Comment by NewsaHackO
3 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.
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-...
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"
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¹Awarders of the Ig Nobel prize
Have you read any of his papers? Morris was not fucking around.
Can you elaborate, or suggest a specific paper?
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.
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. :/
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.
22 replies →
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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> tried to frame.
MIT really respects good hacks and good hackers. It was probably more effective than sending in some PDF of a paper.
>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
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.
3 replies →
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.
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=7411312