My reciprocal appreciation to Fury, Atlanta/n, and Meester (and my many other friends on Hacker News).

I deeply appreciate the kindness and support of the hacker community - sends me back thirty five years to when I was fooling with a Unix workstation and stumbled on a small accounting error. Back then, I was surprised by the outpouring of help, suggestions, and collaboration from other computer folk.

At this moment, I again thank this community -- across decades and across the globe, I'm heartened and happy to be one of the gang.

Warm wishes all around,

       -Cliff

When I had my little ISP in the early 90s, Cliff's book was given to every new customer for the first few years.

You seem like a really cool and interesting person, Cliff.

Do you still use the RC mini forklift for storage? I've always thought that seemed like a lot of fun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kg6woZULFeM

Cliff, if you ever read this, I have a computer science book club that could use reading suggestions. Thoughts? Anything from management to best practices ... we will be adding your seminal work to our list too :)

Their blackhead remover product might be brand hijacking, but their ACME Remover Product! it's the real deal. Just see this review of their product:

"100% success at removing ACME (Klein bottles) from some kids, parents, even works on some websites!" -Cliff Stoll (He did not say this, its a joke!)

Hey Cliff, I just have to say thanks. I read the Cuckoo's Egg in the early 90s and while I was already interested in computers, the idea that there were "networks" of them out there... well... it blew my mind.

I immediately went to my school librarian and said I wanted to try to connect computers together, or try to dial-up to library information services, etc. We started learning together.

You were a huge inspiration, thanks.

There was also a television adaptation, "The KGB, the Computer, and Me" produced by PBS Nova in like 1992, starring Clifford Stoll as Cliff Stoll!

Here is a bootlegged youtube link--it's the best I've got. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGv5BqNL164

A legend!

Thank you for the link. Amazing. And Cliff as himself ! I read the book but just could not stop watching the documentary.

Next time I am in Hannover will have to take a photo in front of the flat. It got a repaint though...

https://www.google.com/maps/@52.371627,9.7208921,3a,53.1y,13...

Ooh ... I visited there way back when. Down where that bike is parked there was a coin-operated cigarette machine. And they sold Benson & Hedges ciggies (which were the passwords that the hackers had chosen). Sends me way back, Belter.

Wanna really nerd out, here's the Grateful Dead show Cliff cut out of hacker chasing to go attend: https://archive.org/details/gd86-06-21.sbd.brame.15406.sbeok...

"A bass guitar note took my attention from the hacker’s trail. The Grateful Dead were playing outdoors at the Berkeley Greek Theater, only a hundred yards downhill from the lab. The police couldn’t keep people from sitting in the field overlooking the concert, so I skipped over there, mingling with a thousand others in tie-dyed shirts. Burnt-out panhandlers, left over from the sixties, walked the crowd, begging tickets and selling posters, buttons, and grass. The drum solo in the second set echoed from Strawberry Canyon, adding a weird backbeat appreciated only by us cheapskates in the fields. Life was full: no hacker is worth missing a Dead concert for..."

"The Cuckoo's Egg" - Pag 35 (on my edition)

Complete agreement — wouldn’t miss a Dead concert for anything.

Hmmm - I seem to be agreeing with myself. I tend to do that, occasionally.

It looks like archive.org also has it: https://archive.org/details/The_KGB_The_Computer_and_Me_1990

That you are linking to a bootleg copy of video on this thread is...ironic, to say the least.

Well, it is unavailable on Amazon...

https://www.amazon.com/KGB-Computer-Me-VHS/dp/B00004Y50L

https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B000JLM0RQ/ref=atv_dp...

Don't worry, I'm sure "AMVOOM The KGB, the Computer, and Me" will be listed anytime soon.

Fascinating movie, thank you for linking to it! I loved to see what logging and tracing looked like back in the day. Looks a lot more fun than just dumping terabytes to S3. I also really enjoyed how stoked and energetic Cliff was about the whole thing. What a gem!

One of my (very sincerely held) goals in life is to be as excited about _something_ as Cliff Stoll is about _everything_.

