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there was *some guy* who placed some code into a compiler once, so that even if there was no malicious code in the actual souce, once compiled, the executable had a block of code enabling the original author to do things (i.e. a backdoor).
You are talking about Ken Thompsons backdoor in early unix ...
more of the story

The quote in the article is that open source folks 'are often libertarian..', not are. There's a difference there.

Not that I think that is a fair description either, but given that it is a pretty accurate description of guys like ESR, it's not hard to see how such an opinion could be formed.

Can you say, rubber hose cryptanalysis? Even if you go quantum, they'll eventually crack you.

No, sorry, you are wrong.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/guns/cowards.html

It's really not a case of FUD*, but rather a case of security through obscurity.

* "Defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company: FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering [Amdahl] products. ... has become generalized to refer to any kind of disinformation used as a competitive weapon.", ESR's Jargon File - which also has an entry on security through obscurity, incidently.

It's really not a case of FUD*, but rather a case of security through obscurity.

* "Defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company: FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering [Amdahl] products. ... has become generalized to refer to any kind of disinformation used as a competitive weapon.", ESR's Jargon File - which also has an entry on security through obscurity, incidently.

The term "intellectual property" is vague (here, ESR means copyrights, rather than trademarks or patents), and the term "theft" doesn't apply particularly well. The wordier statement "all hackers condemn the unauthorized reproduction of copyrighted works, with the exception of fair and personal use" is somewhat more accurate, though probably still not true. Even better would be "all hackers condemn plagiarism," which is really what putting your name on someone else's code is. Plagiarism is a matter of honor, not law, and is somewhat more likely to be something that all hackers -- a pretty big and diverse group -- might condemn.

I know at least one hacker (ahem, a libertarian, even) who condemns copyrights and patents altogether and would probably describe ESR's assertion as nonsensical or undefined.

Condeming IP theft, Eric says, "is what distinguishes [hackers] from the cracker/phreak subculture." Nonsense. Destructive intent is what distinguishes crackers from hackers. Denial-of-service attacks and website vandalism have nothing to do with so-called "IP theft."

For the record, all hackers also don't use the hacker logo, any more than all hackers channel Greek gods. Eric would do well to describe his own opinions and let me describe my own.

The term "intellectual property" is vague (here, ESR means copyrights, rather than trademarks or patents), and the term "theft" doesn't apply particularly well. The wordier statement "all hackers condemn the unauthorized reproduction of copyrighted works, with the exception of fair and personal use" is somewhat more accurate, though probably still not true. Even better would be "all hackers condemn plagiarism," which is really what putting your name on someone else's code is. Plagiarism is a matter of honor, not law, and is somewhat more likely to be something that all hackers -- a pretty big and diverse group -- might condemn.

I know at least one hacker (ahem, a libertarian, even) who condemns copyrights and patents altogether and would probably describe ESR's assertion as nonsensical or undefined.

Condeming IP theft, Eric says, "is what distinguishes [hackers] from the cracker/phreak subculture." Nonsense. Destructive intent is what distinguishes crackers from hackers. Denial-of-service attacks and website vandalism have nothing to do with so-called "IP theft."

For the record, all hackers also don't use the hacker logo, any more than all hackers channel Greek gods. Eric would do well to describe his own opinions and let me describe my own.

Anyone who thinks ESR is a leftist know nothing about his views.

Man, that crystallizes the whole thing right there. Nice, too, that it correlates with one of ESR's closing shots:

The excerpts make it clear that this book is going to be a steaming pile of crap, full of anti-factual distortions, scare-mongering, and FUD.

Because, of course, if a man is talking out of his ass, obviously the only thing you'll get from him is crap and a desperate need for air freshener.

i think the ii's are a sign he is infected. with somethign.

Infected with "somethign"? Don't you mean GNU/infected with somethiGNU?

Virii is hackish? Doesn't look like it to me...

Does this fall under the "overgeneralization" section of the jargon file? (maintained by ESR as far as I know)

here

Just like
radius..radii
hippopotamus..hippopotami
me ntos..menti?

It could be worse. He could be an Idiotarian.

that next-generation programming systems will combine compilers, linkers, debuggers, and that other tools will be plugin frameworks, rather than monolithic applications.

yup, it already happened. more than 10 years ago. it's called Rule of modularity and Rule of Composition. In case you don't know. It's the Basics of the Unix Philosophy

But wait -- SPF doesn't block spam! It just blocks spam where the From: is not right.

