Steven Levy

Steven Levy (born 1951) is an American journalist who has written several books on computers, technology, cryptography, the Internet, cybersecurity, and privacy.

Career[link]

Levy is a senior writer for Wired. Previously, he was chief technology writer and a senior editor for Newsweek. Levy has had articles published in Harper's, Macworld, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Premiere, and Rolling Stone. He is regarded (along with Walter Mossberg) as a prominent and respected critic of Apple Inc. In July 2004, Levy wrote a cover story (which also featured an interview with Apple CEO Steve Jobs) which unveiled the 4th generation of the iPod to the world before Apple had officially done so, an unusual event since Apple is well known for its tight-lipped press policy.

Levy has won several awards, including the "Computer Press Association Award" for a report he co-wrote in 1998 on the Year 2000 problem.

In 1978, Steven Levy rediscovered Albert Einstein's brain in the office of the pathologist who removed and preserved it.^[1]

In 1984, he wrote a book called Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, in which he described a “hacker ethic”, which became a guideline to understanding how computers have advanced into the machines that we know and use today. He identified this Hacker Ethic to consist of key points such as that all information is free, and that this information should be used to “change life for the better”.

Levy received his bachelor's degree from Temple University and earned a Master's degree in literature from Pennsylvania State University.^[2] He lives in New York City with his wife, Pulitzer Prize winner Teresa Carpenter, and son.

Books by Levy[link]

• In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives (2011)
• The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness (2006)
• Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age (2001)
• Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything (1994)
• Artificial Life: The Quest for a New Creation (1992)
• The Unicorn's Secret: Murder in the Age of Aquarius (1988)
• Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1984)

External links[link]

• Steven Levy's website
• iPod: I love you, you're perfect, now change- Salon.com article on Levy's 2006 book The Perfect Thing
• Works by Steven Levy at Project Gutenberg
• Authors@Google: Steven Levy
• Lebowski Podcast Episode 27 - Steven Levy's Wish List Interview with Steven Levy about The Big Lebowski and his interview with the Coen Brothers.
• Lebowski Podcast Episode 27a - Steven Levy on Technology Chalupa and Steven Levy talk about blogging, twitter, internet security, etc.
• C-SPAN Q&A interview with Levy on The Perfect Thing, December 24, 2006

References[link]

This article may contain original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding references. Statements consisting only of original research may be removed. More details may be available on the talk page. (September 2011)

Matt Cutts works for the Search Quality team in Google, specializing in search engine optimization issues.^[1]

Career[link]

Cutts started his career in search when working on his Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. According to quotation in a personal interview with an operator of another website, Matt got his Bachelor's degree at the University of Kentucky and Master's degree from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In the interview he was quoted his field of study was computer graphics and movement tracking, then moved into the field of information retrieval, and search engines^[2] after taking two required outside classes from the university's Information and Library Science department.^[2]

Before working at the Search Quality group at Google, Cutts worked at the ads engineering group and SafeSearch, Google's family filter.^{[citation needed]} There he earned the nickname "porn cookie guy" by giving his wife's homemade cookies to any Googler who provided an example of unwanted pornography in the search results.^[3]

Cutts is one of the co-inventors listed upon a Google patent related to search engines and web spam,^[4] which was the first to publicly propose using historical data to identify link spam.^{[citation needed]}

In November 2010, Cutts started a contest challenging developers to make Microsoft Kinect more compatible with the Linux operating system. At the time, Microsoft had stated that the use of Kinect with devices other than the Xbox 360 was not supported by them.^[5]

Cutts has given advice and made statements on help related to the use of the Google search engine and related issues. ^[6]

In January 2012, on the news that Google had violated its quality guidelines, Cutts defended the downgrading of Chrome homepage results noting that it was not given special dispensation. ^[7]

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• David A. Vise and Mark Malseed (2005-11-15). The Google Story. Delacorte Press. ISBN 0-553-80457-X. 

External links[link]

• Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO – his personal blog
• Matt Cutts on Twitter
• Matt Cutts at TED Conferences
• 2009 BusinessWeek profile
• Philipp Lenssen (2005). "Matt Cutts, Google's Gadgets Guy". blog.outer-court.com, Personal Blog. http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2005-11-17-n52.html. Retrieved December 15, 2006. 

