a video of him describing how the Curta performs arithmetic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OynMJB-2J1o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OynMJB-2J1o — as well as the SciAm article he wrote on them: http://www.mycurta.com/Calculator.pdf http://www.mycurta.com/Calculator.pdf
- CliffStoll 5y ago
  Connoisseur? Naw! Stop by my place and you'll see a messy collection of oddball things ranging from some old calculators to stacks of old books. I received a Curta Calculator from my astronomy mentor, Ernst Both, when he got an HP-35 around 1973. I was one of his students; today, I can't look at it without thinking happy thoughts using a spectrohelioscope to understand sunspot magnetic fields. But that's another story...
  - gfaure 5y ago
    Wow, I'm honoured to hear from someone who loves these old calculating devices as much as I do! I have a Curta II and a number of the HP Voyager calculators from the 80s (11C, 15C, 16C), but the one that takes the pride of place in my collection has to be the Curta. Looking forward to adding a Klein bottle or beanie to my collection some day, too.
CliffStoll 5y ago
Thanks, DFlock. As you realize, writing up what happens is a necessary part of fixing a problem. That’s why I wrote Cuckoo’s Egg. I’m gratified that my own community has responded; perhaps someone at Amazon will pick up on this.
- CliffStoll 5y ago
  A minute ago, I added a few more details to my website-writeup.
- renw0rp 5y ago
  I've read your book a couple of years ago. When I saw your name on hacker news I thought it sounded familiar!
RobertoG 5y ago
>>"Nice write-up of how this scam works, I wasn't aware of the details previously." I still don't understand how it works. Why can somebody owning something called "Amvoom" claim something called "Acme Klein Bottle"? An even if they legally own the brand, how keeping the reviews when moving the brand to the new owner is the proper thing to do for the customers? By definition, the reviews are for another provider. I don't get it.
- s_fischer 5y ago
  My best guess is that amazon is using the entities associated with the registered trademark as some form of proof of identity. So since there was no registered trademark for Acme Klein Bottle, there was nothing to compare the new identity to when Amvoom submitted their request. I really hope I'm wrong though because this sounds like a very lazy and flawed system.
  - alisonkisk 5y ago
    > a very lazy and flawed system. That's how you make $100B, not by "doing things that don't scale" like handwriting thankyou notes to every customer.
    - CliffStoll 5y ago
      Allson, your comment hits home. I like to scribble thank you notes to customers. I was brought up that way. Anyhow, sooner or later, I'll meet the person who bought that Klein bottle - so I'd like to have a good feeling ahead of time.
mijoharas 5y ago
Ahhh... unfortunately there's no kindle version. (I'm too inundated with paper books that I tend to stick with digital for new purchases). Out of interest, is it publishing companies that make digital versions of books, or is it up to the author themselves to do that? (And if it's the latter this is a small request to Clifford to consider it if it's not too much of an arduous task. And provided their relationship with amazon isn't too soured by the current situation, which I could understand if it is).

by dflock 5y ago

adrian_mrd 5y ago

Has anyone read his other book ‘Silicon Snake Oil’ [1] from 1995 lately? Sounds like most of his predictions in it (eg e-commerce will fail, digital books will not be viable, etc) were wildly off the mark - but were any prescient? [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Snake_Oil https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Snake_Oil