Ha! I didn't know the klien bottle guy was the accounting error guy. That's very cool.

Googled him there and he's listed as an astronomer. But the astronomers consider him a computer guy ;)

You should read his book! He discusses this in the first chapter. He helped (or maybe solely) design the lens at W. M. Keck observatory, and you can see him on Numberphile a lot.

Definitely, I read it in a day it was so enthralling.

Took a year to write. Asynchronous I/O, I guess.

So long as more than 365 people spent a day or more reading it, you got your revenge on the universe… ;-)

Aaah - a tilt of the karmic plane!

I did! A long long time ago. That's why I mentioned it. It always stuck with me :)

Brilliant read.

I just wanted to jump in and say the same thing. I had the hardback of the Cuckoo's Egg as a teenager in the 90s. Huge inspiration to me and I have worked in and around tech ever since. Thank you.

I read it only last year. A brilliant and now historical book.

Mind slightly blown. The Cookoo's Egg is a great book, Cliff is amazing to watch in the Klein Bottle videos, but I've only just realised they're the same person!

There’s a movie about it, with Cliff Stoll himself on the lead role.

There's a movie about the hacker: 23 – Nichts ist so wie es scheint.

That’s true. I like both movies.

Same here, my copy from 1989 is still on my bookshelf. Thanks for being inspiring!

a fantastic and inspirational read. also great cookie recipe! made them many times

That book changed my life.

Changed mine, too. Q-Bert.

Don't buy this guy's klein bottles, they're a scam - they're only THREE dimensional! Such a rip off. How am I supposed to store a ŷ̶̺̎͌͐̿̽̊́̕ŏ̶̗̈́̓̍̎̃͠g̶̝̺̜̜͋̿̚ͅ-̷̧̛̈́̔́s̷̰̀͌́̈́ơ̷̝̭̫͛́͘ẗ̴̹̱̖̥́h̸̡̡͙̻̀o̸̹̘̾̀͗̇̕t̵̗̠̄̽̈́͑ḧ̵̳̰̩̲͈̜͉̝́́͌͐ in this thing?

No it's your space that's 3-dimensional. Just make sure to store your klein bottles in 4d space and they will be free of holes and self intersections.

PEBCAK (Problem Exists Between Chair And Klein bottle)

Cliff Stoll stores Klein bottles i in the crawl space under his house and manages his inventory with a frickin' robot. The head clearance seems a bit short for a4 4D space!

This is what comes of neglecting the storage instructions.

The classic Klein bottle is a 2D surface. It doesn't embed in R^3 regardless of whether you give it a little thickness so you can make it out of matter.

Worse, the klein bottles did nothing to remove my black heads

Does anyone else see 10 vertical lines of characters that look like the ‘matrix’ font overlaid on the word ‘yog so Thoth’ in the last two lines of qwertious’ post?

That's He Who Shall Not Be Named's hand reaching into the material world, making himself known to all who would dare parse HTML with regular expressions.

And signalling the immanentizing of Tony the Pony.

Do not speak his name.

Arguably, they just _typed_ his name -- maybe they didn't say it out loud :)

It's a Unicode trick https://lingojam.com/GlitchTextGenerator

The four dimensional answer to this one dimensional question will also answer your question and many others:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/

Strangely, I had that very page open on my three dimensional computing device last night and it was still open just now.

This Must Mean Something.

Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn

A small dog has just materialised and widdled on my foot. Please be careful when summoning the Old Ones.

The Puppy of Tindalos! Ia!

no, it's just you.

What post?

There are no antimemetic posts.

yeah, but I see those everywhere... all the time!

I do

how did you do that?

Something like http://www.eeemo.net/

Thanks for that helpful answer. Big no thanks to those people who downvoted a genuine curious question. I'm allowed to not know something.

Just remember to keep the formulaes for the descending node (or dragon's tail) handy.

Hi Cliff, I'm an independent amazon consultant.

Your Amazon problems would be solved with a regular USPTO trademark. They don't recognize common-law trademarks because they are heavily arguable in litigation.

