Name: Carolyn Meinel
Title: President
Company: M/B Research
How I arrived at my present job (academic and other influences): I've been an entrepreneur most of my life. I worked my way through college with a company I helped start, Analog Precision. We began by designing and building special purpose analog computers. By 1975 we were almost purely digital. I finished school in 1983 with an MS in Industrial engineering, which is integration of complex human/machine systems. My master's research was on heuristic solutions to the traveling salesman problem, which is a member of the class NP-Complete. This gave me a foundation in the mathematics of computation, which is useful for understanding cryptography and operating systems. Actually, I started as a creative writing major. Engineering made it easy for me to sell articles and books about technology. My book "The Happy Hacker: a Guide to Mostly Harmless Computer Hacking" is a laugh-filled romp through the world of old-fashioned hacking. By old-fashioned I mean hacking as wanting to explore those amazing and funny things about computers that you won't usually find in the manuals. OK, I admit the book does explain in detail some ways to break into and defend computers, but that is only a small part of the world of hacking.
How I organize my day:
Amount of time spent working daily (at home and office): I have a white board in my office to remind me of tasks. Usually I prefer to work on one thing at a time until done -- queueing theory says that approach minimizes lateness. Oh, and did you know the word "queueing" has the longest string of vowels of any word in the English language?
What I do to get myself thinking creatively: I pray, do improvisational dance while thinking of the problems at hand, randomly fool around with hardware and software, and read science fiction. It's amazing where ideas come from.
My problem-solving strategy: At dawn, take a walk. Feed horse. Work. Eat breakfast. Work. Go outside and take a walk. Work. Read a manual. Eat lunch. Work. Spend some time outside training horses. Work. If the solution still hasn't come up, cook dinner, take an after dinner walk with my husband, then go back to work again (I almost always work for two hours in the evening). Go to sleep. Wake up at 2 AM with the solution suddenly obvious. When I used to work on classified projects such as writing computer simulations to test options for the design of surveillance satellites, I was wake at 2 AM and know my program was sitting on a hard disk in a safe and I'd have to wait until the classified computer was up and running later in the morning to find out whether I had solved a bug in the program.
What I do to relieve stress: Pray, dance, sing, take walks with my husband, train and ride horses .. and then there is the hot air balloon team we are on and our sail boat.
My hero, mentor, or person I most admire and why: Dr. Harry Fair. I first met him in 1985 when he was the assistant director of the DARPA Tactical Technology Office. I had first heard about him in 1983 when he was on the Defensive Technologies Study Team, a task force that was rethinking how to defend the US from nuclear missile attack. What fascinated me about Dr. Fair was his ability to inspire creative thinking among those who work for him. For example, he managed to revive progress in electromagnetic guns by running a research program he unashamedly called "Nutty Ideas." The basic concept behind Dr. Fair's research management style is to never insult or casually dismiss any idea, no matter how many errors it's original conception might have or how nutty it may sound. Researchers work best when we are free to make mistakes and hit dead ends without fear of consequences. I had the fortune to work under Fair's guidance as DARPA contractor. The opportunity to study his management style was even more valuable than the opportunity to work on the leading edge of hypervelocity impact technology. I carried Dr. Fair's philosophy over to my Happy Hacker organization. We don't "flame" anyone for dumb questions or wrong answers. I do, however, flame our opponents for being arrogant and insulting to people who study and research computer security.
What I do to mentor those who work for me: We run a Hacker Wargame ( http://happyhacker.org/hwargame.html). This operates on a T1 currently in Amarillo, TX. Players the opportunity to put computers they have configured on this LAN and try out security techniques. We don't insult or put down people if/when others take them over. We encourage the defenders to create novel security flaws in order to give other players the chance to discover and exploit them. That gives defenders a psychological safety net. If their computer gets taken over, the other players don't know for sure whether the defender allowed that insecurity on purpose or by accident.
How a negative event changed my life in a positive way: Chronic pain makes me wake often at night. This gives me the chance to wake up with great ideas more often, so I'm often at a keyboard in the small hours. Also, laughter kills pain. So my discoveries of humorous things to do to computers not only helps me feel more comfortable, it helps me write magazine articles and books that give people belly laughs.
One event or decision in my life I wish I could go back and change: I wish I was better at marriage -- I'm on my third now. We get along great, but construction of a good marriage wasn't something I learned when young.
What values are the most important to me and what I value in others: I'm an evangelical Christian. Jesus is my ultimate mentor, with His compassion, ability to inspire people, gentle sense of humor, and the courage to stand up to hypocrites, greedy rich people and political powers, no matter how angry they got at Him. So when certain self-described hackers harass me, I don't ask the question, "What will make life more pleasant for me?" I ask the question, "Is what I'm doing making the world a better place?"
