Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cwjcc!hal!ncoast!allbery From: allbery@ncoast.UUCP (Brandon S. Allbery) Newsgroups: news.sysadmin Subject: Re: No RTM trial? Message-ID: <13161@ncoast.UUCP> Date: 22 Nov 88 02:42:38 GMT References: <16953@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <5424@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> Reply-To: allbery@ncoast.UUCP (Brandon S. Allbery) Followup-To: news.sysadmin Organization: Cleveland Public Access UN*X, Cleveland, Oh Lines: 49 As quoted from <5424@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> by spaf@cs.purdue.edu (Gene Spafford): +--------------- | In article <16953@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> weemba@garnet.berkeley.edu (Obnoxious Math Grad Student) writes: | >Perhaps no charges will even be brought against RTM, on the grounds | >that NSA and others are more worried about the worm program becoming | >public knowledge. Which no doubt could follow from introducing the | >very program as the main evidence against RTM. | | Easily remedied. There are lots of reverse-engineered versions of | the code out there, and new versions could be put together with | a modicum of effort. All we need to do is post one such version. | There is no law against that....In fact, that would make an interesting | tech report, no? +--------------- Aaaagh. Aren't there *any* other Mac users out there reading this newsgroup, or are they forgetting a certain little something...? Spaf, I respect you highly as a Usenet administrator and de-facto Keeper of the Active File. But releasing the source to this virus would be a disaster. Let me tell you -- and everyone else -- a little story: Sometime in 1987, a Mac programmer in West Germany posted some sample viruses (in source form) to a BBS in order to convince people that something should be done about viruses; he'd been victimized a few times by them. He did *too* good a job of warning them (perhaps analogous to RTM?): there are MANY, MANY utilities now available for the Mac that do nothing but sniff out the various mutations of those viruses that sprang up all over the place. Indeed, I haven't seen a virus detector for the Mac *yet* that didn't have some special code to trap "nVIR" viruses. As far as anyone knows, the nVIR plague has been wiped out; but it may yet return in modified form, like the Black Plague -- and there have been others, like Scores (which is as infamous as nVIR in the Mac community), which aren't related except in that they are viruses. IS THIS WHAT YOU WANT TO DO TO THE INTERNET? *Don't* post the virus code. People who really want to get it can undoubted- ly decipher it themselves, or design their own; assuming they're intelligent enough to do so, you couldn't stop them anyway. But making it freely available to all is just asking for any moron to launch an attack on the Internet. ++Brandon -- Brandon S. Allbery, comp.sources.misc moderator and one admin of ncoast PA UN*X uunet!hal.cwru.edu!ncoast!allbery ncoast!allbery@hal.cwru.edu allberyb@skybridge.sdi.cwru.edu allbery@uunet.uu.net comp.sources.misc is moving off ncoast -- please do NOT send submissions direct Send comp.sources.misc submissions to comp-sources-misc@.