https://old.reddit.com/user/romanpoet https://medium.com/@virgilgr https://old.reddit.com/search?q=virgil+griffith http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/ https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/magazine/23wwln-medium-t.html Internet Man of Mystery By VIRGINIA HEFFERNANNOV. 21, 2008 Photo Credit Kevin Van Aelst Girls hang on Virgil Griffith. This is no exaggeration. At parties, they cling to the arms of the 25-year-old hacker whose reason for being, he says, is to “make the Internet a better and more interesting place.” The founder of a data-mining tool called WikiScanner, Griffith is also a visiting researcher at the mysterious Santa Fe Institute, where “complex systems” are studied. He was once charged, wide-eyed rumor has it, with sedition. No wonder girls whisper secrets in his ear and laugh merrily at his arcane jokes. WikiScanner, which Griffith created last year, makes it possible to figure out which organization made which edits to a Wikipedia entry by cross-referencing IP addresses with a database of IP address owners. You can imagine how much fun this tool is to deploy — to see how someone with a senate.gov address tinkers with the Jeremiah Wright entry, or how Diebold apparently protects its reputation by deleting criticism of its voting machines and political connections. The promise of WikiScanner is to help free Wikipedia from both propaganda and sabotage. But Griffith says he also aspires “to create minor public-relations disasters for companies and organizations I dislike.” He’s a troublemaker, then. A twerp. And a magnet for tech-world groupies. At the WebbyConnect conference in Southern California last month, I saw it with my own eyes: Griffith, enjoying a White Russian that I first mistook for chocolate milk, reveled in the attention of his female fans. He smiled broadly. He seemed like a young Henry Kissinger, but sweet, or Arthur Fonzarelli, but not a dropout. Born to doctor parents in 1983, Griffith, who agreed to tell me about himself by e-mail after the conference, grew up in what he calls a “mostly conservative” family in Tuscaloosa, Ala. Problems with extrafamilial authority emerged early on, and he spent several school days in detention. In his public school, he worried about gangs; his mother pulled him out and briefly homeschooled him. Eventually, he graduated from the Alabama School of Math and Science, even though he once threatened to sue the school — for a proposed policy of mandatory drug testing — and skipped his final exams to travel in Greece. Cheating at video games was a hobby early on. “I remember in particular there was a ‘Star Wars’ game, X-Wing, where you shoot down Imperial spaceships,” he recalled in an e-mail message. “Only one of my computer-controlled wingmen was any good. My very first hack at age 9 was noticing there was a file for each pilot, and I simply copied the pilot file for the good wingman 20 times, giving me a plentiful supply of the best wingmen from then on.” Continue reading the main story Related Coverage Beating X-Wing must have been supernaturally gratifying because, then and there, Griffith seemed to have devoted himself to finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in systems of all kinds. As he wrote to me: “I love the ingenuity that goes into trying to think of the most perverse things you can do within the game that the designers would have never intended or foreseen someone trying. You step back and look at the entire interacting, breathing system and pick out the counterintuitive, unbalanced, seldom-explored parts and look for a way for these parts to interact such that they play off each other, synergistically amplifying their power to influence everything else, potentially spiraling out of control.” This cast of mind, Griffith wrote, “gave me a knack for computer security.” During his freshman year in college, at the University of Alabama, he read an article in 2600: The Hacker Quarterly that revealed potential flaws in the Blackboard Transaction System, which administers the multipurpose campus ID card used at many American colleges and universities. Griffith approached Billy Hoffman, the author of the article and a student at Georgia Tech, about collaborating on the problem. The pair worked for months on a demonstration of the weaknesses of Blackboard technology. In April 2003, they were hours away from presenting their findings at a security conference in Atlanta when Blackboard hit them with a restraining order. The company then sued Griffith and Hoffman for something considerably less than trying to overthrow the government (so much for the rumors). In fact, they were charged with violating the Consumer Fraud and Abuse Act, among other things. The parties settled out of court later that year. (The terms of the settlement are sealed.) Griffith says he likes to think of himself as a superhero of online anarchy: a “disruptive technologist.” But there’s another side to the mischief maker from Tuscaloosa — a more contemplative side. In 2002, Griffith, like many other scientifically inclined young people, fell under the spell of Douglas R. Hofstadter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1979 best seller, “Gödel, Escher, Bach.” It was a revelation. In downtime from his life as an Internet poltergeist, Griffith started to explore quieter, more ethically defensible intellectual pleasures. “I wrestled with materialism,” he explained, referring to the vexing fact that the miracle of consciousness somehow inheres in three pounds of quivery human flesh. Why couldn’t a smart guy like himself make a computational