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From: folta@tove.umd.edu (Wayne Folta)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip,comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: a holiday gift from Robert "wormer" Morris
Summary: A tough choice in court...
Message-ID: <14435@mimsy.UUCP>
Date: 9 Nov 88 14:08:11 GMT
References: <1698@cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU> <2060@spdcc.COM> <24@jove.dec.com> <1445@anasaz.UUCP> <389@ksr.UUCP>
Sender: nobody@mimsy.UUCP
Reply-To: folta@tove.umd.edu.UUCP (Wayne Folta)
Organization: U of Maryland, Dept. of Computer Science,
Lines: 19


This is a very difficult case.  If Good Morris is let off because he is
sincere and meant no harm, what about the 2000 Evil Morrises that lurk
in every high school and university in the land?  The next guy could
claim that his destructive program was not meant to be destructive, that
he (or she) only meant to overwrite the systems' message of the day, and
a bug resulted in destroying a filesystem.  (Morris is like a crime buff who,
to prove that it can be done, smuggles a gun onto a plane and hijacks it
to Canada.  He has shown a problem in the system, but he has created the
defense for every would-be hijacker in America.)

And remember, at least two of the well-known Macintosh viruses were not
meant to harm anyone's system, but unexpected side-effects caused crashes.
Morris' program wasn't meant to get loose, but it did.  It wasn't meant to
destroy data but...



Wayne Folta          (folta@tove.umd.edu  128.8.128.42)