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
wombatpm 5y ago
I read in 1995 when it came out. My take away - searching is not the same as browsing, and something is lost when serendipity is removed from the process. And the internet works for a certain mindset to the detriment of other points of view
teraflop 5y ago
Just from skimming through the book, it seems like its central thesis is an enumeration of all the ways in which computers and the Internet are terrible, accompanied by predictions that none of those flaws are ever likely to change. So it's not really a matter of any of his predictions being "prescient", it's just that some things have improved drastically, and others less so. For example, he complains that nobody will want to look up information from computerized databases because CD-ROMs are too slow; consumers won't shop online because they can't pay securely; retailers won't rely on e-commerce because too few customers have Internet access; nobody will want e-books because you can't read them on the subway; there's no way to effectively search for content online; digital art will never surpass clip art and crude photoshops; it's impossible for networks to be secure because data and credentials are unencrypted; and so on. On the bright side, he thinks that at least nobody will need to worry about online privacy, because it will be too cumbersome for anyone to effectively maintain databases of personal information. But on the other hand, with some of his observations, it's at least arguable that they still hold true 25 years later: > Anyone can post messages to the net. Practically everyone does. The resulting cacophony drowns out serious discussion. Online debates of tough issues are often polarized by messages taking extreme positions. > An original IBM PC, now over ten years old, is fully obsolete. Likely, it will still work perfectly and do everything it was build for; after all, the silicon and copper haven't deteriorated. But you can't get software for it any longer. > A word processor may last two years before the next version. These upgrades likely add as many new bugs as are patched, and result in a bigger, more complex program. One that's less and less compatible with old files. [...] Curiously, as computer hardware gets faster, programs run slower. > Photo retouching isn't new. Digital image processing, however, can be so extensive yet undetectable that it undermines the foundation of photojournalism -- that seeing is believing.
alisonkisk 5y ago
He completely missed the boat about how Moore's Law would improve upon the power of early prototypes. It's a classic case of underestimating the power of exponential growth by visualizing it as low-order polynomial, and missing that "digital is worse than analog" is a problem that can be solved by increasing the scale of digital power. But he was right about tech will enable and amplify the worst in social behaviors.

29athrowaway 5y ago

There's this documentary about him too: "The KGB, the Computer, and Me" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGv5BqNL164 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGv5BqNL164

davidw 5y ago

He has occasionally stopped by this site: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=CliffStoll https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=CliffStoll

CliffStoll 5y ago
And, still do occasionally stop by! (woke up from sleeping, and a heavy load on my raspberry-pi web server told me something was happening...)
- indigodaddy 5y ago
  Hah! That’s funny and cool. I mean hot.
- billpg 5y ago
  Wait, your web server is a Raspberry PI, and its holding up while being on the HN front page. Do you have a caching service in front maybe?
  - eatonphil 5y ago
    From personal experience, any cheap vps that can serve static pages will stand the front of HN. The blogs that go down here typically back every request by MySQL (ahem, WordPress) which is totally unnecessary and often actively harmful since MySQL has very low default total connections allowed. The point being: don't serve requests backed by a database unless the results are likely to change very dynamically!
    - billpg 5y ago
      If you'll excuse me, I'm going to be looking at HTML cache add-ons for my WordPress site.
      - eatonphil 5y ago
        Yes you can do that or there are static site generators backed by MySQL too. So your data and configuration site can still be dynamic but your served site will be completely static. The only difference between this and adding a cache is that the cache is another piece of software in your production stack.

nxpnsv 5y ago

Also, he did a numberphile podcast which was truly fantastic. I laughed and cried. Do listen to it.

erk__ 5y ago
Here is a link to the youtube version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxdcBD4ppF0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxdcBD4ppF0 And I will double up and say it is a great episode of a great podcast.

mprovost 5y ago

His TED talk is amazing, his energy for learning is so infectious. I just meant to post the link here but had to watch the whole thing again! https://www.ted.com/talks/clifford_stoll_the_call_to_learn?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/clifford_stoll_the_call_to_learn?l...

