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Valleywag
Back in 1999, Cristophe Bisciglia was a teenage programming prodigy in the sleepy seaside town of Gig Harbor on Washington State's Olympic Peninsula. He was already doing web development work for clients, like Visnet, a tiny ISP in Port Orchard. But a dispute with the owner left a chip on his shoulder. So Bisciglia hacked into the ISP's servers and borked them by sending out thousands of emails, including emails to Visnet's customers pointing out the company's security flaws, according to the Kitsap Sun. While his record was probably cleared once he turned 18, he was convicted of a misdemeanor at the time.
Bisciglia is now a 27-year old dot-bomb veteran and a senior software engineer at Google. There, among other duties, he helps teach University of Washington students the secrets of cloud computing. You'd think, of all people, he'd be more wary of putting that much power into the hands of potentially disgruntled young punks — unless he's shrewdly training loyal soldiers in case his options sink underwater. (Photo by Joi Ito)
Comments
Yes, but does he bathe?
I think it would be better to know what the dispute with the company's owner was before we cast judgement, wouldn't you agree! But I do think it is rather strange that Google being the all knowing company machine that it is didn't find out about that prior to giving this guy the vitual key to the city...
this kid's an outside the box thinker. he's disruptive, and that's what you want in an entrepreneur.
I've worked for my share of shady ISPs and can imagine dozens of scenarios where Christophe could have felt like he had no other moral option. I'm not justifying his actions but merely suggesting that he was acting on a possibly-misplaced 'do no evil' impetus.
harry potter's cousin needs a haircut
Boris Grishenko, anyone?
@Adam: Dead ringer. Good call, one of my favorite Bond villains/nerds of all time. Freakin' hilarious.
(Boris Grishenko reference) I'M INVINCIBLE!!!
Google neews more Christophes and less douchebag MBAs
needs, rather.
Pple should really stop all this negative press - christophe was one of the new students at UW when i was graduating. He's really a great guy, they should be running a story on how smart he is. He was well known for being able to do prime number sieve calculations in his head. The guy is completely off the charts.
Careful Valleywag, now you're on his shit list.
testing123
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