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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 b

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.

px43 1y 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.
- chihuahua 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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.
    - lysace 1y ago
      > I think the bigger thing was that the Internet just wasn't that big a deal at the time. ”Computer crime” definitely was though.
      - tptacek 1y ago
        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.
      - icedchai 1y ago
        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.
      - mindcrime 1y ago
        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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sundevil
        tptacek 1y ago
        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.
- nostrademons 1y ago
  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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chord_(peer-to-peer) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia
xhkkffbf 1y ago
> tried to frame. MIT really respects good hacks and good hackers. It was probably more effective than sending in some PDF of a paper.
- AnotherGoodName 1y ago
  >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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
  - jszymborski 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      At the same time, it's easy to believe that MIT of 2013 is very different than MIT of 1988.
      - jszymborski 1y ago
        While that's entirely possible, MIT was established in 1861. I think the old boys club was established long before 1988.
        pyuser583 1y ago
        I’m pretty sure MIT had a “state school” stigma until after WWII. Vandaveer Bush made sure they got lots of war research.
dcminter 1y ago
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
tptacek 1y ago
Have you read any of his papers? Morris was not fucking around.
- furyofantares 1y ago
  Can you elaborate, or suggest a specific paper?
  - tptacek 1y ago
    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.
- lysace 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - lysace 1y ago
syncsynchalt 1y ago
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-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/crypt.html https://web.archive.org/web/20250121041734/https://www.bell-...

px43 1y 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.

chihuahua 1y ago
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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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.
  - lysace 1y ago
    > I think the bigger thing was that the Internet just wasn't that big a deal at the time. ”Computer crime” definitely was though.
    - tptacek 1y ago
      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.
    - icedchai 1y ago
      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.
    - mindcrime 1y ago
      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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sundevil
      - tptacek 1y ago
        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.
nostrademons 1y ago
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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chord_(peer-to-peer) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia

xhkkffbf 1y ago

> tried to frame. MIT really respects good hacks and good hackers. It was probably more effective than sending in some PDF of a paper.

AnotherGoodName 1y ago
>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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
- jszymborski 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    At the same time, it's easy to believe that MIT of 2013 is very different than MIT of 1988.
    - jszymborski 1y ago
      While that's entirely possible, MIT was established in 1861. I think the old boys club was established long before 1988.
      - pyuser583 1y ago
        I’m pretty sure MIT had a “state school” stigma until after WWII. Vandaveer Bush made sure they got lots of war research.

dcminter 1y ago

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

tptacek 1y ago

Have you read any of his papers? Morris was not fucking around.

furyofantares 1y ago
Can you elaborate, or suggest a specific paper?
- tptacek 1y ago
  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.
lysace 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - lysace 1y ago

syncsynchalt 1y ago

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-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/crypt.html https://web.archive.org/web/20250121041734/https://www.bell-...