SPF can help in three areas, even without 100% compliance. First, it can protect you from joe jobs where a spammer uses your domain as the return address, flooding you with bounce messages and angry complaints. As more and more people restrict mail based on SPF the damage from a joe jobs decreases. Second, with similar gradual pay-off, it can seriously limit attempted identity theft spams that fraudulently appear to come from eBay, BankAmerica, or whoever the target it. Third, again with increasing benefit as more people respect SPF, it will limit the amount of damage done by email worms that spoof the sender based on random addresses found on the infected source machine.

No solution is ever perfect, fortunately no solution ever needs to be.

Wow, the OP compared global warming to nazis, thus invoking Godwin's law before the discussion even started.
I have no choice but to declare this thread officially closed...

"To behave like a hacker, you have to believe that the thinking time of other hackers is precious -- so much so that it's almost a moral duty for you to share information, solve problems and then give the solutions away just so other hackers can solve new problems instead of having to perpetually re-address old ones."

• Lab rats of good pedegree are becoming scarce, there is no shortage of lawyers at IBM.
• Technicians sometimes develop an attachment an emotional attachment to the rats. This should not be the case for lawyers.
• There are some things a rat just won't do.

Yeah, just a rebadge lawyer joke. The Jargon file has an amusing entry about Lion Food

Two lions who, escaping from the zoo, split up to increase their chances but agree to meet after 2 months. When they finally meet, one is skinny and the other overweight. The thin one says: "How did you manage? I ate a human just once and they turned out a small army to chase me -- guns, nets, it was terrible. Since then I've been reduced to eating mice, insects, even grass." The fat one replies: "Well, I hid near an IBM office and ate a manager a day. And nobody even noticed!"

*Bzzt* sorry, try again. Although "word" has certainly seen more variation than "byte", both have referred to different numbers of bits through history. From the Jargon File:

byte: /bi:t/, n.

[techspeak] A unit of memory or data equal to the amount used to represent one character; on modern architectures this is invariably 8 bits. Some older architectures used byte for quantities of 6, 7, or (especially) 9 bits, and the PDP-10 supported bytes that were actually bitfields of 1 to 36 bits! These usages are now obsolete, killed off by universal adoption of power-of-2 word sizes.

Historical note: The term was coined by Werner Buchholz in 1956 during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch computer; originally it was described as 1 to 6 bits (typical I/O equipment of the period used 6-bit chunks of information). The move to an 8-bit byte happened in late 1956, and this size was later adopted and promulgated as a standard by the System/360. The word was coined by mutating the word 'bite' so it would not be accidentally misspelled as bit. See also nybble.

Don't laugh, it exists.

On August 19, 1934, 95% of the Germans who were registered to vote went to the polls and 90% (38 million) of adult German citizens voted to give Adolf Hitler complete and total authority to rule Germany as he saw fit. Only 4.25 million Germans voted against this transfer of power to a totalitarian regime.

char *a = malloc(4), *b = malloc(4);
strcpy(a, "hello to all my fans in domestic surveillance");
/* kablooey */

ESR used to do this, but it looks like he is looking for a replacement

It is jargon

I clicked on your link and found this line from ESR:

"this is why every good hacker is part mystic".

What a load of crap! Just because ESR thinks he's "a shaman and a vessel of the Goat-Foot God", that doesn't mean other hackers have to.

Sounds like the academic world is starting to think along the same lines.

adeu,
Mateu

Were it up to me, I would like to apologize to the entire world, on behalf of all citizens of the U.S. of A., for the entire "freedom fries" fiasco. But I won't - mainly because the twits that are responsible for the fiasco represent a majority of the voting populace of said country. (Well, almost all of the twits represent a majority of the voters...) Therefore, I'll just apologize for me - sorry, that was a stupid and pointless response to a soverign nation exercising it's right to not support an, at best, questionable military action against another sovereign nation that it's selling weapons to.

However, the facts here still remain: the original poster enforces the particular stereotype that I mentioned. Just because this upsets you does not invalidate the stereotype.

Actually, if you read to the end of my other, previously-posted reply to this thread, you'll see that I already discussed comments like this. Instead of this explanation, I could have easily posted YHBT.

