A few years ago, when Greg Martin was in his mid 20s and teaching a computer security course for NASA engineers, he stumbled on an arcane bit of information that stopped him cold: The original set of rules governing the Internet, created in September 1981, the month he was born.
That coincidence helped Martin understand a little better his improbable journey from rural Texas to the center of the fight against cyber crime. A former child hacker who commandeered his high school’s servers and spent his teens studying, manipulating and repairing some of the earliest computer networks, Martin’s life had paralleled the rise of the Internet, culminating with an explosion in data theft, corporate espionage and digital warfare that made him and a generation of other self-taught security experts some of the most sought-after figures in Silicon Valley. “I was just born at the right time,” he said.
Read the rest of this post on the original site »
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
Will you support Vox’s explanatory journalism?
Most news outlets make their money through advertising or subscriptions. But when it comes to what we’re trying to do at Vox, there are a couple of big issues with relying on ads and subscriptions to keep the lights on:
First, advertising dollars go up and down with the economy. We often only know a few months out what our advertising revenue will be, which makes it hard to plan ahead.
Second, we’re not in the subscriptions business. Vox is here to help everyone understand the complex issues shaping the world — not just the people who can afford to pay for a subscription. We believe that’s an important part of building a more equal society. And we can’t do that if we have a paywall.
So even though advertising is still our biggest source of revenue, we also seek grants and reader support. (And no matter how our work is funded, we have strict guidelines on editorial independence.)
If you also believe that everyone deserves access to trusted high-quality information, will you make a gift to Vox today? Any amount helps.
Yes, I'll give $5/month
Yes, I'll give $5/month
We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and
Google Pay. You can also contribute via
