[TUHS] Happy birthday, Morris Worm!

[don@DonHopkins.com (Don Hopkins)]

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Can anyone remember or decipher what this was about???

Date: 24 Mar 90 06:52:43 GMT
From: dmr@alice.att.com
Subject: Re: Contest announcement
To: misc-security at uunet.uu.net

My own contest is "Most appalling display of classlessness in dealing with
a serious subject."  The nominees are:

1) National Center for Computer Crime Data, Security Magazine, and
   Gene Spafford, for their "How High Shall We Hang Robert Morris?"
   contest.

2) Gene Spafford, for the most tasteless article ever to appear in CACM
   (special credits for the Jodie Foster joke).

        Dennis Ritchie

Some context maybe?

https://tedium.co/2015/07/23/early-computer-virus-history/ <https://tedium.co/2015/07/23/early-computer-virus-history/>

To this day, Morris doesn’t really talk about it—though in a lot of ways, his worm had positive side effects, by exposing just how poor security was on many university networks. People didn’t care about password security until Robert Morris came along. Now, security is treated as an immensely important part of running a large network. And Morris, who currently serves as an assistant professor in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, has become a person worthy of emulating—something that can’t be said about John McAfee these days.

“He has not tried to make any money or work in this area,” Purdue University computer science professor Eugene Spafford said of Morris in an interview with The Washington Post. “His behavior has been consistent in supporting his defense: that it was an accident and he felt badly about it. I think it’s very much to his credit that that has been his behavior ever since.”

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