a holiday gift from Robert Morris

[D.Rorke]

> >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?
> >-- 
> 
> As a matter of fact, one of the things Robert did at Bell Labs (while
> still a high school student, I believe) was fix some of the glaring
> security holes in uucp (AT&T Bell Laboratories Technical Journal,
> 10/84).

The author of the article you reference was not the Robert Morris
under suspicion (although it may be his father).  The biographical
notes at the end of the paper indicate that the Robert H. Morris
who co-authored the paper had been employed at Bell Labs since 1960.

> It is very easy in the aftermath of something like this to indulge in
> the devil theory of crime -- that all bad things must come from evil
> minds.  The more you find out about rtm I believe the more you will find
> he has in common with the people criticizing his behavior.  He has done
> significant work in computer security, including warning people for
> years about the security holes that made the worm possible.  He has
> worked as a sysadmin for an arpanet host.  He is a serious student of
> computer science and was making contributions to the field at an age
> when most of us were trying to learn Pascal.  He's also one hell of a
> great guy, and no one seems more appalled by the effects of his actions
> than he is.

Being a "great guy" is not sufficient.  As members of society we are
also expected to exhibit a reasonable degree of responsible judgement.
Perfectly nice people get roaring drunk, get into their cars, and
unintentionally run over little children.  Although this analogy is lacking
in some ways it is meant to dramatically make the point that nice, well
intentioned people can do irresponsible things that cost the rest of society
a great deal.  Such people must be held accountable for the results of
their irresponsibility.

The person responsible for this virus may in fact be a "great guy" in many
ways and may not have thought there was anything wrong with what he was doing.
If so, he had a very poor understanding of the ethics involved.  Although we
may feel sorry for him we cannot afford to easily excuse such poor judgement.


> We can argue about the advisability of what he did, but I urge you to
> resist the temptation to pigeon-hole someone you don't know on the basis
> of fragmentary information.
> 
> Jim Matthews
> Dartmouth Software Development


Dave Rorke
attunix!der