See The Jargon File for a complete explanation and more useful links. Here are the full cut-and-pasted definitions:

Troll:

1. v.,n. [From the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban] To utter a posting on Usenet designed to attract predictable responses or flames; or, the post itself. Derives from the phrase "trolling for newbies" which in turn comes from mainstream "trolling", a style of fishing in which one trails bait through a likely spot hoping for a bite. The well-constructed troll is a post that induces lots of newbies and flamers to make themselves look even more clueless than they already do, while subtly conveying to the more savvy and experienced that it is in fact a deliberate troll. If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in on it. See also YHBT.

2. n. An individual who chronically trolls in sense 1; regularly posts specious arguments, flames or personal attacks to a newsgroup, discussion list, or in email for no other purpose than to annoy someone or disrupt a discussion. Trolls are recognizable by the fact that they have no real interest in learning about the topic at hand - they simply want to utter flame bait. Like the ugly creatures they are named after, they exhibit no redeeming characteristics, and as such, they are recognized as a lower form of life on the net, as in, "Oh, ignore him, he's just a troll." Compare kook.

3. n. [Berkeley] Computer lab monitor. A popular campus job for CS students. Duties include helping newbies and ensuring that lab policies are followed. Probably so-called because it involves lurking in dark cavelike corners.

Some people claim that the troll (sense 1) is properly a narrower category than flame bait, that a troll is categorized by containing some assertion that is wrong but not overtly controversial. See also Troll-O-Meter.

The use of 'troll' in any of these senses is a live metaphor that readily produces elaborations and combining forms. For example, one not infrequently sees the warning "Do not feed the troll" as part of a followup to troll postings.


Flame:

[at MIT, orig. from the phrase flaming asshole]

1. vi. To post an email message intended to insult and provoke.

2. vi. To speak incessantly and/or rabidly on some relatively uninteresting subject or with a patently ridiculous attitude.

3. vt. Either of senses 1 or 2, directed with hostility at a particular person or people.

4. n. An instance of flaming. When a discussion degenerates into useless controversy, one might tell the participants "Now you're just flaming" or "Stop all that flamage!" to try to get them to cool down (so to speak).

The term may have been independently invented at several different places. It has been reported from MIT, Carleton College and RPI (among many other places) from as far back as 1969, and from the University of Virginia in the early 1960s.

It is possible that the hackish sense of 'flame' is much older than that. The poet Chaucer was also what passed for a wizard hacker in his time; he wrote a treatise on the astrolabe, the most advanced computing device of the day. In Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida, Cressida laments her inability to grasp the proof of a particular mathematical theorem; her uncle Pandarus then observes that it's called "the fleminge of wrecches." This phrase seems to have been intended in context as "that which puts the wretches to flight" but was probably just as ambiguous in Middle English as "the flaming of wretches" would be today. One suspects that Chaucer would feel right at home on Usenet.


To me, the subtle distinction lies in the reason for the post. The Troll is looking to get people worked up (and therefore respond), whereas the flamer (so to speak) is just being caustic.

See The Jargon File for a complete explanation and more useful links. Here are the full cut-and-pasted definitions:

Troll:

1. v.,n. [From the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban] To utter a posting on Usenet designed to attract predictable responses or flames; or, the post itself. Derives from the phrase "trolling for newbies" which in turn comes from mainstream "trolling", a style of fishing in which one trails bait through a likely spot hoping for a bite. The well-constructed troll is a post that induces lots of newbies and flamers to make themselves look even more clueless than they already do, while subtly conveying to the more savvy and experienced that it is in fact a deliberate troll. If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in on it. See also YHBT.

2. n. An individual who chronically trolls in sense 1; regularly posts specious arguments, flames or personal attacks to a newsgroup, discussion list, or in email for no other purpose than to annoy someone or disrupt a discussion. Trolls are recognizable by the fact that they have no real interest in learning about the topic at hand - they simply want to utter flame bait. Like the ugly creatures they are named after, they exhibit no redeeming characteristics, and as such, they are recognized as a lower form of life on the net, as in, "Oh, ignore him, he's just a troll." Compare kook.

3. n. [Berkeley] Computer lab monitor. A popular campus job for CS students. Duties include helping newbies and ensuring that lab policies are followed. Probably so-called because it involves lurking in dark cavelike corners.

Some people claim that the troll (sense 1) is properly a narrower category than flame bait, that a troll is categorized by containing some assertion that is wrong but not overtly controversial. See also Troll-O-Meter.

