Ramen worm
My machine pie was broken into by the Ramen worm, which is the first time an automated computer program has ever compromised my system. Alas, I hadn't applied the BIND update I was supposed to, because the Debian dist-upgrade didn't work for me and I got lazy about patching it by hand. So no human had the patience to discover my negligence, but a computer program did.
I think in the future some worms will be much nastier and more virulent. I think we'll see viruses and worms as the pre-eminent source of security threats. I mean, if a machine can beat the world chess champion, surely machines will be better than people ultimately at breaking into other machines. (There will be cases where judgment and background knowledge is important, but many attacks can be automated.)
By the way, I was literally months behind in applying the security patches in question. I saw them the day they came out, and I didn't do anything. So mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
I'm moving everything over to this machine homer, which Trey runs in Berkeley. I'm just waiting for some things to go through with Network Solutions. They tend to do an incredibly bad job with a lot of things they used to do well, so that it's become boring to complain about them.
