Virgil Griffith - Crypto Advocate and Educator Arrested at LAX from DPRK

[grarpamp]

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.”
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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.