| ▲ | NewsaHackO 2 days ago |
| I find it funny that: 1) He released it from MIT to avoid suspicion. 2) After he was convicted, he went from Cornell to Harvard to complete his Ph.D. 3) He became an assistant professor at MIT after that. He had to be really spectacular/have crazy connections to still be able to finish his training at a top program and get a job at the institution he tried to frame. |
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| ▲ | syncsynchalt 2 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| His dad was Bob Morris. Unless that's the joke you're making. Bob Morris wrote crypt(1), dc(1), crypt(3), libm, co-wrote the rainbow series, and did additional unknown work as a cryptographer for the NSA. dmr writes about working with Bob Morris here: https://web.archive.org/web/20250121041734/https://www.bell-... |
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| ▲ | dcminter 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| One of my favourite quiet jokes is the "Editorial Board" list for The Annals of Improbable Research¹ where RTM is listed under Computer Science. Asterisks after each name denote qualifications, RTM's being "Convicted Felon" --- ¹Awarders of the Ig Nobel prize |
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| ▲ | tptacek 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Have you read any of his papers? Morris was not fucking around. |
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| ▲ | furyofantares 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Can you elaborate, or suggest a specific paper? | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Just go pull up his bibliography. Chord, the Click Modular Router (super big deal to me), RON (also a big deal to me), Vivaldi (which made its way into the Hashi products). He had a hand in a lot of stuff. His pre-CSAIL work was very much like that of the LBL Network Research Group (that's Van Jacobsen, Vern Paxson, Steve McCanne) --- he's in that league. |
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| ▲ | lysace 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Please expand? He was and is very smart. This is not disputed. He was 23 at the time. Not exactly a child. The worm was surprisingly elaborate containing three separate remote exploits. It probably took a few weeks to build and test. So sabotaging thousands of at the time very expensive network connected computers was a very deliberate action. I posit that he likely did it to become famous and perhaps even successful, feeling safe with his dad’s position. And it worked. He did not end up in prison. He ended up cofounding Viaweb and YCombinator. Unironically a great role model for YC. :/ | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I'm not psychoanalyzing the guy, I'm saying I'm not surprised he had an elite academic career, because he's an elite performer. | | |
| ▲ | 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | lysace 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | What confuses me right now is your ongoing very obvious leftist activist stance on HN vs refusing to entertain the thought that he got away with it because of his NSA dad. Edit: I am not American. Please realize that I meant exactly what I wrote and not what some of you now imagine that I wrote. I have high trust in you! To clarify: not a Trump fan. | | |
| ▲ | defen 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | A felony conviction, three years probation, 400 hours of community service, and a $25,000 (inflation adjusted) fine for a novel non-violent crime with no personal material benefit isn't exactly "got away with it" | | |
| ▲ | lysace 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Yes, that is getting away with it for someone with means and clout. | | |
| ▲ | defen 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | That's a values debate, I guess. What is the purpose of punishment? Is it to set an example to others, is it to remove a dangerous person from society, is it to prevent the criminal from reoffending, is it to satisfy society's desire to see wrongdoers punished? He didn't reoffend (as far as we know), and in fact went on to become a highly-contributing member of society. His crime was not so egregious that recompense was impossible even in principle. I don't see how a harsher punishment for him would have produced an obviously better outcome. I think it would be more productive to argue that people who commit similar crimes should receive similar punishments as this, rather than arguing that he should have received a harsher punishment. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I don't think this is as much about the purpose of punishment as it is about the monkeys with the grapes and the cucumbers. |
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| ▲ | chasd00 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | in those days computer crimes weren't punished that harshly. I'm surprised it was that severe, in fact, it sounds like there must have been some heavy hitters on the prosecution side. | | |
| ▲ | ls612 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I think the story is that this was one of the first ever prosecutions under the CFAA and they quickly realized that the fact it had taken down so many systems was an accident (there was a bug in the replication code). The prosecution was mainly to establish precedent in an emerging field of law and technology. |
