I just ran across this in my old email archives, Mike Godwin’s reaction to Philip Dorn’s Final Word column in the November 11 issue of Information Week ("Morris Got What He Deserved"): Return-Path: &lt;eff-news-request(a)eff.org&gt; Reply-To: eff-news(a)eff.org Precedence: bulk To: eff-news(a)eff.org From: Rita Marie Rouvalis &lt;rita(a)eff.org&gt; Subject: EFFector2.02 Date: Wed, 27 Nov 91 15:25:23 EST ########## ########## ########## | THE GREAT WORK:| ########## ########## ########## | By John Perry Barlow| #### #### #### | | ######## ######## ######## | HACKER MANIA CONTINUES!| ######## ######## ######## | Excerpts from the Geraldo Circus| #### #### #### | | ########## #### #### | DID MORRIS "GET WHAT HE DESERVED?"| ########## #### #### | A Letter to InfoWeek| =====================================================================| EFFector Online November 27,1992 Volume 2, Number 2| =====================================================================| IN THIS ISSUE: THE GREAT WORK by John Perry Barlow GETTING WHAT HE DESERVED? by Mike Godwin MCI FRIENDS & FAMILY by Craig Neidorf GERALDO! HACKER! MANIA! CONTINUES! […] -==--==--==-<>-==--==--==- GETTING WHAT HE DESERVED? An Open Letter to Information Week by Mike Godwin mnemonic(a)eff.org Information Week 600 Community Drive Manhasset, N.Y. 11030 Dear editors: Philip Dorn's Final Word column in the November 11 issue of Information Week ("Morris Got What He Deserved") is, sadly, only the latest example of the kind of irrational and uninformed discourse that too often colors public-policy discussions about computer crime. It is a shame that Dorn did not think it worthwhile to get his facts straight--if he had, he might have written a very different column. The following are only a few of Dorn's major factual errors: He writes that "It is sophistry to claim [Internet Worm author Robert] Morris did not know what he was doing--his mistake was being slovenly." Yet even the most casual reading of the case, and of most of the news coverage of the case, makes eminently clear that the sophists Dorn decries don't exist--no one has argued that Morris didn't know what he was doing. This was never even an issue in the Morris case. Dorn also writes that "Any effort to break into a system by an unauthorized person, or one authorized only to do certain things only to do certain things, should per se be illegal." This is also the position of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which Dorn nevertheless criticizes for being "out of step with the industry." Yet the issue of whether unauthorized computer access should be illegal also was never an issue in the Morris case. Dorn writes that "Those defending Morris squirm when trying to explain why his actions were harmless." No doubt such defenders would squirm, if they existed. But none of the people or organizations Dorn quotes has ever claimed that his actions were harmless. This too was never an issue in the Morris case. Dorn makes much of the fact that Morris received only "a trivial fine and community service." But the focus both in the trial and in its appeal was never on the severity of Morris's sentence, but on whether the law distinguished between malicious computer vandalism and accidental damaged caused by an intrusion. EFF's position has been that the law should be construed to make such a distinction. Dorn writes that "To say that those who intrude and do no lasting damage are harmless is to pervert what Congress and those who drafted the legislation sought to do: penalize hackers." Indeed, this would be a perversion, if anyone were making that argument. Unfortunately, Dorn seems unwilling to see the arguments that were made. "It is sickening," writes Dorn, "to hear sobbing voices from the ACLU, the gnashing of teeth from Mitch Kapor's Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and caterwauling from the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility--all out of step with the industry. They seem so frightened that the law may reach them that they elected to defend Morris's indefensible actions." Dorn's distortions here verge on libel, since we neither defend Morris's actions nor are motivated out of fear that the law will apply to us. Instead, we are concerned, as all citizens should be, that the law make appropriate distinctions between intentional and unintentional harms in the computer arena, just as it does in all other realms of human endeavor. A more glaring factual error occurs one paragraph later, when he writes that "The Supreme Court says intruders can be convicted under the law because by definition an intrusion shows an intent to do harm. That takes care of Morris." The Supreme Court has never said any such thing--after all, the Court declined to hear the case. Even the lower courts in the Morris case made no such claim. What is far more "sickening" than even Dorn's imaginary versions of our concerns about the Morris case is his irresponsibility in making unsubstantiated charges that even a cursory familiarity with the facts could have prevented. In the course of his article, Dorn manages to get one thing right--he writes that "The law is not perfect--it needs clarification and reworking." This has been our position all along, and it is the basis for our support of Morris's appeal. It is also public knowledge--Dorn could have found out our position if he had bothered to ask us. Mike Godwin Staff Counsel EFF

Don Hopkins wrote: This piqued my interest, because exiting incremental search with ESC doesn't look familiar to me (unless in ITS). I tried it in a recent Emacs, and just got "ESC M-b is undefined". Emacs 18 was contemporary with the Morris Worm. Would it allow ESC?

