VIRGIL GRIFFITH

'Virgil Griffith' (born 1983), also known as 'Romanpoet', is an American hacker, known for his involvement with a 2003 lawsuit with the Blackboard Inc. company and his creation of the WikiScanner. He has also published papers on artificial life.^[1]

Contents

Biography

Writing

References

External links

Biography

Griffith was born in Alabama in 1983, the older of two children. Both of his parents are medical doctors. He graduated from the Alabama School of Math and Science in 2002,^[2] and then attended the University of Alabama, studying cognitive science in New College. He was a member of the Mallet Assembly. He transferred to Indiana University in 2004, but returned to graduate cum laude from Alabama in August 2007.^[3] Griffith is now a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology.^[4] He is affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute as a visiting researcher.
Griffith has given talks at the hacker conferences Interz0ne, PhreakNIC, and HOPE. It was at Interz0ne 1 in 2002 that he met Billy Hoffman, a Georgia hacker 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 letter. Two days later, it was followed by a lawsuit from Blackboard Inc. alleging that they had stolen trade secrets as well as violated both the DMCA and the Espionage and Sedition Act.^[5][6][7] The lawsuit was later settled.
On August 14, 2007, Griffith released a new 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.^[8]

Writing

★ Virgil Griffith, Markus Jakobsson, 2005. "Messin' with Texas: Deriving Mother's Maiden Names Using Public Records", ISBN 978-3-540-26223-7.

★ Virgil Griffith, Larry Yaeger, 2005, MIT Press. "Ideal Free Distribution in Agents with Evolved Neural Architectures. A-Life 10 Conference".

★ Griffith is listed as one of the contributors (as "Virgil G") in ''The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms'', 2006, ISBN 0-7867-1726-2.^[9]

★ Two articles in ''Phishing and Counter-Measures: Understanding the Increasing Problem of Electronic Identity Theft'', ISBN 0-471-78245-9.

References

1. See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign
2. Alumnus Virgil Griffith Creates and Releases Wikipedia Scanner
3. See David Virgil Griffith in Commencement
4. Scanner Tracks Who's Changing What on Wikipedia
5. Blackboard Gets Gag Order Against Smart-Card Hackers
6. Unintended Consequences: Seven Years under the DMCA
7. At Blackboard's Request, Judge Prevents Students From Discussing Security of Debit-Card System Andrea L Foster
8. Wikipedia 'shows CIA page edits' Jonathan Fildes
9. Mammoth Book of Secret Code Puzzles: Acknowledgements

External links

★ Virgil Griffith's homepage

★ Binary Revolution webcast , May 17, 2005

★ Salon, April 15, 2003

★ Santa Fe Institute talk

★ Slashdot interview, April 14, 2003