Tom Cross (computer security)
Tom Cross, also known as Decius, is an American entrepreneur, computer security expert, and hacker. His pseudonym comes from Decius Wadsworth, not the Roman Emperor Decius.
Biography
Cross was born in 1976 in Toronto, 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 engineering.
He is best known for founding several technology and hacker-related organizations, such as The Ninja's Domicile/BBeST BBS out of Nashville; and the se2600 chapter, incorporating hacker groups across the southeastern United States. 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 1999-2000, he was Chief Engineer at Dataway, a computer security firm in San Francisco. From 2000-2001 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. He presently works in the computer security industry as a vulnerability researcher.
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. 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[1]. He has also been a co-host on an episode of "Binary Revolution", as a cryptography expert.
Writing
- "Free Radio Broderick House: Streaming Radio and The Law", Blogworld, September 26, 1999
- "The Internet, Broadcast Media, and Democracy", MemeStreams, September 2001
- "Executed Offenders - My thoughts on the death penalty", MemeStreams, December 12, 2003
- "An open letter to PFIR on "Whois" privacy", Politech listserv, June 24, 2004
- "DNS WHOIS: Barking up the wrong tree", CircleID, June 28, 2004
- "Hamdi v. Rumsfeld - Now THATS legislating from the bench!", MemeStreams, July 5, 2004
- "The Road Ahead for Top-Level Domains", Vint Cerf answers three of Tom's questions in an interview, CircleID, March 13, 2006
- "Academic freedom and the hacker ethic", Communications of the ACM, June 2006.
- "Puppy smoothies: Improving the reliability of open, collaborative wikis", First Monday, September 2006.
References
External links
- PhreakNIC technology conference
- MemeStreams Weblog Community
- "Information Warfare for The People", video of PhreakNIC 9 presentation given with Nick Levay