Comment by px43
3 days ago
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.
3 days ago
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.
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
> 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.
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> I think the bigger thing was that the Internet just wasn't that big a deal at the time.
”Computer crime” definitely was though.
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