sjr@mimsy.UUCP (Stephen J. Roznowski) (11/15/88)
In article <5364@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> spaf@cs.purdue.edu (Gene Spafford) writes: >In article <1613@edsel> kdo@lucid.com writes: >>P.S. Can someone tell me the difference between a worm and a virus, > >Here's my attempt at that: > >A worm is a program that can run by itself and can propagate a fully >working version of itself to other machines. > >In 1979-1981, researchers at >Xerox PARC built and experimented with actual "worm" programs. They >reported their experiences in a CACM article, "The Worm Programs -- >Early Experience with a Distributed Computation." The authors were >John F. Shoch and Jon A. Hupp, and it was published in the March 1982 >issue (v. 25, #3, pp. 172-180). > With all this talk about "The worm", I have been wondering if anyone has been doing any research into practical uses of worm programs. It seems to me that with all these inexpensive workstations that most places have, it would be easy to create an environment with which to create and experiment with worms. There is currently a discussion in sci.crypt about factoring numbers using electronic mail to pass around partial results (a worm seems to be a natural extension). What I am interested in doing is having the ability to create an n-segment worm to do the work intensive portion of a problem. I realize that this is the wrong group to be posting this to, but everyone here is talking about worms. Please send me mail if you would like to discuss this more. Stephen -- Stephen J. Roznowski sjr@mimsy.umd.edu