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From: weemba@garnet.berkeley.edu (Obnoxious Math Grad Student)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
Subject: Re: "Morris did it"--the new excuse?
Message-ID: <17122@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 17 Nov 88 03:10:02 GMT
References: <978@hub.ucsb.edu> <16965@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <1409@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> <17088@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <1429@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu>
Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: weemba@garnet.berkeley.edu (Obnoxious Math Grad Student)
Organization: Brahms Gang Posting Central
Lines: 25
In-reply-to: sloane@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu (Bob Sloane)

In article <1429@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu>, sloane@kuhub (Bob Sloane) writes:
>							The real
>question here is whether or not the worm was a "necessary" interuption.
>You seem to be saying that it was necessary, in that it might wake up
>system administrators to provide better security.

I may *seem* to be saying that, but I'm not.  I am saying that maybe sys-
admins ought to be more security conscious all around.  The Morris worm
was already history--and I simply do not understand the point of any of
us placing "blame" in this incident--other than the intellectual amuse-
ment of playing at amateur lawyers.  (As opposed to the non-amusement of
playing amateur judge/jury/executioner.)  If we as a collective whole
DON'T learn from the worm, then I think we as a collective whole shall
have earned any future disasters that befall us.

>						    I doubt that the
>researchers here would accept that position.

And what did your researchers say when they learned their colleagues in
another department were not shut down?  "What do you mean, it's this bug
in DEBUG mode that's been known about for years?  Why wasn't it fixed?"

Or did they simply get the bald message "Morris did it"?

ucbvax!garnet!weemba	Matthew P Wiener/Brahms Gang/Berkeley CA 94720