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| ▲ | emmelaich a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | You can't judge his behaviour without knowing his intent, and the culture of the late 80s and early internet. Everyone hacked. When the internet was connected to Sydney University early 90s, all the students were grabbing Stanfords /etc/passwd files and peeking at the open X displays of people in Sweden. Etc. All for fun / curiosity. You can be sure that even rtm's Dad did similar, perhaps confined to his lab / peers. |
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| ▲ | tptacek 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Hold on, I need to capture and circulate this claim that I'm a "very obvious leftist" to my friends and acquaintances. Thanks, this made my day. | | |
| ▲ | dctoedt 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > I need to capture and circulate this claim that I'm a "very obvious leftist" to my friends and acquaintances. s/leftist/Catholic/g; (in a good sense) | | |
| ▲ | tptacek a day ago | parent [-] | | I don't know how obvious my Catholicism is but my mom will be glad to hear that. :) |
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| ▲ | josh2600 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Just gotta say that this thread really delivered in so many ways. Thank you for constantly removing some of the veils from the mystery of our computational universe. The notion that you’re a very obvious leftist seems asinine to anyone who has seen your comment history in these digital catacombs for the last decades. |
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| ▲ | ErroneousBosh 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > very obvious leftist activist stance Is there something wrong with being a "leftist"? | | | |
| ▲ | DonHopkins 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [flagged] | | | |
| ▲ | tredre3 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | There's no need to "insult" people. What I'm seeing in his comments is just a successful tech bro admiring and defending a fellow tech bro, "boys will be boys" style. I don't think it has anything to do with politics. | | |
| ▲ | 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | tptacek 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | In this corner: leftist activist! And in this corner: successful tech bro! | |
| ▲ | 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | px43 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| You know his dad ran research at the NSA right? His dad's also a badass and super fun to talk to. Never talked to the son though, but I'd love to some day. |
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| ▲ | nostrademons 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I talked to the son at one of the early (~2008) YC dinners. Actually found him more approachable than PG or most YC founders; RTM is a nerd in the "cares a whole lot about esoteric mathematics" way, which I found a refreshing change from the "take over the world" vibe that I got from a lot of the rest of YC. Interesting random factoid: RTM's research in the early 2000s was on Chord [1], one of the earliest distributed hash tables. Chord inspired Kademlia [2], which later went on to power Limewire, Ethereum, and IPFS. So his research at MIT actually has had a bigger impact in terms of collected market cap than most YC startups have. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chord_(peer-to-peer) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia | |
| ▲ | chihuahua 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | RTM Jr is a very nice person, obviously very smart, but also has a good sense of humor and is friendly and approachable. We overlapped as C.S. grad students at Harvard for several years. | |
| ▲ | NewsaHackO 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I did not. That actually makes everything make much more sense. I was even wordering how he got out of jail time for something like this and just thought he had amazing lawyers. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I think the bigger thing was that the Internet just wasn't that big a deal at the time. I got serious access in '93, and into '94-95 there were still netsplits on it (UUNet/NSFNet is the one I remember most). It was a non-remunerative offense, with really unclear intent, that took out a research network. He had good counsel, as you can tell from the reporting about the trial, but the outcome made sense. I doubt his dad had much to do with it. | | |
| ▲ | mturmon 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Yeah, in 1988 the Internet appeared like a research network that connected universities. No money was directly at stake and the systems harmed didn't appear critical. Related to what Thomas says above, part of the response to the incident was to partition the Internet for a few days [2] - I don't know if such a thing would be possible now. But looking into the specifics again after all these years [1], I read: "The N.S.A. wanted to clamp a lid on as much of the affair as it could. Within days, the agency’s National Computer Security Center, where the elder Morris worked, asked Purdue University to remove from its computers information about the internal workings of the virus." and that CERT at CMU was one response to the incident [2]. So there is a whiff of the incident being steered away from public prosecution and towards setting up security institutions. Robert Morris did get a felony conviction, three years probation, and a $10K fine. As for hn users, aside from pg, Cliff Stoll has a minor role in the story. [1] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/times-insider/20... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm#Effects | |