USPTO is a database of trademarks already scrutinized by trademark attorneys and government. It's not perfect, but it is a collection that Amazon recognizes.

You can do this for $2000-ish and never think about it again.

then GS1.org for barcodes

Now you can sell your bottles in museum gift-shops!

It's a shame that a small-time reseller like Cliff has to go to the trouble and expense to register a trademark to protect his listing (which I doubt Cliff will bother with).

Until about 5-6 years ago the changes Amazon made almost universally made their service better and more pro-user convenience/efficiency. Since then it's really become a nightmare. I realize they are being abused by scammers who are scheming every way to subvert the system but as a technologist familiar with web tech and distribution, it's clear there are some anti-consumer experience issues which Amazon could fix but is choosing not to.

For example, allowing vendors to list alternate "versions" which aren't really the same product at all. It makes it harder to tell what the star rating averages are for the version I actually want (and I have to sort reviews by version which is only accessible on a subpage. Frankly, I'd rather they just go back to one listing per product. Yes it's less useful for a hundred different sized machine screws but it seems like a major source of these issues.

Then there's the nightmare of letting different sellers sell on the "same" product listing. Crap clone products flit in and out contaminating the integrity of reviews because a shoddy version slips in but only from one seller out of six or seven.

As someone who deals with them everyday, do you think they are NOT doing some of the things they could to stop these issues due to strong incentives (Amazon makes more $$$ allowing users to be frustrated), or do you think they are sincerely doing what they can (within reasonable costs) to solve these chronic issues? They used to understand that accuracy and transparency ultimately yield more sales (even if lower for an individual product). I'd like to believe Amazon didn't change their ethos from the early days, but...

Amazon is filled to the brim with predominantly Chinese scammers that they have shown no interest in stopping. Scams I've seen:

- 2 pack scammers that sell someone else's product as a bundle, but it costs more to buy the 2 pack than it does to buy the real item twice.

- Listing swaps, where someone will take a commodity listing with lots of reviews and change the listing to sell overpriced broken garbage

- Counterfeiting or extreme product cheapening after a listing receives recommended status

- A mountain of fake review schemes now including this.

These bad actors don't contribute to the Amazon market. There's little reason not to ban them for ToS violations.

> These bad actors don't contribute to the Amazon market. There's little reason not to ban them for ToS violations.

These bad actors are optimizing for sales, and Amazon benefits from each sale on their marketplace. Their actions result in more money for the bad actors and for Amazon alike.

It's a similar situation to VC-funded social media platforms turning a blind eye to bots and automation early on because bot activity increases growth and engagement metrics, both of which in turn can increase the platform's valuation in future funding rounds or an IPO.

That's gotta be a very short term thing though hasn't it? Honestly Amazon is two, maybe three, knockoffs away from me never using them again (currently: 0). I can't be arsed with faff.. that's why I use Amazon.

It'd be daft for them to not be curbing this!

I believe that they assume they've bought enough goodwill from segments of consumers that things like this don't really matter.

My older relatives generally assume that Amazon will have the best prices online for everything despite that not being the case for 5+ years now.

They're counting on customers like my relatives and yourself not changing their assumptions or habits.

Funny you mention the 2-pack scammers. I was literally just looking for a center-post mounted bike seat for a child yesterday and noticed that exact scam. I thought to myself, "why would someone want a two pack of these bike seats?" Lo and behold the actual product cost less than half as much as the two pack. I didn't realize what was going on, just thought, "this doesn't seem legit" and bought a totally different item. Poor bike-seat manufacturer.

Sure, that sounds good, banning scammers. But then important metrics would not go up and to the right. Metrics executives see! You can't just run around prioritizing the customer experience willy-nilly. Who knows what that would lead to?!? /s

When you scroll tho y the end of the reviews they have a link that says something like show reviews from other countries. If the reviews for different versions worked this way it might cut down on some of the version scamming.

Making the step from a hobby to a business means having to make the necessary investments, some of which may be costly and a pain in the ass, to protect one's intellectual property.

