Re: Apple ][ worms DO exist!

[neufeld@helios.physics.utoronto.ca (Christopher Neufeld)]

In article <35cpk0$97n@news.ysu.edu>, Eric S. Ford <ag471@yfn.ysu.edu> wrote:
>
>I think what you described here is a Virus, not a Worm.  There is a
>difference.  I came across a good description of those differences
>not too long ago but foolishly lost track of it.  Essentially, a
>Worm is a program that propagates itself through a system destroying
>data.
>
   I'm going to look pretty picky now! The definition I remember of
'worm' doesn't include the requirement that it destroy data. Indeed, the
latest version of the Jargon file says:


worm
----

[from `tapeworm' in John Brunner's novel "The Shockwave Rider", via XEROX
PARC] n.  A program that propagates itself over a network, reproducing
itself as it goes.  Compare virus. Nowadays the term has negative
connotations, as it is assumed that only crackers write worms. Perhaps
the best-known example was Robert T. Morris's `Internet Worm' of 1988, a
`benign' one that got out of control and hogged hundreds of Suns and
VAXen across the U.S. See also cracker, RTM, Trojan horse, ice, and Great
Worm, the. 


          
-- 
 Christopher Neufeld....Just a graduate student   neufeld@physics.utoronto.ca
 "Don't edit reality for  | "Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity
 the sake of simplicity"  | is not thus handicapped."  -- Elbert Hubbard