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Tom Cross | |
|---|---|
 Tom Cross at the Emperor (Happy Valley) Hotel in Hong Kong in 2001 | |
| Born | 1976 |
| Alma mater | Georgia Institute of Technology |
| Known for | MemeStreams |
Tom Cross (born 1976), also known as Decius, is an American computer security expert and hacker.
Cross was born in 1976 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and grew up in Tennessee. His father worked in telecommunications policy and his mother was a Registered Nurse's Assistant. He attended Brentwood High School in Brentwood, Tennessee, before attending Georgia Tech in Atlanta, receiving a bachelor's degree in computer engineering. [1] [2]
He co-founded the EFGA (Electronic Frontiers Georgia) in 1995. In 1996, he co-founded Computer Sentry Software, known for their award-winning "CyberAngel" software, a laptop anti-theft program. From 1999 to 2000, he was Chief Engineer at Dataway, a computer security firm in San Francisco. From 2000 to 2001 he worked at iAsiaWorks, as the Director of Global Security Engineering. In 2001, he founded Industrial Memetics, which developed the popular collaborative blogging community MemeStreams. [3]
Cross has been a speaker at several technology conferences, including PhreakNIC; Summercon; "The First International Hackers' Conference in Seoul Korea" (IS2K); "InternetWorld" in Singapore; and APRICOT, the Asia-Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies. [4] He was also among the attendees at the first ever Def Con. He is known for extensive "rant" essays and speeches on technology and policy. [5] [6] He has also been a co-host on episodes of "Binary Revolution", as a cryptography expert. [7] [8]
In a positive connotation, a hacker is a person skilled in information technology who achieves goals by non-standard means. Though the term hacker has become associated in popular culture with a security hacker – someone with knowledge of bugs or exploits to break into computer systems and access data which would otherwise be inaccessible to them – hacking can also be utilized by legitimate figures in legal situations. For example, law enforcement agencies sometimes use hacking techniques to collect evidence on criminals and other malicious actors. This could include using anonymity tools to mask their identities online and pose as criminals. Likewise, covert world agencies can employ hacking techniques in the legal conduct of their work. Hacking and cyber-attacks are used extra-legally and illegally by law enforcement and security agencies, and employed by state actors as a weapon of legal and illegal warfare.
A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures. In popular language, a meme may refer to an Internet meme, typically an image, that is remixed, copied, and circulated in a shared cultural experience online.
Memetics is a theory of the evolution of culture based on Darwinian principles with the meme as the unit of culture. The term "meme" was coined by biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, to illustrate the principle that he later called "Universal Darwinism". All evolutionary processes depend on information being copied, varied, and selected, a process also known as variation with selective retention. The information that is copied is called the replicator, and genes are the replicator for biological evolution. Dawkins proposed that the same process drives cultural evolution, and he called this second replicator the "meme". He gave as examples, tunes, catchphrases, fashions, and technologies. Like genes, memes are selfish replicators and have causal efficacy; in other words, their properties influence their chances of being copied and passed on. Some succeed because they are valuable or useful to their human hosts while others are more like viruses.
Phreaking is a slang term coined to describe the activity of a culture of people who study, experiment with, or explore telecommunication systems, such as equipment and systems connected to public telephone networks. The term phreak is a sensational spelling of the word freak with the ph- from phone, and may also refer to the use of various audio frequencies to manipulate a phone system. Phreak, phreaker, or phone phreak are names used for and by individuals who participate in phreaking.
John Thomas Draper, also known as Captain Crunch, Crunch, or Crunchman, is an American computer programmer and former phone phreak. He is a widely known figure within the computer programming world and the hacker and security community, and generally lives a nomadic lifestyle.
In the context of information security, social engineering is the psychological manipulation of people into performing actions or divulging confidential information. A type of confidence trick for the purpose of information gathering, fraud, or system access, it differs from a traditional "con" in the sense that it is often one of the many steps in a more complex fraud scheme. It has also been defined as "any act that influences a person to take an action that may or may not be in their best interests."
PhreakNIC is an annual hacker and technology convention held in Nashville, Tennessee. It is organized by the Nashville 2600 Organization and draws upon resources from SouthEastern 2600 (se2600). The Nashville Linux User Group was closely tied with PhreakNIC for the first 10 years, but is no longer an active participant in the planning. First held in 1997, PhreakNIC continues to be a long-time favorite among hackers, security experts and technology enthusiasts. PhreakNIC currently holds claim as the oldest regional hacker con and is one of the few hacker cons run by a 501(c)(3) tax-free charity. The conference attracts about 350 attendees.
