The Cuckoo's Egg

I'm usually super into tales about the early days of computers, technology, the internet, and gaming, but I think this one was a miss for me. The author was an astrophysics student at UC Berkeley who accidentally discovers a hacker while trying to explain a 75 cent(!!!) discrepancy in the computer time books. Rather than shut the guy out, Stoll spends months meticulously tracking the hacker's moves through the early ‘net and creating a web of connections within basically every letter agency active at the time. Nobody wants to be the one agency to act, so there's a lot of back-and-forth between agencies at various points of the book, until someone finally loses patience, blinks, and the hacker gets caught.

I had a few issues with the book. I understand it's basically a computer period piece of how technology was at the time, but it still got super repetitive about halfway through. The beginning was really interesting, the end was similarly compelling, but the middle was basically a series of “I see the hacker in my systems, here's what he's doing, I wish I could stop him” short segments. I also was mildly annoyed at the author's massive Main Character Syndrome, where he turns the hacker information over to the proper authorities, and then gets all shocked/angry/annoyed at not being immediately privvy to whatever the government does with the information. Long segments of the book are dedicated to the author waxing philosophical about how he's working with The Man and how much he hates not knowing what's going on. It gets kind of annoying.

I did like the glimpse into the computer technology from the period, though. I liked reading about the innovative ways the author used to track the hacker, determine his location, and mess with him to keep him on the line long enough to be traced. Well done in that respect.

Just kind of a mixed bag of a book all around, honestly.