The use of 'troll' in any of these senses is a live metaphor that readily produces elaborations and combining forms. For example, one not infrequently sees the warning "Do not feed the troll" as part of a followup to troll postings.


Flame:

[at MIT, orig. from the phrase flaming asshole]

1. vi. To post an email message intended to insult and provoke.

2. vi. To speak incessantly and/or rabidly on some relatively uninteresting subject or with a patently ridiculous attitude.

3. vt. Either of senses 1 or 2, directed with hostility at a particular person or people.

4. n. An instance of flaming. When a discussion degenerates into useless controversy, one might tell the participants "Now you're just flaming" or "Stop all that flamage!" to try to get them to cool down (so to speak).

The term may have been independently invented at several different places. It has been reported from MIT, Carleton College and RPI (among many other places) from as far back as 1969, and from the University of Virginia in the early 1960s.

It is possible that the hackish sense of 'flame' is much older than that. The poet Chaucer was also what passed for a wizard hacker in his time; he wrote a treatise on the astrolabe, the most advanced computing device of the day. In Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida, Cressida laments her inability to grasp the proof of a particular mathematical theorem; her uncle Pandarus then observes that it's called "the fleminge of wrecches." This phrase seems to have been intended in context as "that which puts the wretches to flight" but was probably just as ambiguous in Middle English as "the flaming of wretches" would be today. One suspects that Chaucer would feel right at home on Usenet.


To me, the subtle distinction lies in the reason for the post. The Troll is looking to get people worked up (and therefore respond), whereas the flamer (so to speak) is just being caustic.

See The Jargon File for a complete explanation and more useful links. Here are the full cut-and-pasted definitions:

Troll:

1. v.,n. [From the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban] To utter a posting on Usenet designed to attract predictable responses or flames; or, the post itself. Derives from the phrase "trolling for newbies" which in turn comes from mainstream "trolling", a style of fishing in which one trails bait through a likely spot hoping for a bite. The well-constructed troll is a post that induces lots of newbies and flamers to make themselves look even more clueless than they already do, while subtly conveying to the more savvy and experienced that it is in fact a deliberate troll. If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in on it. See also YHBT.

2. n. An individual who chronically trolls in sense 1; regularly posts specious arguments, flames or personal attacks to a newsgroup, discussion list, or in email for no other purpose than to annoy someone or disrupt a discussion. Trolls are recognizable by the fact that they have no real interest in learning about the topic at hand - they simply want to utter flame bait. Like the ugly creatures they are named after, they exhibit no redeeming characteristics, and as such, they are recognized as a lower form of life on the net, as in, "Oh, ignore him, he's just a troll." Compare kook.

3. n. [Berkeley] Computer lab monitor. A popular campus job for CS students. Duties include helping newbies and ensuring that lab policies are followed. Probably so-called because it involves lurking in dark cavelike corners.

Some people claim that the troll (sense 1) is properly a narrower category than flame bait, that a troll is categorized by containing some assertion that is wrong but not overtly controversial. See also Troll-O-Meter.

The use of 'troll' in any of these senses is a live metaphor that readily produces elaborations and combining forms. For example, one not infrequently sees the warning "Do not feed the troll" as part of a followup to troll postings.


Flame:

[at MIT, orig. from the phrase flaming asshole]

1. vi. To post an email message intended to insult and provoke.

2. vi. To speak incessantly and/or rabidly on some relatively uninteresting subject or with a patently ridiculous attitude.

3. vt. Either of senses 1 or 2, directed with hostility at a particular person or people.

4. n. An instance of flaming. When a discussion degenerates into useless controversy, one might tell the participants "Now you're just flaming" or "Stop all that flamage!" to try to get them to cool down (so to speak).

The term may have been independently invented at several different places. It has been reported from MIT, Carleton College and RPI (among many other places) from as far back as 1969, and from the University of Virginia in the early 1960s.

It is possible that the hackish sense of 'flame' is much older than that. The poet Chaucer was also what passed for a wizard hacker in his time; he wrote a treatise on the astrolabe, the most advanced computing device of the day. In Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida, Cressida laments her inability to grasp the proof of a particular mathematical theorem; her uncle Pandarus then observes that it's called "the fleminge of wrecches." This phrase seems to have been intended in context as "that which puts the wretches to flight" but was probably just as ambiguous in Middle English as "the flaming of wretches" would be today. One suspects that Chaucer would feel right at home on Usenet.