I think it's ironic that you're saying he has to pay to run his business safely, when Amazon's set things up this way specifically because they don't want to pay to run their business safely.

It's a little outrageous that a 3rd party can come take over your storefront without any avenue to challenge.

It’s not “your storefront”. Your listing is only there at Amazon’s discretion and subject to whatever arbitrary and capricious and erratically enforced rules they choose to make up. That’s the deal you accept if you choose to make Amazon (or AliExpress or Facebook or whoever) a critical part of your business.

There is nothing wrong with Cliff's store front: https://www.kleinbottle.com

The problem is in Amazon's storefront, and there millions of sellers are operating in the same space, so doing some due diligence is required. If Cliff could just seize ownership of his storefront from a thief, why couldn't a thief seize it from Cliff? The solution is to register a proper trademark.

Like it or not, the world is messy, and it costs to keep it clean. Registering a trademark is like buying locks for your home and vehicle, and buying soap to wash your clothes, and changing the oils in your machines.

This logic assumes that it's cheap to get a trademark, whereas the parent says it'll cost $2000.

This leaves small hobby stores like Cliff's with no practical defense against scams like this if they've only made a few thousand in profits through amazon sales, especially if they don't have that cash on hand (and suddenly lose their amazon revenue stream!)

Like it's easy to say "well you should have trademarked your product" after the fact, but very few people have even heard of this scam when it happens to them.

It's interesting that you say "some due diligence is required" and go on to put the burden of that diligence on Cliff, rather than the creator of the marketplace.

It should be pointed out that in a country like India or China it IS often the marketplaces legal responsibility to prevent counterfeit merchandise from being sold in their market. If you go into many malls for example there are signs up on the walls with a hotline to report people selling counterfeit merchandise. In India, they have a service you can contact that enforces returns/refunds of any counterfeit item that you purchase from a vendor (though usually mentioning the hotline and threatening to call it is more than enough to convince the vendor to give you a refund).

The solution is for Amazon to be less horrid.

There really are no polite words to describe business practices.

Stop buying from Amazon. Quite easy actually.

Exactly, stop buying from Amazon.

There a software company running a software market, all the power is in there hands, and they choose to do nothing.

Why should anyone be able to seize anyone else's Amazon listing without thorough human review by an Amazon employee? This seems like it would be a non-issue on a sane platform.

Except selling Klein bottles is a hobby, his actual business is teaching.

Oh yes, Speeder.

Thank you!

       -Cliff

I'm not sure why the parent was downvoted. The trademark scheme was built to make marketplaces more efficient, by giving producers a carve out in the conversation--a word or phrase or logo--so that they and consumers and distributors can engage together confidently with some bright line rules to work with.

The alternative is anarchy, and much more expensive then filing for a trademark if you want to sell in the marketplace. Like insurance, everyone that wants to be in the market pays a little, so that it makes it easier to avoid something like this.

While this would probably work, it seems insane to me that this would be the only thing to protect his listing from a completely different category of product being merged with another.

You're not wrong.

Because Amazon's system is insane unless you realize it's designed only for the benefit of the corporation, not for any kind of fairness or quality.

The success of Amazon retail is in part because of the ~feature~ of seamless, rampant IP infringement and zero legal or financial liability on the part of Amazon for making money off it.

Which has gotten worse over time, and one of the several reasons why my Prime membership will not renew this year.

Has there been a study on the volume of counterfeit goods flowing through amazon's marketplace?

Seems likely they are now the #1 seller of counterfeit goods globally, by a decent margin.

I’ll bet a six pack of decent beer the % of all sales that are counterfeit goods is double digits.

What's unfortunate is that ideally fairness & quality should be in the interests of the marketplace.

...or the fact that the only way to get this information is a HN comment from an independent Amazon consultant.

Let's say that Acme is a low-down, dirty-rotten, rip-off con who has been usurping somebody else's trademark to make a quick buck with counterfeit merchandise.

Why would Amazon merge the reviews of that product with the reviews of the authentic, high-quality, reputable Chinese vendor's actual product?

Why does Amazon allow a "color" to point to a product from a completely different seller? Why does Amazon allow product aliases at all?

