John Markoff | |
|---|---|
 John Markoff in 2022 | |
| Born | October 24, 1949 |
| Alma mater | Whitman College University of Oregon |
| Occupation | Journalist |
John Gregory Markoff (born October 24, 1949 [1] [2] ) is a journalist best known for his work covering technology at The New York Times for 28 years until his retirement in 2016, [3] and a book and series of articles about the 1990s pursuit and capture of hacker Kevin Mitnick. [4] [5]
Markoff was born in Oakland, California, and grew up in Palo Alto, California. [2] He graduated from Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington, with a B.A. in sociology in 1971. Additionally he received an M.A. in sociology from the University of Oregon in 1976. [6]
After leaving graduate school, he returned to California where he began writing for Pacific News Service, an alternative news syndicate based in San Francisco. He freelanced for a number of publications including The Nation, Mother Jones and Saturday Review. In 1981 he became part of the original staff of the computer industry weekly InfoWorld . In 1984 he became an editor at Byte Magazine and in 1985 he left to become a reporter in the business section of the San Francisco Examiner , where he wrote about Silicon Valley.
In 1988 he moved to New York to write for the business section of the New York Times. In November 1988 he reported that Robert Tappan Morris, son of National Security Agency cryptographer Robert Morris, was the author of what would become known as the Internet worm.
In December 1993 he wrote an early article about the World Wide Web, referring to it as a "map to the buried treasures of the Information Age." [7]
On July 4, 1994, he wrote an article about Kevin Mitnick, who was then a fugitive from a number of law enforcement agencies. [8] He wrote several more pieces detailing Mitnick's capture. Markoff also co-wrote, with Tsutomu Shimomura, the book Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of America's Most Wanted Computer Outlaw about the chase. [9]
Markoff's writing about Mitnick was the subject of criticism by Mitnick supporters and unaffiliated parties who maintained that Markoff's accounts exaggerated or even invented Mitnick's activities and successes. Markoff was also accused by Jonathan Littman of journalistic impropriety and of over-hyping Mitnick's actual crimes. [10] Littman published a more sympathetic account of Mitnick's time as a fugitive in his own book on the incident, The Fugitive Game. Markoff stood by his reporting. [11]
The book later became a film that was released direct to video in the United States. The film went much further, with Markoff himself stating to the San Francisco Chronicle in 2000, "I thought it was a fundamentally dishonest movie." Mitnick stated that he settled a lawsuit with distributor Miramax over the film for an undisclosed sum. [12]
After Mitnick, Markoff continued to write about technology, focusing at times on wireless networking, writing early stories about non-line-of-sight broadband wireless, phased-array antennas, and multiple-in, multiple-out (MIMO) antenna systems to enhance Wi-Fi. He covered Jim Gillogly's 1999 break of the first three sections of the CIA's Kryptos cipher , and writes regularly about semiconductors and supercomputers as well. He wrote the first two articles describing Admiral John Poindexter's return to government and the creation of the Total Information Awareness project. He shared the 2005 Gerald Loeb Award in the Deadline Writing category for the story "End of an Era". [13] In 2009 he moved from the Business/Tech section of the New York Times to the Science section.
Markoff contributed to the New York Times staff entry that received the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. The series of 10 articles explored the business practices of Apple and other technology companies. [14] [15] He retired from his full-time position with The New York Times on December 1, 2016. [16] He continues to work as a freelance journalist for the Times and other organizations and volunteers at the Computer History Museum. [7] He is an affiliated fellow of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. [17]
Markoff is interviewed in Do You Trust This Computer? , a 2018 documentary on artificial intelligence.
DVD video, Grade Level: 9 - 12, Post Secondary
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.
Kevin David Mitnick was an American computer security consultant, author, and convicted hacker. He is best known for his high-profile 1995 arrest and five years in prison for various computer and communications-related crimes. Mitnick's pursuit, arrest, trial, and sentence along with the associated journalism, books, and films were all controversial. After his release from prison, he ran his own security firm, Mitnick Security Consulting, LLC, and was also involved with other computer security businesses.
Tsutomu Shimomura is a Japanese-born physicist and computer security expert. He is known for helping the FBI track and arrest hacker Kevin Mitnick. Takedown, his 1996 book on the subject with journalist John Markoff, was later adapted for the screen in Track Down in 2000.
John Wallace Walker was an American computer programmer, author and co-founder of the computer-aided design software company Autodesk. He was later recognized for his writing on his website Fourmilab.
Freedom Downtime is a 2001 documentary film sympathetic to the convicted computer hacker Kevin Mitnick, directed by Emmanuel Goldstein and produced by 2600 Films.
"The Mother of All Demos" was a landmark computer demonstration of developments by the Augmentation Research Center, given at the Association for Computing Machinery / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ACM/IEEE)—Computer Society's Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, by Douglas Engelbart, on December 9, 1968. The name The Mother of All Demos has been retroactively applied to the demonstration.
Kevin Lee Poulsen is an American former black-hat hacker and a contributing editor at The Daily Beast.
The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, normally shortened to The WELL or, alternatively, The Well, is a virtual community that was launched in 1985. It is one of the oldest continuously operating virtual communities. By 1993 it had 7,000 members, a staff of 12, and gross annual income of $2 million. A 1997 feature in Wired magazine called it "The world's most influential online community." In 2012, when it was last publicly offered for sale, it had 2,693 members. It is best known for its Internet forums, but also provides email, shell accounts, and web pages. Discussion topics are organized into conferences that cover broad areas of interest. User anonymity is prohibited.
Katie Hafner is an American journalist and author. She is a former staff member of The New York Times, and has written articles and books on subjects including technology and history. She co-produces and hosts the podcast series Lost Women of Science. Her first novel, The Boys, was published in 2022.
Matt Blaze is an American researcher who focuses on the areas of secure systems, cryptography, and trust management. He is currently the McDevitt Chair of Computer Science and Law at Georgetown University, and is on the board of directors of the Tor Project.
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.
Takedown or take down may refer to:
Brian Keith Reid is an American computer scientist. He developed an early use of a markup language in his 1980 doctoral dissertation. His other principal interest has been computer networking and the development of the Internet.
Susan Headley is a former phreaker and early computer hacker during the late 1970s and early 1980s. A member of the so-called Cyberpunks, Headley specialized in social engineering, a type of hacking which uses pretexting and misrepresentation of oneself in contact with targeted organizations in order to elicit information vital to hacking those organizations.
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Fred Moore (1941–1997) was an American political activist who was central to the early history of the personal computer. Moore was an active member of the People's Computer Company and one of the founders of the Homebrew Computer Club, urging its members to "bring back more than you take."
Justin Tanner Petersen was an American hacker, concert promoter, sound engineer, private investigator and an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. While tasked with helping to catch other hackers and fugitives wanted by the FBI, he continued to commit serious crimes.
The Secret History of Hacking is a 2001 documentary film that focuses on phreaking, computer hacking and social engineering occurring from the 1970s through to the 1990s. Archive footage concerning the subject matter and graphical imagery specifically created for the film are voiced over with narrative audio commentary, intermixed with commentary from people who in one way or another have been closely involved in these matters.
"My kung fu is stronger than yours" or "wǒ de gōng fū bǐ nǐ de gōng fū gèng qiáng" is a popular cultural trope and catchphrase, originally referring to the clichéd plots of martial arts films. The phrase is also rendered as "My kung fu is better than yours", "My kung fu is stronger than your kung fu", "My kung fu is the best", etc.
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