Assume that a computer student wants to impress his father, who is a computer security expert for the CIA, by writing a program like the one below. The parameter for the program is the network address of a computer system.
The preceding code is enough to cause some issues between father and son; however, assume that the student plays with it some more and then makes a mistake, leaving out the IF/ELSE instruction so that the algorithm looks like this:
a. What kind of recursion is within this program?
b. Assuming that the student knows enough systems programming to make the instructions work, what will the program actually do?
c. If it takes 10 seconds for the algorithm to run, including the time it needs to connect to other computers, how many copies of the program will be running 1 minute after the program first starts? After 2 minutes? After 1 hour? After 6 hours?
d. What would something like this do to the Internet?
e. What sentence did U.S. District Court Judge Howard G. Munson give Cornell University graduate student Robert Tappan Morris when he was convicted of doing something similar to this in November, 1988?