Other names Romanpoet Role Software developer Television King of the Nerds TV shows King of the Nerds | Name Virgil Griffith | |
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Education University of Alabama (2007) | ||
Virgil griffith season 1 at king of the nerds premiere party virgilgr tbs kingofthenerds
Virgil Griffith, also known as Romanpoet (born 1983), is an American software application writer, known for his creation of WikiScanner. He has published papers on artificial life and integrated information theory. In developing WikiScanner, Griffith described his mission as "to create minor public-relations disasters for companies and organizations I dislike."
Contents
- Virgil griffith season 1 at king of the nerds premiere party virgilgr tbs kingofthenerds
- Casting audition virgil griffith
- Early life
- Computer career
- Writing
- References
Casting audition virgil griffith
Early life
Griffith was born in Birmingham, Alabama and grew up in nearby Tuscaloosa. He graduated from the Alabama School of Math and Science in 2002, and then attended the University of Alabama, studying cognitive science. He transferred to Indiana University in 2004, but returned to graduate cum laude from Alabama in August 2007. In 2014 Griffith received his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology under Christof Koch in computation and neural systems. He is affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute as a visiting researcher.
Computer career
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 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.. Two days later, it was followed by a lawsuit alleging that they had stolen trade secrets and violated both the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Economic Espionage Act. The lawsuit was later settled.
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.
In 2008, together with Aaron Swartz, Griffith designed the Tor2web proxy.