Can anyone remember or decipher what this was about??? Date: 24 Mar 90 06:52:43 GMT From: dmr(a)alice.att.com Subject: Re: Contest announcement To: misc-security(a)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.”

A friendly reminder that kabuki-west is not an appropriate forum for baby announcements! ;) http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-doctor.html <http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-doctor.html> -Don

Unless I'm mistaken, the Morris worm was the first such incident to make the front page of the New York Times (in an article by now-retired John Markoff): http://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/04/us/virus-in-military-computers-disrupts-s… So I'm not surprised that other reporters started poking around. No one thought to call Apple (at least, not that anyone told me about), but given the limited nature (and understanding) of the Internet at the time, and its characterization by Markoff as "military", this is not too surprising. My group was a little worried about an AppleTalk-based virus getting loose in the Apple Engineering Network ... and that sort-of did happen, not very long after: http://virus.wikidot.com/wdef Fortunately, WDEF had a bug which limited its spread to promiscuous media exchange (floppies) - AppleShare volumes didn't have the resource it attempted to infect (a "desktop database"), and thus if your computer had WDEF, the first attempt to mount an AppleShare volume would crash your system - at that time, most Macs didn't have MMUs and didn't run real operating systems like Unix ... and we inside Apple used AppleShare extensively. Also easy to clean out: just rebuild the "desktop database" (hold down Option key when mounting disk volumes, IIRC). I'm also pretty sure that the Morris worm was the impetus for the formation of the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) at CMU Software Engineering Institute (SEI): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_emergency_response_team It looks like Wikipedia agrees with me. Tom Duff gave a related talk & paper at Summer USENIX 1989 that was most interesting, "Experience with Viruses on UNIX Systems": https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/compsystems/1989/spr_duff.pdf I especially liked the bit in which Tom's virus infected a multi-level secured UNIX system that Doug McIlroy and Jim Reeds were developing which they didn't spot until they turned on all their protections ... and programs started crashing all over the place. Erik

Sorry, "psl" is Peter S. Langston, so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_(1972_video_game) http://www.langston.com That Wikipedia entry should describe it as a "computer game" (or "simulation") rather than as a "video game", given the common understanding of those phrases. PSL's "empire" was a multiplayer game similar (sort of) to the board game "Risk" and the "graphics" were ASCII-maps. I played that game at some length after leaving UCB - it was "guaranteed to drop your GPA two points" (addictive as hell). Another way to parboil your brain with it was to set the "update interval" to 5 seconds (a.k.a. a "flash" game) and have a several hour (instead of the more typical several month) gaming session with like-minded crazies ... I mean, "players" ... in a terminal room. I recall one such evening up at LBL with Craig Leres and Jef Poskanzer, among others ... Anyway, the Dave Pare mentioned in the Wikipedia entry is the same one who worked on decompiling the Morris worm, with the aforementioned tools he'd developed (he liked playing empire and wanted to fix bugs and extend the game, but psl was only supplying binaries ...). It's funny where tools come from sometimes. Erik

Remember Eedie & Eddie, Peter Langston’s DecTalk voice synthesizers who would answer the phone with “Yes, operator, I will accept the charges!” and then responded to touch tone commands to perform algorithmic compositions and sing songs together to you over the telephone? http://www.langston.com/SVM.html <http://www.langston.com/SVM.html> Good thing Bellcore had all the free long distance phone service they could use, because anyone who knew the phone number for Eedie & Eddie could use it to make as many free third party charge long distance phone calls as they desired! (Spoiler: The phone number was listed in the title of Peter S. Langston’s 1986 Summer USENIX paper!) Search Results 201 644-2332 or Eedie & Eddie on the Wire: An Experiment in Music Generation http://www.langston.com/Papers/2332.pdf -Don

On Wed, Nov 15, 2017 at 8:56 PM, Erik E. Fair &lt;fair-tuhs(a)netbsd.org&gt; wrote: Indeed - this is a solid bit of UNIX history. We should put a PSL Games Tape into Warren's library. And Empire was more additive then Adventure when it came out :-) Fortunately, I only got mildly sucked in. If I recall, Ward Cunningham, Steve Glaser and Charlie Perkins were pretty heavily caught up.