Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday Morris worm

Full disclosure: I served as a character witness at Robert Morris's trial. Before the trial, the judge was quite incredulous that the prosecutor was pursuing a felony charge and refused to let the trial go forward without confirmation from the prosecutor's superiors in Washington. that one. As Bob ut it, "It {being the father] is not a great career move." Robert confessed to Bob as soon as he realized the folly of loosing an exponential, even with a tiny growth rate per generation. I believe that what brought computers to their knees was the overwhelming number of attacks, not the cost of cecryption. The worm did assure that only one copy would be allowed to proceed at a time. During high school, Robert worked as a summer employee for Fred Grampp. He got high marks for finding and correcting an exploit. Buffer overflows were known to cause misbehavior, but few people at the time were conscious that the misbehavior could be controlled. I do not know whether Berkeley agonized before distributing the "debug" feature that allowed remote super-user access via sendmail. But they certainly messed up by not documenting it. Doug