To me, the subtle distinction lies in the reason for the post. The Troll is looking to get people worked up (and therefore respond), whereas the flamer (so to speak) is just being caustic.

The point I'm driving at is that even modern units, designed in a big creationist leap, and in common use for only a century or two, have grown warts, and require a handful of magic numbers. People are willing to trade conversion consistency (between interstellar units and terrestrial units, in the parsec/light-year example) for convenience in rule-of-thumb calculations within a certain field of endeavor. If you stamp out non-standard units, new ones crop up, showing that people want non-standard units and don't care about conversion factors.

So maybe some of those warts are really miswarts.

Whoever likes modern units is, of course, free to use them, but the bureaucratic mandate to force them in the face of people who don't want them is questionable.

The point I'm driving at is that even modern units, designed in a big creationist leap, and in common use for only a century or two, have grown warts, and require a handful of magic numbers. People are willing to trade conversion consistency (between interstellar units and terrestrial units, in the parsec/light-year example) for convenience in rule-of-thumb calculations within a certain field of endeavor. If you stamp out non-standard units, new ones crop up, showing that people want non-standard units and don't care about conversion factors.

So maybe some of those warts are really miswarts.

Whoever likes modern units is, of course, free to use them, but the bureaucratic mandate to force them in the face of people who don't want them is questionable.

The point I'm driving at is that even modern units, designed in a big creationist leap, and in common use for only a century or two, have grown warts, and require a handful of magic numbers. People are willing to trade conversion consistency (between interstellar units and terrestrial units, in the parsec/light-year example) for convenience in rule-of-thumb calculations within a certain field of endeavor. If you stamp out non-standard units, new ones crop up, showing that people want non-standard units and don't care about conversion factors.

So maybe some of those warts are really miswarts.

Whoever likes modern units is, of course, free to use them, but the bureaucratic mandate to force them in the face of people who don't want them is questionable.

The point I'm driving at is that even modern units, designed in a big creationist leap, and in common use for only a century or two, have grown warts, and require a handful of magic numbers. People are willing to trade conversion consistency (between interstellar units and terrestrial units, in the parsec/light-year example) for convenience in rule-of-thumb calculations within a certain field of endeavor. If you stamp out non-standard units, new ones crop up, showing that people want non-standard units and don't care about conversion factors.

So maybe some of those warts are really miswarts.

Whoever likes modern units is, of course, free to use them, but the bureaucratic mandate to force them in the face of people who don't want them is questionable.

by cracking the perspex case on one of the pods on the Sony stand.

You see! Now those are crackers. Leave the hackers alone.

Lets just leave him alone. Its not helping. If you have any questions why, refer to Formosa's Law.

Did you even read what I wrote?

First off, you're not a libertarian.

Sure I am. I'm currently a minarchist libertarian, but learning towards anarchist, also known as anarcho-capitalist.

There's more than one kind of libertarian, you know. Those who, like me, disagree with intellectual property laws are still a minority within the movement, but we are a significant minority. Here's a good discussion of the issue. Here's some more perspective. Saying libertarians are all agreed on the issue and that I'm not a libertarian because of my position on this is a misrepresentation. As Eric Raymond says, the non-coercion principle is about the only thing all libertarians agree on.

Secondly, a basic government is needed to protect property rights (that's a tenent of Libertariansim)

You're dismissing an entire branch of libertarianism, there. Anarcho-libertarians do not believe a basic government is needed, at all, or believe that government itself should be demonopolized (allowing a choice between any number of independent governments in a geographic area, or starting your own). Now, most of the ones I hear from still seem to believe in intellectual property, but I'm at a loss as to how intellectual property law is to be enforced in anarchy.

Furthermore, as I said in my post (did you read it?), I do not believe "intellectual property" is a property right. Nowhere in our legal code is it acknowledged as a right; it is a gift from the public encoded in the Constitution NOT because people have an "inherent right" to their ideas, but in order to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. (Did you read the Constitution?)

Your assumption is that everybody wants to code for free, which is utter bullshit.

Where did I say that? Strawman, or else you're reading somebody else's post.

