Virgil Griffith
Virgil Griffith, 2007
Born	1983 (age 26–27) Alabama, USA
Education	Cognitive science (University of Alabama)
Occupation	Hacker
Website http://virgil.gr/

Virgil Griffith (born 1983), also known as Romanpoet, is an American hacker, known for his involvement with a 2003 lawsuit with the Blackboard Inc. company and his creation of the WikiScanner. He has published papers on artificial life and is currently a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology.^[1] According to the New York Times, he is the Internet Man of Mystery.^[2]

Contents 1 Biography 2 Writing 3 References 4 External links

[edit] Biography

Griffith was born in Alabama in 1983 and graduated from the Alabama School of Math and Science in 2002,^[3] 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.^[4] Griffith is now a graduate student^[5] studying computation and neural systems.^[6] He is affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute as a visiting researcher.^[7]

Griffith has given talks at the hacker conferences Interz0ne, PhreakNIC, and HOPE. It was at Interz0ne 1 in 2002 that he met Billy Hoffman, a Georgia hacker 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 restraining order.^[8] Two days later, it was followed by a lawsuit from Blackboard Inc. alleging that they had stolen trade secrets as well as violated both the DMCA^[9] and the Economic Espionage Act.^[10][11][12] The lawsuit was later settled.

On August 14, 2007, Griffith released a new 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.^[13]

[edit] Writing

• Virgil Griffith, Markus Jakobsson, 2005. "Messin' with Texas: Deriving Mother's Maiden Names Using Public Records", ISBN 978-3-540-26223-7.
• Virgil Griffith, Larry Yaeger, 2005, MIT Press. "Ideal Free Distribution in Agents with Evolved Neural Architectures. A-Life 10 Conference".
• Griffith is listed as one of the contributors (as "Virgil G") in The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms, 2006, ISBN 0-7867-1726-2.^[14]
• Two articles in Phishing and Counter-Measures: Understanding the Increasing Problem of Electronic Identity Theft, ISBN 0-471-78245-9.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Virgil Griffith

• Virgil Griffith's homepage
• Binary Revolution webcast , May 17, 2005
• Salon, April 15, 2003
• Santa Fe Institute talk
• Slashdot interview, April 14, 2003
• Polyworld: Using Evolution to Design Artificial Intelligence, November 8, 2007