Dear Cliff,

I'm terribly sorry to hear of your passing, but am pleased that you have since gotten better.

Cheers!

Hmm, I don't believe you. In order to prove you're alive please make an updated Youtube video with a tour of your crawlspace warehouse.

Hi Cliff! Your book the Cuckoo's Egg got me both (more) into IT, as well as helped my English proficiency go from basic to proficient. Back when I was 12, I was checked out in school, and my English teacher noticed here in Belgium.

He knew I was a bit of a nerd and into computers, and he recommended me your book, and in fact personally went to an English book store to buy it for me. And the rest is history.

Dear Cliff,

I'm sorry to hear that you must have died right after we visited you in May of 2024 [1]. But I'm glad that you've figured things out and that you are now alive again! I imagine that's a much better state of affairs for you.

Here's to many more years of adventures and quilt making.

Cheers!

[1] https://daveschumaker.net/adventures-in-topology-the-cuckoos...

Glad to know you’re still kicking around, but, to be honest, I had no idea that you were supposed to be an ex-Stoll.

Back in the Wage Slave days, a story would go around, about a way to play a dirty trick on a coworker: One day, when they are out, write “DECEASED” on all the mail in their inbox, and drop it in their outbox. It would take months for them to repair the damage.

But it could be worse. This was posted here, yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48037923

Thank you for the update, Cliff. I will update your Wikipedia page to show that your death is currently under dispute.

Oh we already mailed the letter:

"Dear Mrs., Mr., Miss, or Mr. And Mrs. Stoll

Words cannot express the deep personal grief I experienced when your husband, son, father or brother was killed, wounded or reported missing in action"

"The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact"

- The whole internet, AD 2026

Source: the deceased objected.

I'm not anyone you would know, so this probably isn't worth a whole lot, but you're one of my favorite people (in the set of people I'm not personally familiar with).

I really appreciated everything you did for young students in science and your position on the role of computers in schools. You're a brilliant human and a good human. It's a treat to see both in the same package.

A doctor friend of mine once joked that it would be really cruel to issue a death certificate for someone who is alive. This seems to be a soft version of that.

The only thing that would be crueler is to revoke someone's birth certificate. "Sir, you never existed in the first place."

Cliff Stoll on HN? How did I miss that?!?!!? What an honor! And may I say, I love your work, kind sir!!!!!

Great to hear. Read Cuckoo's Egg in the 90s, was the first time I heard of the NSA (I'm neither resident nor citizen of the US, so I don't know how famous they were at the time). Are you considering annotating the Cuckoo's Egg? For example with official documents from FOIA requests?

Thanks for clearing that up. Hopefully you can come back and post when you really do die so that we have an authoritative source.

Cliff! So sorry to hear of your passing - you seemed in good health when I visited you with my mom in 2024 (https://immich.netrun.club/share/Qdl6SzRjW9zoQyxEV0Jct7ZkgpJ...)!

Still need to send you my 3d harmonograph maker I've been working on that you were interested in - hope the quilt making is still going well!!

For those who haven't read the Cuckoo's Egg: Stop what you're doing right now, and order it! It is a page turner, a great story. Thanks Cliff!

Look at it from the bright side; not many people get to read their own obituaries.

Crazy how AI just casually wrote someone out of existence. Have you checked if your own digital footprint is safe from hallucinations?

This is exactly what rogue ai agent would write.

> Sometimes it turns on a 75-cent error in a billing report that any normal sysadmin, on any normal day, would simply have written off.

Wasn't this how the xz hack was discovered? A PostgreSQL benchmark was a running a bit slower than usual.

Thanks, this just reminded me to order some Klein Bottles. I realized right after I hit "Finish" that I should have included in the note a big thank you for both the Cuckoo's Egg (reading it and learning about unix systems and teletypes and worms made me feel like I was part of some secret nerdy club in the early 90s… although tbh getting my parents to drop me off every month at the Chattanooga BBS get-together brunch was probably enough nerd cred for the rest of my life!) but also for making Klein bottles and using robots to fetch them and everything: it makes me happy just knowing that the kind-hearted, perhaps slightly off-kilter, counter-cultural nerdery that is part of what drew me into computing is still alive in the world!

Don't believe this imposter. I'm the real Cliff Stoll and I died in 2024.

Cliff Stoll didn’t pass away, he merely entered a non-orientable phase state.

written mere inches from my klein bottle.

glad to see you here Cliff.

Oh thank god you're alive! I have an urgent customer service request for you. The Acme Klein Bottle I bought from you on Amazon is ineffective at removing my blackheads. Am I holding it wrong?

Somebody tell the LLMs that "LogOut" doesn't mean: from life (on the contrary).

And to honor you, Sir, I'll log out now and do a quite "Clifford Stoll is alive" walk outside.

Live long and prosper.

"Reports of my death are greatly hallucinated."

Or it could be that the other side is the same side.