This article relies largely or entirely upon a single source. Please help improve this article by introducing citations to additional sources. Discussion about the problems with the sole source used may be found on the talk page. (December 2011)

John Markoff
John Markoff
Born	John Markoff (1949-10-24) October 24, 1949 (age 62) Oakland, California
Occupation	Journalist

John Markoff (born October 24, 1949) is a journalist best known for his work at The New York Times, and a book and series of articles about the 1990s pursuit and capture of hacker Kevin Mitnick.

Biography[link]

Markoff was born in Oakland, California and grew up in Palo Alto, California. He graduated from Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington, with a BA in Sociology in 1971. Additionally he received a MA in sociology from the University of Oregon in 1976.^[1]

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."

Markoff and Kevin Mitnick[link]

This biographical section of an article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (March 2008)

On July 4, 1994 he wrote an article about Kevin Mitnick, who was then a fugitive on the run from a number of law enforcement agencies. He wrote several more pieces detailing Mitnick's capture. Markoff also co-wrote, with Tsutomu Shimomura, the book Takedown about the chase. The book later became a film that was released direct to video in the United States. 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 stood by his reporting in several responses.

The film went far further, with Markoff himself stating to the San Francisco Chronicle in 2000, "I thought it was a fundamentally dishonest movie." (Mitnick stated a number of times that he settled a lawsuit with distributors Miramax over the film, but details were confidential; Miramax has apparently never publicly confirmed that.)^{[citation needed]}

John Markoff at San Francisco New York Times bureau

Markoff was also accused by Jonathan Littman of journalistic impropriety and of over-hyping Mitnick's actual crimes. Littman published a more sympathetic account of Mitnick's time as a fugitive in his own book on the incident, The Fugitive Game. Further controversy came over the release of the movie Takedown, with Littman alleging that portions of the film were taken from his book The Fugitive Game without permission.

Markoff's involvement with Mitnick is thoroughly covered in the documentary Freedom Downtime, in which an interview is conducted with Markoff who is unable to elaborate on the veracity of Mitnick's charges.

Post-Mitnick[link]

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 [1], 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. In 2009 he moved from the Business/Tech section of the New York Times to the Science section.

Bibliography[link]

• The High Cost of High Tech (with Lennie Siegel) (1985) ISBN 0-06-039045-X
• Hafner, Katie; Markoff, John (1991). Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-68322-5. 
• Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of America's Most Wanted Computer Outlaw (with Tsutomu Shimomura) (1995) ISBN 0-7868-6210-6
• What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (2005) ISBN 0-670-03382-0
• A robot network seeks to enlist your computer

See also[link]

• Interview with John Markoff about What the Dormouse Said, April 13, 2006 (audio)

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: John Markoff

• Recent and archival news by John Markoff of The New York Times.
• John Markoff radio interview on Tech Nation
• TED Talks: John Markoff on newspapers at TED in 2007

Steve Levy (born March 12, 1965) is a journalist for ESPN.

Early life and career[link]

Levy was a 1987 graduate of the State University of New York at Oswego. He also attended John F. Kennedy High School. Before working for ESPN, he worked in New York for WFAN.

ESPN[link]

At ESPN, he usually works on SportsCenter, and he covered NHL regular season and playoff games before the network lost the rights to televise the league's games. He also previously covered the network's college football coverage for four seasons. Levy has been with ESPN since 1993.

He is also known for leaving fellow co-anchor Keith Olbermann in stitches when, due to a teleprompter typo, he said "bulging dick" instead of "bulging disc".^[1]

National Hockey League broadcasting[link]

Levy is a prolific and well known NHL broadcaster. He has earned the nickname "Mr. Overtime," for having called the three longest televised games in NHL history, all of which have been playoff games — a 1996 game between the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Washington Capitals that went four overtimes (third longest); a 2000 contest that also featured the Penguins, this time playing the Philadelphia Flyers, which went five overtimes (the longest); and a 2003 matchup between the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim and the Dallas Stars, which also went five overtimes, and lasted six hours (second longest). The only two games to go longer took place before the era of television.

Other appearances[link]

Most recently, Levy has appeared in a print advertisement for Swiss watchmaker Raymond Weil. He appeared as himself in a pair of 2005 films, covering the Boston Red Sox in spring training in Fever Pitch, and the Special Olympics in The Ringer. He also appeared in The Game Plan released in 2007.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Steve Levy's ESPN Bio