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This week in 1988, Robert Morris unleashed his eponymous worm

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Re: This week in 1988, Robert Morris unleashed his eponymous worm

#141

Post by georgemcbay »

iwontberude wrote: post #138
tim333 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PG spoke about the worm a bit in an interview here: https://aletteraday.substack.com/p/letter-85-paul-graham-and... Some quotes from that: > The worm, no one would have ever known that the worm existed, except there was a bug in it. That was the problem. The worm itself was absolutely harmless. But there was a bug in the code that controlled the number of copies that would spread to a given computer. And so the compu…

I suppose the notion that you could just distribute untested software onto an unlimited amount of other peoples computers without consent wasn't yet considered unethical so therefore the worm was perceived to be absolutely harmless by rtm and pg. Just some minor details they couldn't possibly have seen back then.

> I suppose the notion that you could just distribute untested software onto an unlimited amount of other peoples computers without consent wasn't yet considered unethical

As someone who is old enough to have been a teenage hacker back in this timeframe and who spent his time on old Diversi Dial dialup systems which lead to early internet systems via gnu/fsf's open access policy, which lead to bitnet relay, and who was around during the initial development of irc right around this very year (1988) I can say that it was absolutely considered a bad act to do this sort of thing back then even as just a prank or demonstration (which made it kind of cool to back-then me, as a teenager, but which made it certainly unethical in a professional sense even for the time).

... however when you oopsied and the shit hit the fan, you could get away with it if your dad worked for the NSA.

The vast majority of people who weren't RTM would have had a far more severely negative outcome in his situation.

Re: This week in 1988, Robert Morris unleashed his eponymous worm

#142

Post by tomhow »

bdcravens wrote: post #5

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?

He's referred to it a few times in essays:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Apaulgraham.com+%22mor...

Re: This week in 1988, Robert Morris unleashed his eponymous worm

#143

Post by SchemaLoad »

conradev wrote: post #42

I’m still waiting for the first runaway autonomous botnet.

It's kind of surprising that it hasn't happened already, outside of iot junk. Seems like computer OSs just got so secure that it's become impractical to deploy a widespread exploit. And everything moved to scamming instead.

Re: This week in 1988, Robert Morris unleashed his eponymous worm

#144

Post by quickthrowman »

bdcravens wrote: post #5

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?

A bit of an aside from The Cuckoo’s Egg;

It’s been a long time since I read the book, but IIRC Cliff visited with Robert Morris (rtm’s dad) at the NSA when he traveled to Washington DC, and I think the worm and rtm are mentioned after he meets with the elder Robert.

Re: This week in 1988, Robert Morris unleashed his eponymous worm

#145

Post by fsckboy »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #81

A good account is With Microscope and Tweezers: The Worm from MIT's Perspective [1], published in CACM a few months after the event. Notice it was the worm. I was an intern at IBM in '88 and they shut-down the (iirc) two internet getaways to their corporate network (vnet) while people figured out what was going on. News moved slowly back then, and the idea of self-replicating software was unusual. Although IBM had ha…

>the idea of self-replicating software was unusual

floppy based viruses were well established and quite common

Re: This week in 1988, Robert Morris unleashed his eponymous worm

#146

Post by wkat4242 »

nakamoto_damacy wrote: post #139
Chinjut wrote: post #133

The 10% number is completely made up. According to Paul Graham, "I was there when this statistic was cooked up, and this was the recipe: someone guessed that there were about 60,000 computers attached to the Internet, and that the worm might have infected ten percent of them."

That figure is probably UUCP mostly not live connected hosts. I could be wrong, but 60k hosts that you could telnet to sounds like a lot of ducking hosts back then. I was there too, in my late teens. God bless PG.

Yeah and a 'host' back then wasn't a cheap PC or something, they tended to be $30000 workstations or $300000 servers. At tech companies and Universities only, and mostly in the US. 60k sounds like a lot for those days. It grew massively from the early 90s.

Even UUCP was still really fringe and those weren't actually connected hosts on tcp/ip. They had their own dialup mail exchange protocol similar to fidonet.

Re: This week in 1988, Robert Morris unleashed his eponymous worm

#147

Post by [deleted] »

tredre3 wrote: post #119
lysace wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

There's no need to "insult" people. What I'm seeing in his comments is just a successful tech bro admiring and defending a fellow tech bro, "boys will be boys" style. I don't think it has anything to do with politics.

[deleted]

Re: This week in 1988, Robert Morris unleashed his eponymous worm

#149

Post by ls612 »

chasd00 wrote: post #124
lysace wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that is getting away with it for someone with means and clout.

in those days computer crimes weren't punished that harshly. I'm surprised it was that severe, in fact, it sounds like there must have been some heavy hitters on the prosecution side.

I think the story is that this was one of the first ever prosecutions under the CFAA and they quickly realized that the fact it had taken down so many systems was an accident (there was a bug in the replication code). The prosecution was mainly to establish precedent in an emerging field of law and technology.

Re: This week in 1988, Robert Morris unleashed his eponymous worm

#150

Post by rootusrootus »

wkat4242 wrote: post #146
nakamoto_damacy wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That figure is probably UUCP mostly not live connected hosts. I could be wrong, but 60k hosts that you could telnet to sounds like a lot of ducking hosts back then. I was there too, in my late teens. God bless PG.

Yeah and a 'host' back then wasn't a cheap PC or something, they tended to be $30000 workstations or $300000 servers. At tech companies and Universities only, and mostly in the US. 60k sounds like a lot for those days. It grew massively from the early 90s. Even UUCP was still really fringe and those weren't actually connected hosts on tcp/ip. They had their own dialup mail exchange protocol similar to fidonet.

Those were the days. I still remember my fido number. And I still remember just how painful it was to get uucp working properly. Ugh. But my mother had an email address years before any of her contemporaries. Being a geek was fun then.
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