| ▲ | mr_toad 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > I think the bigger thing was that the Internet just wasn't that big a deal at the time. Maybe I’m just getting old, but it seems like nothing was such a big deal at the time. Everything seems to have gotten more uptight in the last few decades. I used to have a metal cutlery set that an international airline gave to every passenger on the plane. | | |
| ▲ | esafak 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Organizations naturally accrue regulations in response to incidents as time goes by. |
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| ▲ | lysace 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > I think the bigger thing was that the Internet just wasn't that big a deal at the time. ”Computer crime” definitely was though. | | |
| ▲ | mindcrime 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | From what I can remember, while there was some public awareness of "computer crime" by 1988 (War Games helped with that), it wasn't exactly a "big deal" to most people yet. My subjective recollection is that things took a marked turn around 1990, with the advent of "Operation Sundevil"[1], the raid on Steve Jackson Games, etc. And by the mid to late 90's (I'd say about 1997) it was finally becoming "received wisdom" to most hacker that "this is real now: getting caught doing this stuff could mean actual jail time, fines, not getting into college, losing jobs, etc." Now I grew up in a rural part of NC and so we probably lagged other parts of the country in terms of information dispersal, so I expect other people view the timeline differently, so YMMV. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sundevil | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Lots of chaos, but just three arrests. Did any of them proceed to full prosecutions? I'm reasonably sure Bruce Esquibel wasn't charged (at least, there's nothing in PACER to say so). I have no idea who "Tony The Trashman" was. |
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| ▲ | icedchai 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Barely. In my area around that time, teenagers were causing havoc by breaking into local colleges just so they could get onto IRC and access FTP sites. "Network security" was a pretty new concept. | |
| ▲ | tptacek 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Ehh? It had only recently been made explicitly criminal by federal statute. If you're thinking of "the Hacker Crackdown" that occurred a few years after the Morris Worm, or of Kevin Mitnick's exploits, it's worth keeping in mind that they were doing pretty crazy shit even relative to today; they were owning up phone switches across the country. And despite that, the penalties were not crazy high. What you didn't have back then was financial fraud on the scale that happens today, where even nominal damages run into 8-9 figures. |
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| ▲ | xhkkffbf 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > tried to frame. MIT really respects good hacks and good hackers. It was probably more effective than sending in some PDF of a paper. |
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| ▲ | AnotherGoodName 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | >MIT really respects good hacks and good hackers. Oooof in light of Aaron Swartz. He plugged directly into a network switch that was in an unlocked and unlabelled room at MIT so he could download faster and faced "charges of breaking and entering with intent, grand larceny, and unauthorized access to a computer network". MIT really didn't lift a finger for this either. >Swartz's attorneys requested that all pretrial discovery documents be made public, a move which MIT opposed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz | | |
| ▲ | jszymborski 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Agreed, it's hard to see this as some sort of "hacker respect hacker" in light of MIT's other actions. It's very hard to extract Robert Tappan Morris from the context of his father being an extremely powerful man when trying to figure out how he managed to get away with what he did. | | |
| ▲ | LukeShu 2 days ago | parent [-] | | At the same time, it's easy to believe that MIT of 2013 is very different than MIT of 1988. | | |
| ▲ | jszymborski 2 days ago | parent [-] | | While that's entirely possible, MIT was established in 1861. I think the old boys club was established long before 1988. | | |
| ▲ | pyuser583 a day ago | parent [-] | | I’m pretty sure MIT had a “state school” stigma until after WWII. Vandaveer Bush made sure they got lots of war research. |
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| ▲ | jacquesm a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | They didn't lift a finger and spent a lot of effort on whitewashing their own behavior afterwards in the guise of an independent review. |
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| ▲ | rasz 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Its the other way around, they throw hackers under the bus. Aaron Swartz, Star Simpson arrested for stupid LED brooch, the list is quite long https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7411868 MIT faulted over its support for students https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/02/14/mit/9VBBq9pBQ1z... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7411312 |
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