Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!ncrlnk!ncr-sd!hp-sdd!hplabs!ucbvax!husc6!purdue!spaf
From: spaf@cs.purdue.edu (Gene Spafford)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
Subject: Re: Possible Fines for Virus Perpetrator
Message-ID: <5332@medusa.cs.purdue.edu>
Date: 7 Nov 88 15:44:24 GMT
References: <456@l5comp.UUCP> <12081@dscatl.UUCP> <16600@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Sender: news@cs.purdue.EDU
Reply-To: spaf@cs.purdue.edu (Gene Spafford)
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Organization: Department of Computer Science, Purdue University
Lines: 57

In article <16600@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> weemba@garnet.berkeley.edu (Obnoxious Math Grad Student) writes:
>In article <12081@dscatl.UUCP>, lindsay@dscatl (Lindsay Cleveland) writes:
>>			         Whether or not it made it through all
>>the courts, appeals, etc. is perhaps not as useful as the scare it
>>would throw into some other clowns who might think of trying a similar
>>worm/virus "just for a bit of fun!"
>
>I see that you, like thousands of others, don't really understand.  Robert
>T Morris Jr has done everyone a FAVOR.  Instead of thanking him for maybe
>waking up people on the ARPANET to how DAMN EASY IT IS TO INFILTRATE, you,
>like thousands of others, just think he's some annoying clown out there
>who gets off on crashing the net.
>
>Guess what?  Well, maybe he is an annoying clown, but that's irrelevant.

That attitude is completely reprehensible!  That is the exact same
attitude that places the blame for a rape on the victim; I find it
morally repugnant.

Consider an analogy:

Locks built in to the handle of a door are usually quite poor;
deadbolts are a preferred lock, although they too are not always
secure.  These standard, non deadbolt locks can be opened in a few
seconds with a screwdriver or a piece of plastic by someone with little
training.

Now, if you have such a lock on your door, and you wake up in the
middle of the night to find that a stranger has broken into your home
and is wandering about, bumping into things in the dark and breaking
them, how do you react?  Do you excuse him because the lock is easy to
circumvent?  Do you thank him because he has shown you how poor your
locks are?  Do you think *you* should be blamed because you never got
around to replacing the lock with a better one and installing a
burgler alarm?

We have failed to imbue society with the understanding that computers
contain property, and that they are a form of business location.  If
someone breaks our computers, they put us out of work.  If someone
steals our information, it is really theft -- not some prank gone
awry, and it certainly isn't some public service!

We cannot depend on making our systems completely secure.  To do so
would require that we disconnect them from each other.  There will
always be bugs and flaws, but we try to cover that by creating a sense
of responsibility and social mores that say that breaking and cracking
are bad things to do.  Now we have to demonstrate to the world that
this is the case, and we will back it up with legal action, or we'll
continue to risk having bored students and anti-social elements
cracking whatever we replace the systems with until there is no longer
any network.  

-- 
Gene Spafford
NSF/Purdue/U of Florida  Software Engineering Research Center,
Dept. of Computer Sciences, Purdue University, W. Lafayette IN 47907-2004
Internet:  spaf@cs.purdue.edu	uucp:	...!{decwrl,gatech,ucbvax}!purdue!spaf