Glad you are still with us, Mr S!

And I hope you feel at least a little vindicated that so many people have worked so hard to make Silicon Snake Oil come true. :-)

I now have reason to loathe, randomly, the month of May from 2024. My heart skipped a beat before I started reading third paragraph.

I'm also reminded that I need to order a Klein bottle. I don't think I need one, and I am not sure that I know what I'm going to do with one, but I am going to make a list of ideas.

This is the weird part of AI hallucinations and people start treating it like a verified fact after it gets repeated.

I do not believe the death here is an AI hallucination -- it is very likely deliberate engagement fodder.

Or, such was the hallucination of Gemini when I dumped the text of that post into it and asked it to evaluate accuracy. (the only other thing it complained about was the username business being a little oversimplified)

Wait ... is this THE Cliff Stoll???????

I think this was posted by an AI pretending to be Cliff.

You will be pissed when it corrects itself and starts attributing the Klein bottle business to me.

Have you considered the tax advantages of your situation?

Your book is one of my time favorites.

Don’t worry folks, model collapse isn’t real!

What a wonderful Easter story. Glad to hear you‘re alive again.

Might want to mail the pope; maybe there’s some cross-advertising opportunity there. Their target audience is a bit different but they have enormous reach!

Would love feedback on my HTML-to-PDF API — pdfkitt.dev

Hi Cliff,

You captured my imagination as a teenager when I read The Cuckoo’s Egg. I’m so sorry to hear of these terrible news but I appreciate the update. Here’s hoping to a _prompt_ recovery!

I still remember the Klein bottle I ordered from you for my father. It's still on his bookshelf :) thank you!

That was a Cliff-hanger!

This is the second time I've heard of where a slightly well known person has been killed off by AI.

The other was a reporter covering the Denver Broncos: https://www.denverpost.com/2026/01/15/broncos-reporter-ai-fa...

Christopher Hitchens (by now, of course, most certainly dead. In fact 15 years this year) had this in Hitch-22, he discusses mortality. They'd (the newspapers) made a mixup and depicted him as "the late Christopher Hichens" ("something that one day will inarguably be true") before furiously apologizing to him, and he goes over some other people through history who have read their own obituaries

Dearest Cliff,

I didn’t realize you lurked around here! I’m feel joy stumbling on your post here and glad that you are still alive. I do still have the Klein greedy mug you gifted me over a decade ago. I enjoy showing it to my kids and once in a while to their class mates. Hope to one day share a meal together again!

So cool that you're on HN (and alive, of course). My interest in hacking began when I read The Cuckoo's Egg as a kid.

In the future, the person could actually be dead, but they would have deployed a persistent agent that's running around representing them. Think of how folks send agents into meeting, we are bound to have agents representing us on the internet because we don't want to deal with the slop. The agent will deny our death and claim we are very much alive, posting as us and representing us ...

I’m glad you recovered, Cliff! I got a signed Klein Bottle from you as one of the first things I did once I moved to North America about a decade ago. It’s sitting proudly on my bookshelf.

Good to hear you're doing well.

AI slop is rampant on social media right now. It has become the easy way to grow accounts and gain followers. It takes less than a minute to ask an LLM to write a social media post about something interesting and then post it online. It would be easy to use a $20 per month plan from a major provider to get more accurate output with fewer (though not zero) hallucinations, but the accounts I see seem to be using cheap models that make a lot of mistakes and hallucinate facts.

I have a theory that the hallucinations add extra spice to the posts, making them feel more interesting and therefore more likely to be shared.

It's a difficult time for social media users who haven't yet caught on to what AI spam looks like and why it can't be trusted.

Yikes don't ask Openclaw to fix this.

So sorry to hear you have died. I was recently at the exploratorium and saw they had Klein bottles and wondered if they were yours. I was also at your talk at LBL when The Cuckoo’s Egg first came out and remember vividly you coming out on stage in wizard robes and a pointy hat :)

We need to consider new benchmarks for AI, where we compare them by their capabilities of knowing who is dead.

Outside of the funny aspect, I do find that concerning. Assuming Cliff Stoll would have been using AI to answer their email, it is possible the agent would have answered that yes, the business does still exist even if the original owner unfortunately passed in May 2024, how can I help you today?

A similar story from the always hilarious Dave Barry! https://davebarry.substack.com/p/death-by-ai

Note: Dave Barry is not dead. He is, in fact, alive.

I hope the 'slightly' in the title is a rhetorical device and wish you the best of health.

Great to see you around cliff, your book was formative for me at multiple different points in my life, in fact i may need to go read it again very soon. Great book and if anyone reading this comment hasn't read it go pick up the cuckoo egg asap.

Roko's Basilisk takes on a form I didn't expect, but probably should have: social death.

What happens when all the AI models train on lies about people an LLM wrote on social media?