I don't code for free, but I don't produce proprietary software, either. Something like 70% or more of the coding industry is not jobs for software makers like Microsoft or your favorite game company but coding custom software that is only of interest to one particular company. This will never go away; intellectual property laws have zero bearing on whether this kind of work needs to be done or not. Furthermore, removing the government-monopoly grant of intellectual property would radically change the software industry but not destroy it. Free software is demonstrating that. We are slowly approaching the point where, even with the protection of the government grant of exclusive rights "for a time," proprietary software will be unable to compete on price, features, performance, or TCO with Free software. That's the point of the whole article from Tocqueville! They see Free software as a neutron bomb that will "kill" the industry. What it will do is not kill it, but change it forever. There will still be money to be made in Free software. And even if not, people still have the right to give their "intellectual property" away for free, so this change is going to happen anyway.

How do you propose protecting the rights of people who develop software and want to sell it?

I do not believe anyone has a right to a profit at any particular business model, nor do I believe anyone has an exclusive right to an idea they have originated, thus I do not propose protecting these alleged "rights." (I do, of course, believe in protecting all the same rights for everybody, so they'd have the same basic rights as you and me.)

Meanwhile, it's not impossible to make money selling Free software. Why don't you do some reading some time?

so all software development is in the hands of people who happen to have the time and mone

No, the system works like this: you ask the complaintant (who SpamCop easily allows you to contact) what his email address is so you can remove it from the list. You do so, and SpamCop stops blacklisting you.

Except, in reality, you are probably a spammer (therefore by definition a criminal) so you just ignore complaints anyway.

I have an archive of over 10,000 spams that I personally have recieved despite never having signed up for any. I turn away around 400 daily using SpamAssassin Bayes and various blacklists. My address was harvested from InterNIC (along with all the other domain admins) by spammers without anyone's permission.

SpamCop provides a service that people like myself can CHOOSE to take advantage of. You can easily find an ISP who does not use it. SpamCop has absolutely NO ability to "stop all bulk emailing" as you claim (god, I wish they did, though!).

If you want to take away people's right to choose whether to use SpamCop or not, you are just another amoral spam whore. If you don't think SpamCop has a right to publish lists however they choose, well, you're tempting Godwin's law.

I'm sure they used a rotary debugger.

Big fonts - light and pleasing colours - useful/necessary content
The three fundamental rules for a website. Since it's for they elderly, you might want to use a bigger font. Keeping in mind that many of them could be visually challenged, use good colour combinations and finally, make sure you have all the important content easily accessible. HTML Hell Page might help ya

Mnemonic for 'Halt and Catch Fire', any of several undocumented and semi-mythical machine instructions with destructive side-effects, supposedly included for test purposes on several well-known architectures going as far back as the IBM 360. The MC6800 microprocessor was the first for which an HCF opcode became widely known. This instruction caused the processor to toggle a subset of the bus lines as rapidly as it could; in some configurations this could actually cause lines to burn up. Compare killer poke.

>>doubles as a mirror.

Come on, folks. OGG is a nice bell and whistle, but a mirror? That's just chrome. :-)

>>doubles as a mirror.

Come on, folks. OGG is a nice bell and whistle, but a mirror? That's just chrome. :-)

According to Gates's Law,

"The speed of software halves every 18 months."

Well, Sasser is not a virus, it's a worm. Worms usually want to simply spread, not necessarily actively wreak havoc. (Sasser does of course wreak havoc, but that's more of a collateral damage type thing.) Viruses, on the other hand, may (but not always do) deliberately destroy stuff. The Jargon file has some more complete explanations on worms and viruses.

Well, Sasser is not a virus, it's a worm. Worms usually want to simply spread, not necessarily actively wreak havoc. (Sasser does of course wreak havoc, but that's more of a collateral damage type thing.) Viruses, on the other hand, may (but not always do) deliberately destroy stuff. The Jargon file has some more complete explanations on worms and viruses.

No, that's inaccurate.

Worms can spread to other machines on their own. Viruses require some external intervention (such as file sharing or e-mail) to spread to other machines. See this entry in the Jargon File for a more verbose answer.

Now, many of the latest e-mail "worms" would be better classified as viruses or trojan horses, as they are incapable of infecting other hosts without direct user intervention (i.e., opening an attachment.) They've been (IMHO) mis-labeled as worms because they display worm-like behavior once they've infected a machine--that is, they mail copies of themselves as trojan-style attachments to other users.

So yes, the Sasser worm is a bona-fide worm. It transmits itself to other systems without any external help.

This link might be useful, its Eric S. Raymond's "continuity page".