Earlier quoted context omitted.
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(Not USA:ian.)
> Why are flattering tptacek?
?
This week in 1988, Robert Morris unleashed his eponymous worm
121–130 of 200 posts
Re: This week in 1988, Robert Morris unleashed his eponymous worm
#122I followed his course 6.5840 on distributed systems ( https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/ , YouTube videos at https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrw6a1wE39_tb2fErI4-WkMbs... ) and completed the labs. One day, out of curiosity, I looked up his name. Then I realized what a legend he is. Great course by the way.
I am also doing the course now in my freetime. Even I wasn't aware who he is. On a sidenote, what did you do after the course? It is an amazing course though!
I went here next: https://www.youtube.com/@CMUDatabaseGroup
Re: This week in 1988, Robert Morris unleashed his eponymous worm
#123PG has said that he made up the 10% figure. It was a guess, but it was not correct.
Re: This week in 1988, Robert Morris unleashed his eponymous worm
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
A felony conviction, three years probation, 400 hours of community service, and a $25,000 (inflation adjusted) fine for a novel non-violent crime with no personal material benefit isn't exactly "got away with it"
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.
Re: This week in 1988, Robert Morris unleashed his eponymous worm
#125From 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?
Would you?
I hope he at least leaves it in his will or something. We're all wondering / waiting to know.
Re: This week in 1988, Robert Morris unleashed his eponymous worm
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Sounds like the type of mistake I always make: Notice someone being off by two days, and in haste, post a correction that is off by ten years.
With that username you don't even need to be all that close to get the job done.
Re: This week in 1988, Robert Morris unleashed his eponymous worm
#127From 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?
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 computer would get like 100 copies of the worm running on it, back in the day, when having 100 processes running on your computer would be enough to crash it.
>he called me and told me what had happened.
Re: This week in 1988, Robert Morris unleashed his eponymous worm
#128Thankfully the security holes in C that have allowed Morris worm to exist, have been taken care by WG14 since then.
The future isn't evenly distributed. I recently discovered an actively developed software project that had a ton of helper functions based on the design of `gets` with the same vulnerability. Surprisingly not all C/C++ developers have learned yet to recoil in horror at seeing a buffer pointer being passed around without a length. (C++'s std::span was very convenient for fixing the issue by letting the buffer pointer and length be kept together, exactly like Go and Rust slices.)