Thanks, Blair. I've spent an afternoon pawing through the USPTO trademark & their TESS system. To self-register a trademark with already-listed goods (eg, a T-Shirt or a clock) costs about USD$350. The cost bumps up for every class of goods your trademark covers (say, your trademark covers T-Shirts and Clocks). And oddball, unlisted items (Klein bottles) cost noticeably more.

I have felt for awhile that fees for Trademarks, and Patents should be tied to 1040 income level.

A wealthy corporation (person) should pay more than the poor, or little enterprise.

I looked into a patent a few years ago, and couldn't justify even the fee at the time. When I had disposable income I was ready to patent, but I was too late. A corporation with over 60 patents beat me to it.

That shouldn’t be required. Amazon should verify the seller. Scam sellers sell knockoff trademarked items everyday on Amazon. Trademark won’t fix anything.

It's kind of sad if the only way to stop having your item listing in Amazon from being hijacked is to trademark.

Do Amazon care about jurisdiction, UK registration is ~£200, perhaps any registered trademark will get you recognised by Amazon [in all jurisdictions]?

If someone is squatting one's trademark you can still sue them with an unregistered mark, and perhaps crucially if they're using Amazon then Amazon should be up for contributory infringement.

This is not legal advice and represents my personal views only.

I was thinking similarly, what about state trademarks? I've got a Massachusetts trademark because it was quick and easy, and cost only $50. My lawyer advised me that, while not as iron clad as a federal trademark, it would tend to discourage anybody else from filing federally on the mark because they'd do a search and mine would turn up and they'd rather pick a different mark than be limited in one state. I don't sell product on Amazon though, so I don't know if it would work in that instance.

I can save him the money…it would be highly unlikely the USPTO would grant a TM for “ACME Klein Bottle”.

In either case, or even in the case the was a seller legitimately infringing on a valid trademark, Amazon should not be reassigning reviews from one sellers product to another seller under these types of matters. How in the hell would that be beneficial to Amazon shoppers?

Indeed, "Klein bottle" is not descriptive of the origin, it's descriptive of the type of goods. Trademarks indicate origin and must do so distinctively to be registered.

This post is my own view, not legal advice, and unrelated to my employment.

And “ACME” is very likely already registered in any desired class for the particular good.

It also creates bigger questions about Amazon’s brand/trademark practices vis-a-vis forum selection where registration fees and criteria are minimal and rights are liberal.

Assuming it was successfully filed, actually returning the marketplace/reviews to OP would actually be more troubling…in other words Amazon would be willing to take the marketplace/reviews from a legitimate Trademark holder with an earlier filing date and give it to a legitimate Trademark holder with a later in time filing date from another jurisdiction.

Disclosure: I’m a lawyer and have actually represented a client that registered trademark A, sole the product on Amazon, then Amazon began selling a competing product with a similar (not identical spelling but pronounced the same) name they successfully trademarked B, ironically the USPTO rejected our clients trademark for C on the basis it was “to similar to B” whereas the USPTO never found B was similar to A. The difference between A and C being addition of a logo to the word mark.

> Amazon began selling a competing product with a similar (not identical spelling but pronounced the same) name they successfully trademarked B

Trademarks are published for opposition for this reason, right? Client could have filed an opposition against the confusingly similar mark during the opposition period and it never would have ended up in that situation with trademark C. Monitoring trademarks posted to the Official Gazette is an extra burden but important if your brand is valuable.

> USPTO is a database of trademarks

No the United States Patent and Trademark Office is not a database of trademarks.

It has one, though.

What about the following listing (first result for the search "acme klein bottle" ) :

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08YWM31V4 by "Brand: Cradle & Dew"

"Kleinverse Exquisite Glass Klein Bottle, Handmade Math & Science Education Vase, Mobius Strip Glass Display for Gifts, Geometry Decoration & Theorem Glass - Collab with Mr Cliff Stoll" $74.90 + shipping

How linked to you is this ? Are these just reselling your products or are they independently made ?

