Virgil Griffith

Virgil Griffith
Virgil Griffith, 2007
Born	1983 Birmingham, Alabama, USA
Other names	Romanpoet
Education	Cognitive science (University of Alabama)
Occupation	Internet and software researcher
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 and graduated from California Institute of Technology in 2007.^[2] Griffith describes his mission as being "to create minor public-relations disasters for companies and organizations I dislike."^[1] In 2013, he appeared on King of the Nerds, a competition series airing on TBS.^[3]

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 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.^[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.^{[citation needed]}

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]

Writing

• Virgil Griffith, Markus Jakobsson, 2005. Messin' with Texas: Deriving Mother's Maiden Names Using Public Records. ISBN 3-54-026223-7.
• Virgil Griffith, Larry S. Yaeger, 2005, MIT Press. Ideal Free Distribution in Agents with Evolved Neural Architectures. Indiana University School of Informatics and Department of Cognitive Science.
• Griffith is listed as one of the contributors (as "Virgil G") in Elonka Dunin (2006). The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes And Cryptograms. Carroll & Graf. ISBN 0-78-671726-2.^[16]
• Two articles in Markus Jakobsson, Steven Myers (2007) Phishing and Counter-Measures: Understanding the Increasing Problem of Electronic Identity Theft. Wiley-Interscience. ISBN 0-47-178245-9.

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Virgil Griffith.

• Personal website
• Binary Revolution webcast, 17 May 2005
• The copyright cops strike again, 16 April 2003
• Santa Fe Institute talk
• Blackboard Campus IDs: Security Thru Cease & Desist, 14 April 2003
• Polyworld: Using Evolution to Design Artificial Intelligence on YouTube, 8 November 2007