The emotional moments in Stoll's book are directly related to his commitment to find the cracker getting in to his system and his conflict over continuing pursuit. The emotional moments in Takedown are mostly involved with annoyance. Markoff's role was widely explored in online discussions after the articles appeared originally in the New York Times and later when Takedown came out. It's even discussed. But then just brushed off.
Takedown is interesting reading from a few perspectives despite pacing and ego problems.
It's something every system administrator, ISP owner, and corporate CEO should read to understand how vulnerable systems continue to be, and how open companies are despite expensive solutions meant to isolate their networks. Clever crackers apparently can be beaten by genius hackers, but the book as a whole led me to feel that they should have just closed the security holes, documented the problems, and went skiing. At the end, I'm still wondering to what end capturing Mitnick solved any problems. Glenn Fleishman except as noted otherwise. All rights reserved.