Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!eplrx7!udel!princeton!njin!rutgers!mailrus!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!DORSAI.ICS.HAWAII.EDU!torben
From: torben@DORSAI.ICS.HAWAII.EDU ("Torben N. Nielsen")
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: a holiday gift from Robert "wormer" Morris
Message-ID: <88Nov17.005858hst.4205@dorsai.ics.hawaii.edu>
Date: 17 Nov 88 10:58:52 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 41

>Perhaps the Computer Science programs should:
>    1.  require students to take ethics, humanities and social science
>        courses.

Computer science programs I know of already do that. That's still a part
of a college education.

>    2.  restructure their programs such the early years are not simply
>        set up to flunk out all but the 'compulsive' hackers.  Fortunately
>        these programs do NOT succeed, and ' a few good men & women' get by.

I believe the current tendency is to spend the first few years teaching
mostly algorithms and data structures. I'd think that it's hardest for the
so-called hackers to make it through the first few years. At least it is if
they follow a normal curriculum.

>Furthermore:
>    3.  lets not celebrate movies such as 'War Games' where the hacker kid
>        breaks the law numerous times AND gets off.

Why not? I thought that was a rather delightful movie and if you think about it,
it had quite a few *good* points. Besides, all those blinking lights was a nice
touch :-)

>    4.  Lets engineer better operating systems!

We are. Look at how we've advanced in functionality. It's not all that
surprising that a few holes exist. Actually, I'm more surprised that there
haven't been more problems than this. Making a system secure is pretty easy.
If you don't mind throwing functionality overboard. Let's learn what can be
learned from this incident, fix the holes and go on. Hopefully, vendors and
researchers/developers alike will be a little more careful about what they
release in the future.

>    5.  More distribution of binary systems and less source code.

I trust you're not serious..... Let's get more source systems out there and then
get people to work actively on breaking them. With as much information as
possible. That way we might make some real gains. 

						Torben