【OHI】Jeff Moss interview selection
Growing up in the San Francisco Bay area, Jeff “started getting exposed to computers” at a very early age. In the 1980s, IBM offered a discounted price for professors and teacher on the newly released IBM PC II. His father “knew he’d be interested.”, thus bought it for 10- year-old Jeff Moss. Advantages like access to Lawrence Livermore’s lab and Exploratori...
Growing up in the San Francisco Bay area, Jeff “started getting exposed to computers” at a very early age. In the 1980s, IBM offered a discounted price for professors and teacher on the newly released IBM PC II. His father “knew he’d be interested.”, thus bought it for 10- year-old Jeff Moss. Advantages like access to Lawrence Livermore’s lab and Exploratori...
Jeff Moss
Developed a liking for computer
Growing up in the San Francisco Bay area, Jeff “started getting exposed to computers” at a very early age. In the 1980s, IBM offered a discounted price for professors and teacher on the newly released IBM PC II. His father “knew he’d be interested.”, thus bought it for 10- year-old Jeff Moss. Advantages like access to Lawrence Livermore’s lab and Exploratorium intrigued Jeff Moss’s interest in computers. Furthermore, his middle school was equipped with RadioShack TRS-80 computers and offered computer classes programmed in BASIC.
FBI Dream was shattered
At that time Jeff was not only interested in working in jobs relevant to computers, but also “thought he wanted to be an FBI agent, and “go into law enforcement”. He applied to be an FBI agent but received a rejection with the reason of unqualified eyesight. Five years later at a Christmas party, Jeff met a doctor whose husband is FBI agent, and mentioned he applied to be FBI agent, but didn’t have good enough eyesight. The doctor told him there was no such requirement on eyesight. The agent who received his application just didn’t want to do the paperwork. Jeff’s life path was dramatically changed. He quickly realized that most part of life is unpredictable and uncontrollable.
DEFCON, full of geniuses
In 1993, his Bulletin Board was closed. One of the big bulletin board named ‘Platinum’ as part of the bulletin board hub managed by Jeff was called, which was run by a kid from Canada. The kid had to shut down “Platinum’ because his father decided to move out of the country because of a new job opportunity. Many of the Platinum users reside in the United States. Some of them suggested throwing a going away party for the Platinum net.Las Vegas was picked as the location of the farewell party. While Jeff was preparing for the party, the Canadian kid was missing. Jeff decided to invite everybody from different bulletin boards. Since the Platinum Bulletin board no longer existed, they went to promote it in different IRC channels including COMP SCI, computer security, information security, firewalls, and privacy, etc. They posted announcements in small libraries, bookstores, and newspaper, took advertisements out in the little underground magazines like <2600>, in order to get the words out. They invited newly-founded IRC groups on Usenet, faxed legal system and secret services, to inform them he was preparing this Hacker Conference, DEF CON.
