3 ms·
No, you're not the only one. That doesn't seem much like youthful mischief to me; in 1980 RHM would have been 48 (with a teenaged son RTM)! That's if the story
by neilk 15y ago
No, you're not the only one. That doesn't seem much like youthful mischief to me; in 1980 RHM would have been 48 (with a teenaged son RTM)!
That's if the story is true -- and we have no evidence to suggest it is.
P.S. Also I don't know what the author is talking about with regards to the encrypted files. Modern crypt(3) is clearly not something you use for reversible file encryption.
P.P.S. Ok, Wikipedia says there was a crypt(1), written by... Robert H. Morris. And it had weak encryption, to the extent that crackers for it were widely available in the mid-80s. Maybe this is plausible.
(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypt_(Unix)#Command_filter_crypt.281.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypt_(Unix)#Command_filter_cry... , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Morris_(cryptographer)#Bell_Labs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Morris_(cryptographer)#B...).
- StavrosK 15y agoYes, of course. I'm not commenting on whether or not the story is true, but on the reactions. People say "that strikes me as a fond memory", "nice story", "how warm" when it seems to me like the OP meant it as a sort of indictment. Youthful mischief can be at any age, but that's not mischief, that's a pretty egregious theft of data. It would have been very different if he had exploited some new script to gain access to a machine he didn't have access to, for example.
- neilk 15y agoAnyway, perhaps this is not the time to focus on such things. The value of some passwords from a system in 1980 is not a big deal, really, considering that at this moment it's more appropriate to look at what the man did over his whole life.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- JoeAltmaier 15y agoBack then, you owned the whole computer network. You could rebuild the kernel, change drivers, whatever. We would write fake login pages just to burn somebody - wait for their login attempt, print lots of fake security log messages, simulate a crash screen - just for fun. Imagine putting a potato in your buddies exhaust pipe, or wiring up their car radio volume knob backward. Since there was no internet, there was no intent to 'rule the world' - just mess with your friends. So no, it was no more malicious than a pre-med student putting a nervous system in their prof's mailbox.