Edit : In the description it states "These Klein bottles are proudly designed in Singapore, The Garden City".

I was going to ask about this too -- my suspicious nature immediately thinks they're improperly taking advantage of Cliff's name to promote their product. But maybe there's a genuine collaboration and it's all above board?

Seems they are also ripping off his product descriptions.

Anything that can be done to get these people off of amazon?

Get it to affect their revenue somehow (people used to do boycotts for things like this, but now everything is one company, so what do we do?)

There was a story about a guy who had a self published book. He was the only person printing / selling his book.

Until someone showed up on amazon and sold it too, they just copied it and printed it themselves.

The copied book is identical, cover and all, images in the Amazon listing too ... Amazon chose to do nothing.

I have a similar issue; I have a $10 self published book on Amazon and somebody re-listed with an earlier (like 1900!) publication date, so it shows up first when looking for it and it's listed at like $100.

I don't know who can fall for this in my case but I'm sure if they can they have probably done this at scale. When I search in Amazon I see a lot of results with wide range of prices so I'm sure some people are just counting on showing up on results, users being "lazy" and arbitraging the difference between their listing and the cheapest vendor.

I have ordered 2 service manuals on eBay, and both times I got some shitty photocopies of the official manual, yet paid full price for the official manuals. You email the vendors and ask why you got this shitty copy, and they claim it's official, and that they're licensed by the company to reproduce them. So eBay won't do shit.

And if we charge back eBay they just prevent us from using their marketplace.

> The copied book is identical, cover and all, images in the Amazon listing too ... Amazon chose to do nothing.

Amazon will still get paid whether they sell the real book or a knock off, either way. It's not like a small time author has the resources to actually do something about it in court.

I refuse to give money to a business that behaves the way Amazon does.

He should just sue for copyright infringement.

IIRC: Amazon won't tell him who it is and he suspects it's just someone out of legal reach / as the book is just self published his legal resources are pretty limited.

Which is what the infringers hope - and the major engine driving much of Amazon's profits.

Fraud.

I remember when people used to (heck still do) get worked up about Walmart but those same people not only order from Amazon all the time, they even join B mans private club (Prime).

You sue Amazon for contributory infringement. Subpoena for the number of fraudulent copies they sold and then press for triple damages plus all of your fees. Even if that number is tiny you'll cost them much more in legal bills.

I'm not sure why I'd spend $50k forcing Amazon to spend $250k. They can play that game a lot longer than me.

Honestly, all the stories in this thread make me very glad I canceled my Prime subscription. I still use Amazon occasionally, but now most of my purchases go direct. With the exception of books; there I order from my local bookstore.

> Amazon won't tell him who it is

Does that matter to the police? Surely police reports don't have to include the name of who you think caused you some injury.

"It's a civil matter"

The police are never going to bother trying to seriously curtail online fraud. There's a reason why so many scam calls try to trick vulnerable people into paying them with iTunes gift cards and Google Play gift codes. Even with the added friction and blatantly farcical nature of the scam they find it more profitable to try and get the funds that way. They undoubtedly lose plenty of victims who might have been tricked into sending it through Western Union, mailing cash, or a cashier's check. They're paying a steep price to funnel it through the app store between the platform fees and whatever they pay the merchant that's laundering the funds for them.

They do that because they know that Apple is never going to try to claw back funds and the police are never going to force Apple to return the money that's still sitting in their accounts. You can call Apple 30 minutes after giving the scammers the code and without fail "oh sorry, the funds are gone!" https://i.imgur.com/oijXbLD.jpeg

That's the status quo, the courts are your only remedy here and you're going to lose trying to sue Amazon over a fraudulent seller. Best case scenario you manage to get Amazon to identify the seller and find out they're in a foreign jurisdiction and for all practical reasons untouchable as far as legal recourse is concerned.

Amazon are selling it; if it's tortuously acquired he can sue them.

My opinion, not legal advice.

Companies are taking a broad interpretation of Section 230 and claim that the law shields tech companies from all liability for their platform[1], online and off, and not just liability for hosting user created content.

