Virgil Griffith

Virgil Griffith

Virgil Griffith, 2007
Born (1983-03-06) March 6, 1983
Birmingham, Alabama, USA
Other names Romanpoet
Alma mater California Institute of Technology
Occupation Internet and software researcher
Television King of the Nerds
Website http://virgil.gr

Virgil Griffith, also known as Romanpoet (born 1983),[1] is an American software application writer, known for his creation of WikiScanner and the lawsuits filed against him by Blackboard Inc. in 2003. He has published papers on artificial life[2] and integrated information theory.[3] In developing WikiScanner, Griffith described his mission as "to create minor public-relations disasters for companies and organizations I dislike."[1]

Early life

Griffith was born in Birmingham, Alabama and grew up in nearby Tuscaloosa.[1] He graduated from the Alabama School of Math and Science in 2002,[4] and then attended the University of Alabama, studying cognitive science. He transferred to Indiana University in 2004, but returned to graduate cum laude from Alabama in August 2007.[5] Griffith in 2007 was a graduate student[6] studying computation and neural systems.[7] He is affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute as a visiting researcher.[8]

Computer career

Griffith has given talks at the hacker conferences Interz0ne, PhreakNIC,[9] and HOPE. It was at Interz0ne 1 in 2002 that he met Billy Hoffman, a Georgia Tech student, who had discovered a security flaw in the campus magnetic ID card system called "BuzzCard". He and Hoffman proceeded over the next year to learn more about the flaw and attempted to give a talk at Interz0ne2 in April 2003. However, a few hours before the presentation, he and Hoffman were served with a cease and desist order from corporate lawyers acting for Blackboard Inc..[10] Two days later, it was followed by a lawsuit alleging that they had stolen trade secrets and violated both the Digital Millennium Copyright Act[11] and the Economic Espionage Act.[12][13][14] The lawsuit was later settled.

On August 14, 2007, Griffith released the software utility, WikiScanner, that tracks Wikipedia article edits from unregistered accounts back to their originating IP addresses and identifies the corporations or organizations to which they belong.[15]

In 2008, together with Aaron Swartz, Griffith designed the Tor2web proxy.[16][17]

Writing

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 Heffernan, Virginia (November 23, 2008). "The Medium - Virgil Griffith, Internet Man of Mystery". The New York Times.
  2. ↑ John Borland (August 14, 2007). "See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign". Wired. Retrieved 2007-08-14.
  3. ↑ Griffith, Virgil. "Virgil Griffith's articles on arXiv" (List of papers in a search result.). arXiv. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Library. Retrieved 14 December 2014.
  4. ↑ "Alumnus Virgil Griffith Creates and Releases Wikipedia Scanner". September 3, 2007.
  5. ↑ See David Virgil Griffith in "Commencement" (PDF). The University of Alabama. 2007. Retrieved 29 August 2007.
  6. ↑ "Scanner Tracks Who's Changing What on Wikipedia". NPR. August 16, 2007.
  7. ↑ "CNS Graduate Students". California Institute of Technology Computation and Neural Systems.
  8. ↑ "SF I Profile: Virgil Griffith". Santa Fe Institute. March 27, 2008. Archived from the original on November 20, 2009.
  9. ↑ https://archive.org/download/phreaknic9video/2005-10-21_phreaknic_9_007_virgil_artificial_life.avi
  10. ↑ "Temporary Restraining Order against Hoffman and Griffith" (PDF). April 14, 2003.
  11. ↑ "Unintended Consequences: Seven Years under the DMCA". Electronic Frontier Foundation. April 2006. Archived from the original on February 15, 2006.
  12. ↑ "Restraining Order Letter". Virgil Griffith (official website). 12 April 2003.
  13. ↑ Anitha Reddy (17 April 2003). "Blackboard Gets Gag Order Against Smart-Card Hackers". Washington Post.
  14. ↑ Foster, Andrea L. (16 April 2003). "At Blackboard's Request, Judge Prevents Students From Discussing Security of Debit-Card System". Wayback Machine (The Chronicle of Higher Education). Archived from the original on April 7, 2007.
  15. ↑ Jonathan Fildes (15 August 2007). "Wikipedia 'shows CIA page edits'". BBC News.
  16. ↑ "New Service Makes Tor Anonymized Content Available to All". wired.com. Retrieved 22 February 2014.
  17. ↑ "tor2web brings anonymous Tor sites to the "regular" web". arstechnica.com. Retrieved 22 February 2014.
  18. ↑ "Mammoth Book of Secret Code Puzzles: Acknowledgements". Retrieved 2007-08-14.

External links

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