Jason Scott Sadofsky, more commonly known as Jason Scott, is an American archivist, historian of technology, filmmaker, performer, and actor. Scott has been known by the online pseudonyms Sketch, SketchCow, The Slipped Disk, and textfiles. He has been called "the figurehead of the digital archiving world".
Cult of the Dead Cow, also known as cDc or cDc Communications, is a computer hacker and DIY media organization founded in 1984 in Lubbock, Texas. The group maintains a weblog on its site, also titled "[Cult of the Dead Cow]". New media are released first through the blog, which also features thoughts and opinions of the group's members.
David Blake, also known as StankDawg, is the founder of the hacking group Digital DawgPound (DDP) and a long-time member of the hacking community. He is known for being a regular presenter at multiple hacking conferences, but is best known as the creator of the "Binary Revolution" initiative, including being the founding host and producer of Binary Revolution Radio, a long-running weekly Internet radio show which ran 200 episodes from 2003 to 2007.
A security hacker is someone who explores methods for breaching defenses and exploiting weaknesses in a computer system or network. Hackers may be motivated by a multitude of reasons, such as profit, protest, information gathering, challenge, recreation, or evaluation of a system weaknesses to assist in formulating defenses against potential hackers.
The Digital DawgPound is a group of hackers, best known for a series of articles in hacker magazines such as 2600: The Hacker Quarterly and Make, the long-running webcast Binary Revolution Radio, and a very active set of forums with posts from high-profile hackers such as Strom Carlson, decoder, Phiber Optik and StankDawg. The stated mission of the DDP is to propagate a more positive image of hackers than the negative mass media stereotype. The group welcomes new members who want to learn about hacking, and attempts to teach them more positive aspects and steer them away from the negative aspects, by reinforcing the hacker ethic. Their goal is to show that hackers can, and regularly do, make positive contributions not only to technology, but to society as a whole.
A memetic algorithm (MA) in computer science and operations research, is an extension of the traditional genetic algorithm (GA) or more general evolutionary algorithm (EA). It may provide a sufficiently good solution to an optimization problem. It uses a suitable heuristic or local search technique to improve the quality of solutions generated by the EA and to reduce the likelihood of premature convergence.
Virgil Griffith, is an American programmer. He worked extensively on the Ethereum cryptocurrency platform, designed the Tor2web proxy along with Aaron Swartz, and created the Wikipedia indexing tool WikiScanner. He has published papers on artificial life and integrated information theory. Griffith was arrested in 2019 and in 2021 pleaded guilty to conspiring to violate U.S. laws relating to money laundering using cryptocurrency and sanctions related to North Korea. On April 12, 2022, Griffith was sentenced to 63 months imprisonment for assisting North Korea with evading sanctions and is currently in a federal low-security prison in Pennsylvania.
The College of Computing is a college of the Georgia Institute of Technology, a public research university in Atlanta, Georgia. It is divided into four schools: the School of Computer Science, the School of Interactive Computing, the School of Computational Science & Engineering, and the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy. The College of Computing's programs are consistently ranked among the top 10 computing programs in the nation. In 2022, U.S. News & World Report ranked the Computer Science graduate program #6 in the U.S. In 2016, Times Higher Education and the Wall Street Journal ranked the College #5 in the world.
MemeStreams is an early social networking website, online community, and blog host that was established in 2001 by Industrial Memetics.
Howard Keith Henson is an American electrical engineer and writer. Henson writes on subjects including space engineering, space law, memetics, cryonics, evolutionary psychology, and the physical limitations of Transhumanism. In 1975, Henson founded the L5 Society with his then-wife Carolyn Meinel to promote space colonization. In 1987 the L5 Society merged with the National Space Institute to form the National Space Society.
Dave Buchwald, is a filmmaker and former phone phreak, hacker, and leader of the Legion of Doom in the mid-1980s, then known as Bill From RNOC.
Telecomix is a decentralized cluster of net activists, committed to the freedom of expression and is a name used by both WeRebuild and Telecomix. WeRebuild is a collaborative project used to propose and discuss laws as well as to collect information about politics and politicians. The Telecomix is the operative body that executes schemes and proposals presented by the WeRebuild. On September 15, 2011, Telecomix diverted all connections to the Syrian web, and redirected internauts to a page with instructions to bypass censorship.
Nick Levay (1977–2021) also known as Rattle was an American computer security expert and hacker. He was the Chief Security Officer at the Council on Foreign Relations and other organizations such as Carbon Black and the Center for American Progress. From 2018–2021 he was the President of the NGO-ISAC, an Information Sharing and Analysis Center nonprofit serving US-based non-governmental organizations.
