IF ONLY HE HAD A MOBILE DEVICE BACK THEN...

[From Ronald Abadi Surabaya, East Java, Indonesia] A few days ago I just finished re-reading Clifford Stoll's book, "The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage." I bought the book about 10 years ago, read it only once at that time, and did not re-read it until several days ago. It is a true story about the author of the book, Cliff Stoll. In that 1990s book, set in 1986, Cliff was tracking a hacker from Hannover that hacked into his Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL) in order to break into some thirty military bases.

In order not to have to watch the monitor days or nights just to detect the hacker showed up, Cliff programmed his UNIX workstation to send him a message to his pocket pager whenever the hacker was on. He made it so that the workstation sent a message in morse code, so that he could also differentiate which account name the hacker used to logon to the system. While reading the book, I could not help thinking that if only mobile devices existed back then, Cliff Stoll would have had much more power in his hand.

Let me dream out loud for a while... let's see, I think Cliff could have programmed the workstation to send out SMS instead. So, the message would have been more complete than just morse codes. Or maybe, I don't know, maybe he could setup a program which would capture the hacker's activity, and would sum it up into an auto-created RSS feed that Cliff could download from his mobile device anytime. Sure a pocket pager worked just fine in his situation, but what if he was outside and could not reach his Macintosh to dial to his UNIX workstation at the lab? Well, if he had a mobile device, perhaps he could also use whatever VNC (Virtual Network Computing) software he had on his mobile device to connect to the workstation instead, wherever and whenever he was, as long as he had a mobile connection.

What about the logbook? Well, in the book it is told that Cliff kept the records of his tracking the hacker on a logbook. I think he could organize it well on a mobile device too, and probably could browse or peruse the information better wherever and whenever. I am sure there are many other things Cliff Stoll could have thought of that I can't if he had a mobile device back then.