In the end, Morris apologized, earned three years of criminal probation, performed four hundred hours of community service, and was fined $10,050. He transferred from Cornell to Harvard, founded a dot-com startup with some friends in 1995, and sold it to Yahoo! in 1998 for $49 million. He is now a respected, tenured professor at MIT.

In retrospect, the commission’s recommendations—urging users to patch their systems and hackers to grow up—might seem naïve. But there were few plausible alternatives. Computing architectures, both then and now, are designed for flexibility rather than security. The decentralized, nonproprietary ownership of the Internet and the computers it links made it difficult to implement structural revisions. More important, it was hard to imagine cures that would not entail drastic, wholesale, purpose-altering changes to the very fabric of the Internet. Such changes would have been wildly out of proportion to the perceived threat, and there is no record of their having even been considered.

Johnathan Zittrain, on how to meet the security threat.