Pylimitics

The second of November is a big day in computer security; it’s the anniversary of the first significant computer worm distributed over the Internet in 1988. It was the Morris Worm, created by Robert Morris, a graduate student at Cornell. His intentions weren’t malicious, and the worm wasn’t intended to cause any harm. During his graduate work Morris had identified vulnerabilities in many connected systems, and the worm was meant to highlight them. 

His mistake was in the routine the worm used to check to see if a copy was already running on a system it was able to infect. If it was, the worm would usually just delete itself. If that had always worked, the cure would be simply to configure systems to answer “yes” to the question “is this process running.” But there was a randomization function included so that 14% of the time the worm would keep going and install another copy of itself on an infected system. 

Morris miscalculated how many infections would be caused by that 14% figure; the worm replicated so many times per system that its multiple processes started to slow down the systems it infected. Instead of being an invisible research project, people started to notice. 

When people noticed, that kicked off a couple of things that are still hallmarks of the legal side of computer security. First, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was invoked for the first time. It was a frighteningly vague law that had just been passed two years before, by a Congress that one might argue was just as keenly aware of computer, networking, and other technical issues as they still aren’t. 

Second, a method of measuring the cost of damage caused by the worm debuted. It’s a pretty questionable method, but it’s still used as a matter of course. You have to have monetary harm under most computer laws, because otherwise nobody can tell how much harm has really been caused. So to figure out the expense caused by the worm (or any similar computer security issue), prosecutors take the number of systems that could have been infected, figure out how long it would theoretically take to remove it from one system, and multiply by the hourly rate of the administrators involved (more or less), along with adding the cost of what they might have been doing instead (which somebody just takes a wild guess at). 

That rigorous approach resulted in estimates of damage that ranged from $200 to $10,000,000. Even though that’s an obvious way of admitting “we don’t have the slightest idea”, once you get a number like ten million admitted into court, it sticks. Morris was convicted and sentenced to three years of probation. He turned out fine, though, and his later efforts include founding the startup that became Yahoo! Store, earning his PhD. at Harvard, becoming a tenured professor at MIT, becoming a technical advisor for Cisco Meraki, and being elected a Fellow of the ACM and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. 

Engineering also played a big role on November 2, 1920, when the Pittsburgh radio station KDKA started its first broadcast, becoming the first commercial radio station. On the same day in 1936, the BBC initiated its television service, the world’s first regularly scheduled “high definition” TV signal. In those days, of course, it only took 200 vertical scan lines to qualify for the high definition label. BBC1, which is still on the air, has a somewhat higher resolution signal these days. 

But November 2, 1947 there was an engineering milestone that still hasn’t been improved upon: Howard Hughes flew the Hughes H-4 Hercules (the “Spruce Goose”) on a demonstration flight. It’s still the biggest fixed-wing airplane ever constructed. It only flew that one time. It was primarily made of wood because aluminum wasn’t available due to the restrictions caused by WWII. Hughes hated the Spruce Goose nickname, possibly because the airplane was made of birch, not spruce. It’s other popular nickname, The Flying Lumberyard, wasn’t any better. 

Whatever it was called, the H-4 Hercules was designed as a transport plane for World War II. By the time it flew, the war was over and there really wasn’t any need for a transport plane that size. Besides, the wartime restrictions on metal were over. So after the single demo flight, Hughes parked the plane (or docked it; it’s a seaplane) and it became a museum piece. It still is; you can see it at the Evergreen Aviation Museum in Oregon. 

Once the BBC showed that there could be an audience for television broadcasts, radio stations like KDKA and the rest were scrambling to get in on the new technology. By the 1950s commercial television broadcasts were going strong. But once you have a TV station, you’ve got to find something to broadcast. One answer, by the late 50s, was game shows. All you had to do was come up with some questions — about the early history of radio broadcasting, say, or the details of the world’s biggest airplane — and get some regular people to try to answer them to win prizes. 

It was a pretty good deal for the broadcasters. They didn’t have to pay all the production costs associated with something like a drama. There were no actors, writers, or directors, and the whole show took place on just one set that could stay the same as long as they wanted it to. They could even get the prizes donated for free in exchange for mentioning the manufacturer on the air. If you were a producer of a quiz show, you had a pretty sweet setup. 

The only problem they ran into was the contestants. When the show Twenty-One debuted in 1956, the first two contestants got nearly every answer wrong. It wasn’t much fun to watch; what was needed was some dramatic tension. Somebody had to be a potential hero everyone would want to root for, and he (or she, Dr. Joyce Brothers was the winner of the $64,000 Question in 1955) ought to get most of the answers right, but have a difficult time managing it. Even if you’re producing a game show because it’s inexpensive, it’s still all about the story, after all. 

The producers started “fixing” the shows, either hand-picking questions they thought would be too difficult for the contestant they wanted to be losers or giving the answers to whoever they wanted to be the winner. It didn’t always work — they hadn’t wanted Joyce Brothers to win, but she answered their hand-picked “too difficult” questions anyway. 

The fixes were a little too perfect, though, and people began to wonder whether the shows were really fair contests. Congress took note (the quiz shows had huge audiences of potential voters, after all) and on November 2, 1959, one contestant (Charles Van Doren) gave testimony admitting that he’d been given the answers before the show. Outrage was registered, new regulations were formulated, reputations were ruined. Some of the producers were blackballed from US television work, at least for a while, but others found somewhat different work in the same industry. A few of the contestants were impacted as well. Charles Van Doren, who was a professor at Columbia University and had been hired by the “Today Show,” was fired from both and ended up as an encyclopedia editor (he eventually became a vice president of Encyclopedia Brittanica.)

Charles Van Doren went on to write and edit quite a few books, but none of them were in the least controversial. That wasn’t true of the book that went on trial in 1960, with the decision arriving on November 2 that Penguin Books was not guilty of obscenity for publishing Lady Chatterly’s Lover, by D.H. Lawrence. The trial took place in England, and like the Morris Worm affair, was a test case for a new law: the Obscene Publications Bill. Although Lady Chatterly’s Lover dated from 1928, the 1960 trial was over Penguin’s publication of the first completely uncensored version. 

Editing, whether by Charles Van Doren, Penguin Books, or governments, can be more important than you might think. In 1967, the Vietnam War wasn’t going particularly well for the US, and public opinion was getting to be pretty extreme in opposition to both the war and the president, Lyndon Johnson. Johnson huddled with his advisors, a group called the “wise men” (apparently they weren’t trying to be ironic) and their conclusion? Edit the information about the progress of the war so everybody would think it was going better than it was. That didn’t work any better than fixing the results of quiz shows. But editing can offer some advantages too; Robert Morris might have been glad if he’d asked someone to edit his code.