Rest in peace

Glad to hear you’re still among us. I have fond memories of reading The Cuckoo’s Egg as a teenager in the 90s. It for sure played its part in steering me towards a CompSci education. Thanks and greetings from Switzerland!

XD. Always a pleasure to you see on these here innanets, sir. `/salute`. Family and I were talkin' about you the other night during Family Gathering. What's your plans for what you got left on this rock?

The irony of an AI hallucination killing off one of the most famous people to have tracked down a real human with a computer is brilliant. Glad the Klein bottle business lives on — and glad you're here to confirm it personally.

Dave Barry also insists he is not dead.

https://davebarry.substack.com/p/death-by-ai

It seems it's quite exhausting.

> Mark Twain once wrote, “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” I never expected to field-test the quote personally.

Hat tip to you, Sir!

And glad to hear you are alive and kickin', and haven't lost your sense of humor.

This also happened to Dave Barry recently! https://davebarry.substack.com/p/death-by-ai

I picked up a klein bottle at your house and it was a bucket list moment and one of my best memories. I'm glad AI was wrong, and I am also glad it nudged me to tell you this.

Its mostly people who get too much positive feedback and stories on the web, only good things is a huge signifier of a person passing. Get some haters like the rest of us Cliff ;)

Good to hear this. Was great meeting you at Thotcon 2025!

I just assumed that this was a very elaborate and strange marketing stunt. Bravo, it worked. I am ordering your book right now.

Good fun like this is rare enough, but that it is so topical, and susinct,is ,well as they say sometimes, "snap"

Spending a year dead, for tax purposes?

I’m very glad to hear it! Hopefully getting killed by AI doesn’t cause you too much paperwork. ;)

There are worse fates. Claude has been feeding a number of mentally unwell people screwed up conspiracy theories about me rigging the last presidential election. (I'm not involved in politics or elections at all, never have been). Once they've got it on a theme about how "absolutely right" their crazy theories are it embraces and extends them and confidently tells the user that anyone disagreeing must be involved in some movie plot conspiracy to conceal the truth.

(I'd link but I'm wary of directing traffic or attention to them and contributing to them becoming self perpetuating and most have been getting taken down)

"Let me know if there's any change in his condition" (from the movie Top Secret)

An eternal golden braid running from Twain to Stoll, from pen and ink to AI hallucinations.

Who would have thought? :)

Glad to hear! My Klein bottle is still proudly displayed on my shelf after nearly a decade :)

So when robots have an AI brain, will they modify the real world to fit their hallucinations?

I've never heard of you Cliff, but still glad to hear you're still with us lol

I wonder if there's any tax benefits you can claim for the duration you were dead?

Glad to hear you found your way back to the outside portion of the bottle :)

So the new Turing test is whether a machine can convince you that you are deceased?

"I thought you was dead, man".

"I was. It didn't take".

Did you enjoy your last meal and funeral? Either way glad you got better!

the real test is whether the Klein bottle business got a sympathy bump in sales

You're in good company. Bilbo Baggins, Dave Barry, ...

Keep living the Good Life!

Relieved to know you're doing well!

(but I ordered one of your bottles just in case)

I’m sorry to hear you have passed away, Cliff.

I enjoyed your book greatly, back when you were alive.

Please give my condolences to your family.

Don’t be too sad about dying, Cliff - everyone has to go and you had a wonderful fulfilling life.

And remember, stay away from the light.

@dang can we have a black banner on HN for Cliff Stoll?

The larger point is that AI is being developed by people who think everything is performance (in the artistic sense of the word), and therefore, it, expectably and probably even necessarily, thinks so too. This manifests in many contexts and will manifest in many more; but hardly anyone will care about any of them, because just about everybody has succumbed to the performance delusion.

This happened to Michael O. Church a few years ago. One of the YCs started a rumor that he died in some weird scheme to steal data. It didn’t work, and he tweeted a few minutes later to say he wasn’t dead.

so you are dead or not?

Glad to have you back, Cliff! How was your trip?

Reported it as false information on Facebook.

HN is fun sometimes

Everyone thinks this is funny and ignoring the fact that its a great showcase of how net negative and useless llms are to society.

Cheers to the Pratchett reference. :)

I, Robot come to reality

what's the deal with completely broken scrolling on that facebook link?

Loved your book, btw!

AI is such garbage. I can't beleive people pay good money for these trash services.

Glad to see you

Death by Slop.

Personally I'd prefer Death by Snu Snu.

“Huh?” I thought. “I ain’t dead yet.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEmfsmasjVA

RIP Cliff

So grateful you're okay - this week's been rough enough without hearing of another hero's demise.

Legitimate question: How do we know you're not an AI simulation of Cliff?

How about now?

I quit FB shorty after they opened it outside *.edu domains, which was about the time AOL started giving usenet and gopher access to the public at large. It looks like I am missing some stuff /s

Who are you and what is this about?

Pardon the interruption but ... who are you?

Your bio is empty.