indigodaddy 5y ago
There’s a Cliff Stoll Ted Talk!?? I’ve read the book and watched the complimentary PBS side piece, but wasn’t aware of a ted talk, thanks!
- CliffStoll 5y ago
  Sigh - sends me back 15 years or so. I'd prepared a 1 hour talk. When I was about to go on stage, they told me that I had only 15 minutes. So, well, I remembered one of the few things I learned in grad school: talk fast and don't give 'em a standing target. Covered my points and finished in, yep, 18 minutes.
  - arp242 5y ago
    Well, I bought a Klein bottle and knitted Klein hat after seeing that talk many years ago, so it wasn't entirely useless :-) I still have the hat. I no longer have the bottle as I moved to the other side of the world a number of years ago, and after inquiring with some mathematician friends it turned out that four-dimensional glass bottles are not compatible with three-dimensional backpacks :-/ When I got the package it was covered in hand-written notes; gosh, I don't remember what it said exactly, but it was hilarious; somehow you even managed to put some joke in Dutch on it. I wanted to email something back but I was shy and didn't know what to say. So, about a decade too late, thanks! Not only was I very happy with the bottle, the packaging absolutely made my day all those years ago.
  - elwell 5y ago
    I saw that talk a long time ago, but I can still hear you saying "I would dearly love to talk about one-sided objects!" I appreciate your infectious energy.

gfaure 5y ago

He's also a connoisseur and collector of slide rules and the Curta mechanical calculator! Here's a video of him describing how the Curta performs arithmetic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OynMJB-2J1o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OynMJB-2J1o — as well as the SciAm article he wrote on them: http://www.mycurta.com/Calculator.pdf http://www.mycurta.com/Calculator.pdf

CliffStoll 5y ago
Connoisseur? Naw! Stop by my place and you'll see a messy collection of oddball things ranging from some old calculators to stacks of old books. I received a Curta Calculator from my astronomy mentor, Ernst Both, when he got an HP-35 around 1973. I was one of his students; today, I can't look at it without thinking happy thoughts using a spectrohelioscope to understand sunspot magnetic fields. But that's another story...
- gfaure 5y ago
  Wow, I'm honoured to hear from someone who loves these old calculating devices as much as I do! I have a Curta II and a number of the HP Voyager calculators from the 80s (11C, 15C, 16C), but the one that takes the pride of place in my collection has to be the Curta. Looking forward to adding a Klein bottle or beanie to my collection some day, too.

CliffStoll 5y ago

Thanks, DFlock. As you realize, writing up what happens is a necessary part of fixing a problem. That’s why I wrote Cuckoo’s Egg. I’m gratified that my own community has responded; perhaps someone at Amazon will pick up on this.

CliffStoll 5y ago
A minute ago, I added a few more details to my website-writeup.
renw0rp 5y ago
I've read your book a couple of years ago. When I saw your name on hacker news I thought it sounded familiar!

RobertoG 5y ago

>>"Nice write-up of how this scam works, I wasn't aware of the details previously." I still don't understand how it works. Why can somebody owning something called "Amvoom" claim something called "Acme Klein Bottle"? An even if they legally own the brand, how keeping the reviews when moving the brand to the new owner is the proper thing to do for the customers? By definition, the reviews are for another provider. I don't get it.

s_fischer 5y ago
My best guess is that amazon is using the entities associated with the registered trademark as some form of proof of identity. So since there was no registered trademark for Acme Klein Bottle, there was nothing to compare the new identity to when Amvoom submitted their request. I really hope I'm wrong though because this sounds like a very lazy and flawed system.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  > a very lazy and flawed system. That's how you make $100B, not by "doing things that don't scale" like handwriting thankyou notes to every customer.
  - CliffStoll 5y ago
    Allson, your comment hits home. I like to scribble thank you notes to customers. I was brought up that way. Anyhow, sooner or later, I'll meet the person who bought that Klein bottle - so I'd like to have a good feeling ahead of time.

mijoharas 5y ago

Ahhh... unfortunately there's no kindle version. (I'm too inundated with paper books that I tend to stick with digital for new purchases). Out of interest, is it publishing companies that make digital versions of books, or is it up to the author themselves to do that? (And if it's the latter this is a small request to Clifford to consider it if it's not too much of an arduous task. And provided their relationship with amazon isn't too soured by the current situation, which I could understand if it is).