This book was recommended to me by a friend (a fellow Tech teacher) and I liked it (kinda). It’s a book about a real life story of the author’s life. I loved the references to Berkeley, the hacker chase, the oldschool feeling of the story. The book takes you back to an earlier time in computing (in 1989), which I thought was a fascinating reminder of what things were like back then.

The story is fascinating. It shows how one guy in a computer lab (he was a physicist, not even an IT person) in Berkeley was able to track down a ring of international hackers and awaken some of the US top security agencies to the dawn of a new form of espionage. It’s funny how all of those top secret and important government agencies were laughing at the guy and not caring that a hacker was going through their networks almost every day. Every detail about that is written down in the book, including the phone calls, some computer commands, numbers, people, etc. I found that so interesting. Also, the main character (the author, Cliff himself) gets obsessed with the hacker chase and often sleeps under his desk at the lab, patiently waiting for the hacker to come back and log in their network (as Sventek 🙂 ). Also, something I found interesting was the dedication of his girlfriend. She kept up with the whole obsession, even helped the guy a couple of times. The bike he was riding to work, the old computers and consoles, the physics lab, the 80s vibe, everything was kinda romantic. The book had that old criminal chasing spy detective feeling to it, like the reader is submerged back in time in an old movie with obscure music on the background, surrounded by people with sunglasses and long trench coats, smoking cigarettes in some dark corner on a lonely street. Ah, it was cool!

While the beginning and end of the book are very interesting, about mid-book it starts to get pretty repetitive and boring. There are a hundred or so pages where he just (a) gets alerted that the hacker is active, (b) jumps out of bed, (c) starts a phone trace, (d) the phone trace fails for some reason, (e) he calls a bunch of federal agents and gets ignored. Sequence is interesting a couple times -but got a little repetitive at some point. Could have shortened this part, and spent more time on the actual ring of hackers once they got discovered. This only occupied a small part of the end of the book, which I found disappointing.

Overall, I kinda liked the book. I think you need to be a bit of a computer geek to enjoy this one because there’s a lot of technical details in it. I would definitely recommend the book to anyone who wants to reminisce a bit, who enjoys a good spy chase, and who could remember some UNIX commands and those old chunky computers back in the day.

P.S. I found a movie-TV adaptation of the book, starring the actual guy from the book, who also wrote the book – Cliff Stoll! I can’t believe it was on YouTube for so many years and it has so little views! I watched it all (1 hour long) and it’s just great! You can see the old computers, Cliff talking and acting, the whole story but without the boring repetitive parts. It has the obscure music, the long trench coats, filmed back in the 90s, I loved it! Here’s a link if you’re interested in the story and want to watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGv5BqNL164