161–170 of 200 posts
That was one scary exciting day (source: was running machines at MIT at the time)
That day our tech chief at the time came running and told us about the worm, and that apparently our country managed to avoid it because the news spread quickly enough that one guy simply unplugged the whole country from the Internet - there was only a single connection back then. (!)
The term "worm" came from the 1975 (sci-fi) novel The Shockwave Rider : * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shockwave_Rider
The worm in shockwave rider released secret information to the public. Turns out a worm was not needed for this, just wikileaks.
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At the same time, it's easy to believe that MIT of 2013 is very different than MIT of 1988.
While that's entirely possible, MIT was established in 1861. I think the old boys club was established long before 1988.
I was a student part-time administrator/systems programmer at the Purdue Engineering Computer Network at the time. Our OS installs had enough local mods (and we had enough non-VAX, non-Sun architectures) that we were immune to some of the worm's modalities, but the sendmail debug mode exploit at least still caused a lot of consternation.
Was KSB there at the time? That dude was fun.
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There's contemporaneous reporting. It's in Katie Hafner and John Markoff's book! A friend of Morris', named Paul, has a role in the aftermath of the worm. I'm not dunking on Paul Graham here. If you know anything about me, if anything, this is a point in his favor. :)
It's in Katie Hafner and John Markoff's book! Not sure if that was supposed to be sarcasm[1] or was intended seriously, but for what it's worth Hafner & Markoff have frequently received a lot of criticism for playing fast and loose with the truth in that book. Now most of that is specifically in regards to their treatment of Mitnick, and I'm not making any particular accusation here. Just sharing a thought that "it's…
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Hold on, I need to capture and circulate this claim that I'm a "very obvious leftist" to my friends and acquaintances. Thanks, this made my day.
Thank you for constantly removing some of the veils from the mystery of our computational universe.
The notion that you’re a very obvious leftist seems asinine to anyone who has seen your comment history in these digital catacombs for the last decades.
I’m still waiting for the first runaway autonomous botnet.
Currently AI doesn't work very well on hardware separated by hundreds of milliseconds of latency and slow network links. Both the training and inference are slow. However I think this is a solvable problem, and I started solving it a while ago with decent results: https://github.com/Hello1024/shared-tensor When someone gets this working well, I could totally see a distributed AI being tasked with expanding it's own p…
It doesn’t need to be fully decentralized, the control plane just needs some redundancy
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.
You don’t need a full host compromise to send network traffic