I am pretty amazed that PG said what he has always been saying since 20 years ago. Thanks to New York Times to open their archive. I was then in the other side on Earth. I remember then my friends and I were so impressed by what RTM did then. (Taiwan then had not yet been hooked up into Internet, we only had a BITNET in my university reserved for CS and graduate school faculty and students, and I was a sophomore in Physics dept with two VT200 to VAX with 9600 baud line, and to us some guy could write such a cool program in a naughty sense was like GOD.) I never had a chance to read this article in New York Times in print then. I was too lazy to walk into our library to read the archive. It is really funny 20 years later to read this piece. And it also reminds me how many things have changed since Internet becomes a commodity in first world.

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Now I need to imagine what will happen if 3 billion people in the world connected with Internet in next 10 years.

"if the release of the ''virus'' prompts measures like a tightening of computer security, the country's economy could be harmed, rather than helped"

How far we have fallen.

Read Katie Hafner's work (in "Cyberpunk") on what happened with the Morris Worm very carefully, and Paul Graham's involvement with that incident seems a bit more interesting.

"Ha!" I thought. "Why buy the book when I can just cleverly search Google for the right keywords?" But then: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&suggon=0&client=f... . This is getting to be more of a problem: people pose questions to a bigger audience than they pose answers to, so Google is likely to find the question rather than the answer.

No, that was Andy Sudduth, who was sysadmin at Aiken then.

http://www.doqs.com/rvethcs.htm,

>At one point a friend, Paul Graham, suggested that the attempt could be used for Robert's dissertation.

Just think that today, if the same thing had happened and that conversation had occured --- prior to the launch of the worm, that is --- Graham would likely be prosecuted as an accessory.

Yeah that's fucked up right there.

"brought down the Department of Defense Arpanet computer network last week for a day and a half"

So RTM literally brought down the internet?

Just read this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm Most TCP/IP mail servers had to be shut down then and patched. At that time, the majority tasks of internet are Email, Usenet and FTP.

Neat. I knew about the Morris worm, but never connected it with YC's Morris.

Yeah, for some reason he forgot to list "I accidentally crashed the Internet" as an accomplishment on his home page.