a holiday gift from Robert "wormer" Morris

[Glen Dudek]

In article <1445 at anasaz.UUCP> john at anasaz.UUCP (John Moore) writes:
>In article <24 at jove.dec.com> vixie at decwrl.dec.com (Paul Vixie) writes:
>># the hole [in sendmail] was so obvious that i surmise that Morris
>
>According to press reports, RM spent his summers working at AT&T
>on "Unix Communications Software Security". Anyone with a source
>license check to see if he slipped a trojan horse into uucico
>or uuxqt or something?

I was system administrator at Harvard's computer science computing
facility while Robert Morris was an undergraduate there.  I found him
to be an intelligent and responsible person.  He volunteered his
assistance in solving difficult problems in network configuration and
routing, and helped to make Harvard a major Northeast news and mail
gateway.  He did not exploit his knowledge of UNIX security
deficiencies to break into systems or install trojan horses, though he
well could have.

I do think that if he did indeed release this worm, he showed
extraordinarily poor judgement.  However, I would not consider it
justice to punish him as a criminal.  I am convinced he had no
malicious intent (please, no arguing about intent and breaking the law -
I am talking about justice, not the law).

I do not think the world need worry about holes that Robert Morris
could have created - I think we need to worry about the ones he didn't find.

	Glen Dudek
	ex-postmaster at harvard.harvard.edu