Tom Cross (computer security)

Early Life

Tom Cross was born in 1976 in Toronto, Ontario, 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, and later enrolled at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, where he earned a bachelor's degree in computer engineering.

Career

Cross entered the computer security field early, co-founding the Electronic Frontiers Georgia (EFGA) in 1995. The following year, in 1996, he co-founded Computer Sentry Software, a company recognized for its award-winning laptop anti-theft program, CyberAngel.

From 1999 to 2000, Cross served as Chief Engineer at Dataway, a computer security firm based in San Francisco. He subsequently joined iAsiaWorks, where from 2000 to 2001 he held the position of Director of Global Security Engineering.

In 2001, Cross founded Industrial Memetics, which developed MemeStreams, a collaborative blogging community that gained a notable following in early internet culture.

Notable Work

Cross has spoken at a range of technology and security 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 recognized for extensive essays and speeches addressing technology and policy issues, and has appeared as a co-host on episodes of the podcast Binary Revolution in the capacity of a cryptography expert.

Writing

Cross has contributed to several publications and forums on topics related to internet governance, open collaboration, and hacker culture. His written work includes an open letter to PFIR on Whois privacy published on the Politech listserv in June 2004, and a follow-up piece titled "DNS WHOIS: Barking up the wrong tree" published on CircleID in June 2004. In March 2006, internet pioneer Vint Cerf answered three of Cross's questions in a CircleID interview titled "The Road Ahead for Top-Level Domains."

Cross also published "Academic freedom and the hacker ethic" in the Communications of the ACM in June 2006, and "Puppy smoothies: Improving the reliability of open, collaborative wikis" in the journal First Monday in September 2006.