What inspires, motivates, or gets me excited about my job on a daily basis: I love reading email. Almost every day I get messages from people who tell me our Happy Hacker group helped them change their lives. We do more than teach people about computers and networks. We're reaching out to people who are tempted by the dark side of the hacker scene. When someone writes to thank me because he's quit a hacker gang, enrolled in a computer science curriculum and is holding down a job as a sysadmin - that makes my day!
Biography: 1988 -- present Consultant, writer. Recent activities include:
Worked on the DARPA Intrusion Detection Evaluation program under Dr. Richard P. Lippmann, MIT Lincoln Lab, researching Windows NT exploits. Ran denial of service vulnerability tests for Interpact, Inc.
Wrote "How Hackers Break in and How they Are Caught," Scientific American, Oct. 1998, pp. 98 -- 105; and the humorous, yet instructional book, The Happy Hacker: A Guide to Mostly Harmless Computer Hacking, currently in second edition, 400 pages, American Eagle Publications, 1998.
Assisted Computing Devices International (now part of General Dynamics Information Systems and Technology) in winning contract for payload computer for the Teledesic communications satellite constellation. Required evaluation of technology requirements and matching hardware to requirements so as to minimize cost, and evaluating likely strategies of competitors.
Assisted American Paging, Inc. (nation's 7th largest paging company) in research and evaluation of narrowband Personal Communications Services (digital cellular data) and spread spectrum technology opportunities.
Founder, moderator, "Happy Hacker" email list. Teaches computer security and hacking techniques from humorous perspective; some 22,000 subscribers. Operate a "Hacker Wargame" testbed for secure operating systems and application, intrusion detection techniques, and profiling of hacker attacks.
Assisted Utah State University's Space Dynamics Lab Computational Sciences Division in developing new business.
4/87-8/88 President, Cardinal Communications Corp. SETA work. Performed analyses for Dr. Peter Kemmey of the Tactical Technology Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency on electromagnetic guns, including computer analyses of gun-launch trajectories. Co-authored two volume book, Electromagnetic Launch Systems, and two conference keynote talks with Dr. Harry Fair.
9/83-3/87 Senior Scientist, Analytic Decisions, Inc. SETA work on electromagnetic guns and hypervelocity impact under Dr. Harry Fair for DARPA Tactical Technology Office. Wrote papers for 1985, 1986 Strategic Systems Symposia held at Naval Post Graduate School, Monterey, CA. Led work on a DARPA Strategic Technology Office contract on hypervelocity kinetic weapons. Orbital analyses for coverages of sensors, including writing software with thousands of lines of code. Wrote software module for a Navy war game.
1/80-8/83 Consultant, writer (part time while in graduate school). Special correspondent, World Aerospace Weekly; regular contributor, MIT Technology Review magazine.
8/75-12/79 Founder, President, L-5 Society, educational organization supporting space development. Built membership of 3500 and assisted formation of local chapters around the world. The L-5 Society merged with the National Space Institute in 1986 to become the National Space Society.
5/72-8/76 General Manager, Analog Precision, Inc. Designed and managed production of analog and digital devices.
CLEARANCES: Inactive Secret, Top Secret.
EDUCATION: M.S., Industrial Engineering, The University of Arizona, 1983. Research in the mathematics of computation (traveling salesman heuristics). This topic is directly relevant to cryptography. B.A., General Studies, The University of Arizona, 1981. Three part major: math, systems engineering and creative writing.
PROFESSIONAL: Examples: speaker at "Science and Journalism" symposium, Harvard University, 1986; seminar on hypervelocity kinetic weapons, Naval Postgraduate School, 1985; conducted seminars on asteroid resources, Renssalear Polytechnic 1985; The University of Arizona, 1989. Member Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Back Country Horsemen of Amreica, Balloon Federation of America.
PUBLICATIONS: Over 200 technical papers and popular articles; six technical books. Sample publciations:
Carolyn Meinel, "How Hackers Break in -- and How they Are Caught," Scientific American, Oct. 1998, pp. 98 -- 105.
Carolyn Meinel, "The Hacker Wargame Experiment," Information Security Bulletin, Vol. 3 Issue 4, June 1998, pp. 35-40.
Carolyn Meinel, The Happy Hacker: A Guide to Mostly Harmless Computer Hacking, American Eagle Publications, Inc., first edition March 1998, second edition Nov. 1998. A humorous, how-to primer on computer security.
Meinel, C.P., Gutheinz, L.M., Toepfer, A.J., Vandenberg, R. and Weitz, R. "Remote Resource Mapping of Solar System Bodies," Engineering, Construction and Operations in Space, Proceedings of the Space 90 Conference, ASCE, Johnson, S.W. and Wetzel, J.P., eds., April 22-26, 1990.
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Location: www.acm.org/crossroads/dayinlife/bios/carolyn_meinel.html