[TUHS] Happy birthday, Morris Worm!

[ggm@algebras.org (George Michaelson)]

Having been stupid, to deleterious effect of others, I can't find it
in my heart to condemn it in anyone who clearly had a shitload of
smarts.

I was just selfish (I burned the JANET X.25 budget for the entire
campus, logging into the TOPS-10 typing tutor to get X.25 PAD to a vax
in edinburgh to connect to EMAS and read emails and oh well ok yes
play a lot, a seriously large amount of dungeon. They shut down the
Dec-10 typing tutor account and I was forbidden the network for the
year)

I don't think he actually intended to be that disruptive. In a way,
the person most harmed was Morris Senior, wasn't it?

(I was at CSIRO, and we got "hit" for want of a better word by morris,
but we also got fixed very quickly. From memory, piers dik lauder from
Sydney uni actually kept a mail *@* in ACSNet even after this,
figuring store-and-forward to everyone at everywhere was actually useful)

-G

On Thu, Nov 2, 2017 at 1:46 PM, Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
>> the idiot hadn't tested it on an isolated network first
>
> That would have "proved" that the worm worked safely, for
> once every host was infected, all would go quiet.
>
> Only half in jest, I have always held that Cornell was right
> to expel Morris, but their reason should have been his lack
> of appreciation of exponentials.
>
> (Full disclosure: I was a character witnesss at his trial. A
> little known fact is that the judge leaned on the prosecutor
> to reduce the charge to a misdemeanor and accepted the felony
> only when the prosecuter secured specific backing from
> higher echelons at DOJ.)
>
> Doug McIlroy