Happy Worm-a-Versary!

Today, July 26th, is an anniversary for two men who are infamous for unleashing their worms upon an unsuspecting world. Thanks to Dave “Dave’s Picks” Polaschek and his blog for the reminder!

Robert Tappan Morris Jr.

First, it’s the anniversary of the indictment of Robert Tappan Morris. Those of us who make a living off the internet will instantly recognize the name: he’s the author of the Morrris Worm, one of the first computer worms to porpagate via the Internet and probably the first to gain attention in the mainstream media.

Computer worms are self-contained self-replicating programs; unlike computer viruses, they do not need a “host” program to attach to. Although the worm functions by taking advantage of some design flaws in the Unix operatin systems of the era — late 1988 — Morris claimes that he wrote it for a benign purpose: to gauge the size of the internet at the time. However, do to a flaw in the design of the worm’s self-replication mechanism, it made too many copies of itself and slowed a significant number of machines on the internet to a crawl.

Morris was indicted under the Computer Abuse and Fraud Act of 1986 on this day in 1989 and convicted in 1990. He was sentenced to three years of probation, 400 hours of community service and fined US$10,000. Morris did well for himself later on, helping to create an application that Yahoo! would buy and turn into Yahoo! Store, get his Ph.D. from Harvard, become a professor at MIT and found the techie venture capital firm Y Combinator.

Paul “Pee-Wee Herman” Reubens (nee Rubenfeld)

It’s also the anniversary of the arrest of Paul “Pee-Wee Herman” Reubens, who exposed a worm of a different sort. On July 26, 1991, he was arrested in Sarasota, Florida for masturbating in public in a porn theatre (the movie is supposed to have been Nurse Nancy). He negotiated his punishment down to a fine and some public service announcements.

Song of the Day

In honour of this momentous anniversary, I present you with the Divinyls’ song I Touch Myself [3.3MB MP3], as performed by the Scala Girls Choir. Where the hell were these girls when I was in Catholic high school?