hubcap@hubcap.UUCP (Mike Marshall) (11/17/88)
I was looking forward to discussions of the worm in the computer press. All (most) of the discussions in the popular press I saw were botched, but then I don't really blame "The Greenville News" or whatever for getting the technical details wrong. I got "UNIX Today!" yesterday and was dissapointed... "Usenet users, however, were actually safe from the particular worm that hit last week. The worm required TCP/IP to function, and usenet is based on uucp..." Of course the worm didn't attack USENET, but the reasons stated above don't belong in a magazine about UNIX... I am posting this from an NNTP site. "Ultrix doesn't include the send-mail feature of of Berkeley 4.3..." Then what the heck is this configuration file that's been driving me crazy? 1/2 :-)... "... it would zero out its argv[] parameter block..., effectively making the operating system give it a (sh) as its argv[0]..." RTM crammed the string "(sh)" into the argv list so that his worm wouldn't stick out like a sore thumb, UNIX didn't do it for him. These are little things, but I'll have a hard time in the future accepting the stuff I read in "UNIX Today!" as credible. -Mike Marshall hubcap@hubcap.clemson.edu