device with the self-awareness of a human mind? This question has stayed with Griffith. “I am immensely interested in the Singularity,” a hypothetical event Griffith calls “a school of thought which cites, among other things, trends in technological growth that predict that around 2040 for a mere $1,000 we will be able to buy a computer with the processing power” — and even self-awareness, he added — “of the human brain.” Griffith is quick to note that he knows how wacko this sounds. “There is an aura of ‘rapture of the nerds’ around these ideas,” he admitted. But he remains enthusiastic about them. After the Blackboard lawsuit, Griffith decided to transfer to Indiana University, in hopes of studying with Hofstadter, who teaches there. Griffith banked on getting a cognitive-science fellowship, but the program was canceled that year — though not before he had quit Alabama and signed a lease in Bloomington. Griffith felt stuck. But rather than enroll as an undergraduate, he found a position as a research associate at the university’s School of Informatics. A pretty good trick: if you want to go to college somewhere, start by working with the faculty. Eventually, Griffith took some classes at Indiana, though he avoided various required courses. Nevertheless, he was able to persuade the University of Alabama that his “life experiences to date and his published papers constituted the remaining required courses to graduate,” and in 2007 he received his bachelor’s degree. Last year Griffith entered a graduate program to study theories of consciousness at the California Institute of Technology. At the same time, he conducts research at the Santa Fe Institute, which is a kind of RAND Corporation for the post-cold-war world, a home for the study of self-organizing systems. From his education to his professional career to his social life, Griffith sometimes seems to have hacked everything. But what makes him more than a garden-variety Internet troublemaker? Perhaps that’s all he is. But Griffith is not 14 now; he’s 25, and technofoolery may not satisfy him forever. The allure of real science is powerful, even as the hacker high life — girls, notoriety, White Russians — can be hard to resist. “Hackerdom rewards spontaneity, curiosity and ingenuity,” Griffith told me. “Science rewards rigor and forging solid bedrock to stand on — which means a lot of carefully dotting i’s and crossing t’s. Although scientific questions are harder, more abstract and tend to have less immediate influence in the world, the questions are deeper and the answers so uplifting and transcendently beautiful that contact with them is a genuine spiritual experience.” Points of Entry THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDATIONS THE GREAT GEB: If you care or have ever cared about how thinking happens, you must read or reread Douglas Hofstadter’s 1979 masterwork, ‘‘Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.” The latest edition, published with a new Hofstadter foreword in 1999, is available from Amazon. As Hofstadter puts it, “GEB is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter.” Related links are here: geb.stenius.org. Fans chatter here: groups.google.com/group/alt.fan.hofstadter. MEET SINGLES: Afraid of, or excited by, the prospect of ultraintelligent machines that can think, learn and know that they’re thinking and learning? Join the transhumanists, who propose that humans can transcend our substandard biology and achieve new heights of braininess. The Singularity approaches. The latest Singularity book (by Ray Kurzweil) here: singularity.com. (And the movie based on it here: singularity.com/themovie.) THE VIRGILIAD: The hacker whom some know as Romanpoet can be found here: virgil.gr. His creation WikiScanner — with its defiantly minimalist design — is here: wikiscanner.virgil.gr. A look at Griffith’s “books that make you dumb” project is here: booksthatmakeyoudumb.virgil.gr. A preview: “The Book of Mormon” apparently doesn’t make us as dumb as “Wuthering Heights.” Also worth a hard look, if not a subscription, is the hacker quarterly 2600: 2600.com.

On 29/11/2019 19:49, grarpamp wrote: "GRIFFITH was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport yesterday and will be presented in federal court in Los Angeles later today. U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman stated: "As alleged, Virgil Griffith provided highly technical information to North Korea, knowing that this information could be used to help North Korea launder money and evade sanctions. In allegedly doing so, Griffith jeopardized the sanctions that both Congress and the president have enacted to place maximum pressure on North Korea's dangerous regime." Assistant Attorney General John Demers said: "Despite receiving warnings not to go, Griffith allegedly traveled to one of the United States' foremost adversaries, North Korea, where he taught his audience how to use blockchain technology to evade sanctions. By this complaint, we begin the process of seeking justice for such conduct." What the frag. How could that "conduct" be illegal? Didn't the US Gov learn about the idiocy of trying to keep math and algorithms secret with the whole encryption = weapons thing decades ago now? Surely the North Koreans can just read all they need to know about blockchain via any number of freely available publications or websites. Github would be a good place to start, for example. Isn't this just pointlessly persecuting someone for doing something that no sane person would think of as illegal or criminal and which could, at worst, be of only trivial benefit to any putative enemy.