Lower level courts seem to agree with them, although one such case has been fought all the way to the Supreme Court[2].

[1] https://www.lawfareblog.com/herrick-v-grindr-why-section-230...

[2] https://www.americanbar.org/groups/diversity/women/publicati...

So just having a web shop shields you for example from the consequences of selling counterfeit goods? How does that work?

They'll argue that they aren't liable for the crimes that users of their platform commit using their platform and cite Section 230 of the CDA.

Which makes no sense, since CDA's Section 230 is saying nothing about being an accomplice to crimes, only about not being treated as the publisher or speaker of some information.

I agree, and there's a case that's gone to the Supreme Court over this, so we'll see how they rule.

You signed a copy of The Cuckoo's Egg for me, oh, maybe 30 years ago, which I still own. I just wanted to say thank you for being a positive inspiration in my life.

Hot ziggitty!

https://ibb.co/8jy12Z8

https://ibb.co/Nxt7V6j

Jay - that looks surprisingly like my signature. Wonder who counterfeited it...

    Cheers,   -Cliff

Just wanted to say while your bottles are awesome, your under-house storage and retrieval system is the stuff of my childhood dreams and my claustrophobic adult nightmares.

How did you go about designing it? Was it fairly organic? Or did you have the full plan from the beginning?

So in 2015 [1] you said you ordered enough bottles for about 10 years, but you're already running out? That's quite the success story you have there!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3mVnRlQLU

Lopis, you're right. Forward planning has never been my strong suit, and backward planning doesn't seem to work for me. There are some smart people in the world who can predict demand. Not me!

And, about twenty minutes ago, I ran out of large Klein bottles. It'll be September before I can get more, what with shortages of borosilicate glass.

Hey Cliff, just wanted to say that the Klein bottle I bought in 2014 or so is the best buying experience I’ve ever had. It’s still the only piece of home decoration I own. Thanks!

Many thanks, indeed, Kabb. I hope the manifold is still working after, uh, seven years. (You're aware, of course, that it's covered by my exclusive 1,000,000 year guarantee.)

Big fan sir - thank you for all you have done and continue to do.

Have you considered filing an FTC complaint? The new FTC commissioner actually seems to care about these things.

This is a good idea. It also would help to reach out to your state and Amazon's Attorneys General offices, too.

I second this!

Cliff, reading `The Cuckoo's Egg` in the 90's when I was in my early teens was a watershed moment in my life. Set me up upon a path of discovery and fascination with technology of all kinds. Countless thanks!

I was going to say, I don’t think that’s the message you were supposed to take from it, but it looks like he retracted his next book.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Snake_Oil

Much love, I've read your site through, often times out loud to family and coworkers. GL w/ Amazon. Minor nitpick. The link to go back to top of page at the bottom of https://kleinbottle.com/ links to index.htm and not index.html and is thus a 404. I guess you could just link it to / or ideally change <body bgcolor="#fff"> to <body id="top" bgcolor="#fff"> and link to <a href="#top"> to avoid a new page load.

(if anyone's wondering, now fixed )

Fixed, because of your help and advice. >Thank you!< -Cliff (who stumbles over .htm and .html files)

Cliff, Thanks for being in this world. I still own my hardback copy of "The Cuckoo's Egg" from 30 some odd years ago. I also talk about the events that unfolded in that book to my students! It's a great story!

Thanks for your book.

A friend recommended it to me as a “beach book” and I bought it not knowing anything about it. Best beach book ever.

Hold lots of respect for you and regret that this has happened to you, but thanks for bringing these specifics to light. Amazon needs to fix this - or regulators need to force them to.

This borosilicate shortage sounds worrisome! I’m inactive now, but did boro flamework for ~20 years and just wanted to say as a fellow glassblower that I love what you do with glass.

Cliff I love your website, it makes me all nostalgic for the internet of the 90's / early 2000's - full of personality and humor.

Hi Cliff,

I want to buy your books, but suddenly I don't want to buy them through Amazon, is there a better website for me to buy them from?

I love my Klein bottle earrings, there so tiny! Thanks Cliff!