Don Hewitt, the creator of the program, lobbied for Mr. Rooney's reinstatement.
Anantha Chandrakasan (second from left), EECS department head and creator of the program, visited with each of the students.
"This is for anybody and everybody who got a wedgie in high school," said Ryan Murphy, a creator of the program, as he accepted the trophy.
It will take some legal creativity to prove that the creator of the program -- a hybrid of varieties known as viruses and worms -- even committed a crime.
Officials at Sky Internet told reporters yesterday that authorities had informed them that a warrant would be served in the investigation to find the creator of the program.
Scott Koon, creator of the program Pocket Zendo, available at amsoftw.tripod.com/id12.htm, described it as being "like having a little meditation hall, complete with master, in your pocket".
But the creator of the program appears to have gone a step further, Mr. Dunham said, using computers that were taken over by previous versions of the SoBig virus to mass-mail copies of the program, as spammers do.
Philip R. Zimmermann, the creator of the program used by Mr. Scarfo and millions of other people worldwide, said, "I knew PGP would be used by criminals; I felt bad about that".
The creator of the program, J. Michael Straczynski, would sometimes post cryptic comments, which everyone devoured as if they were utterances of the oracle at Delphi.
