61–70 of 200 posts
> the internet in 1988 60k computers ( mostly at institutions ) in 20 countries
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Have you read any of his papers? Morris was not fucking around.
Can you elaborate, or suggest a specific paper?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you read any of his papers? Morris was not fucking around.
Please expand? He was and is very smart. This is not disputed. He was 23 at the time. Not exactly a child. The worm was surprisingly elaborate containing three separate remote exploits. It probably took a few weeks to build and test. So sabotaging thousands of at the time very expensive network connected computers was a very deliberate action. I posit that he likely did it to become famous and perhaps even successful…
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I think the bigger thing was that the Internet just wasn't that big a deal at the time. I got serious access in '93, and into '94-95 there were still netsplits on it (UUNet/NSFNet is the one I remember most). It was a non-remunerative offense, with really unclear intent, that took out a research network. He had good counsel, as you can tell from the reporting about the trial, but the outcome made sense. I doubt his d…
> I think the bigger thing was that the Internet just wasn't that big a deal at the time. ”Computer crime” definitely was though.
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Both of those agree that is was '88...
I strongly suspect 1998 was a typo by OP and he was actually pointing out the discrepancy between 2 Nov and 4 Nov WRT “this day”. However the article has been updated so only the HN title has this flaw.
From the Wikipedia article: Clifford Stoll, author of The Cuckoo's Egg, wrote that "Rumors have it that [Morris] worked with a friend or two at Harvard's computing department (Harvard student Paul Graham sent him mail asking for 'Any news on the brilliant project')". Has pg commented on this?
> the internet in 1988 60k computers ( mostly at institutions ) in 20 countries
Everything was slower though. Turkey as a whole country had one 9600bps link to Bitnet at the time. Internet was accessed through Bitnet gateways. Systems (CPUs and I/O in general) were also much slower.
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6,000+, and those machines served many others (back then there were tens of thousands of machines on the Internet, but probably 10x as many that were connected to these by relays that handled email or Usenet traffic).
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>MIT really respects good hacks and good hackers. Oooof in light of Aaron Swartz. He plugged directly into a network switch that was in an unlocked and unlabelled room at MIT so he could download faster and faced "charges of breaking and entering with intent, grand larceny, and unauthorized access to a computer network". MIT really didn't lift a finger for this either. >Swartz's attorneys requested that all pretrial…
Agreed, it's hard to see this as some sort of "hacker respect hacker" in light of MIT's other actions. It's very hard to extract Robert Tappan Morris from the context of his father being an extremely powerful man when trying to figure out how he managed to get away with what he did.