Sam Hocevar
Samuel “Sam” Hocevar (born August 5, 1978 in Forbach, Moselle) is a French computer scientist, programmer, image processing expert and reverse engineer. Hocevar was the Debian Project Leader from 17 April 2007 to 16 April 2008.
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[edit] Biography
From 1995 to 1997 Hocevar took preparatory classes at the Lycée Fabert in Metz, Moselle, France.[1] He graduated in 2002 from École Centrale Paris, after receiving the "Award of Information Technology and Communication" from the SNCF as the most promising student in his class.[2] He specialized in electromechanical systems and applied mechatronics, and project management.
From 2005 to 2006 he was a Wikimedia France board member.[3]
Hocevar was elected Debian Project Leader on 17 April 2007.[4][5][6][7] Hocevar's Debian leadership platform[8] stated a preference for finishing larger numbers of small projects in succession, echoing Japanese management philosophy Kaizen's idea that constant, incremental improvements to a project would generate more gains per unit of time than large single leaps of performance.
[edit] Achievements
Hocevar is best known for his contributions to the Debian and VideoLAN projects.[9] He has made large contributions to almost all software of the VideoLAN project, especially to VLC media player and libdvdcss, since 1998 and he is the author of various software programs, such as zzuf, a data fuzzer, and libcaca, a color ASCII art renderer. He is also the current maintainer of the Extension Language Kit Scheme interpreter, which has found use in many multimedia applications including audio processing.[10]
Besides this, he is known for his extensive work in reverse engineering and image processing. He reverse engineered DVD subtitles in 2000[11] and in 2005 it was found that the DRM software which triggered the Sony BMG CD copy protection scandal had unlawfully pirated open source code from the VideoLAN project which Sam Hocevar was involved in authoring.[12][13]
Sam Hocevar's experience in image processing includes authoring a Captcha decoding framework called PWNtcha.[14][15][16] PWNtcha was the first captcha decoder framework to defeat multiple captchas and was referred to as the "most famous" captcha breaker by a 2009 Stanford University publication.[17]
He authored WTFPL version 2, an extremely liberal, permissive free software license that is recognized by the Free Software Foundation.[18] Hocevar has also been cited for his "whimsical" copyleft activism.[19] Hocevar is also part of Goatse Security,[20] an information security working group most known for revealing security flaws in the Apple iPad.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ "Samuel HOCEVAR - CV." (DVI, PDF, PS). Sam Hocevar Official Website. Retrieved on September 18, 2010.
- ^ "École Centrale Paris". http://www.ecp.fr/fr/G_voir/G2_actualites/G2a_actualites.htm?rubrique_id=rubrique_13&actualite_id=actualite_41. Retrieved 2007-04-19.
- ^ "2005-2006 WikiMedia France Conseil d'administration" (in French). http://ca.wikimedia.fr/index.php?title=Conseil_d%27administration&oldid=2325. Retrieved 2007-04-09.
- ^ "debian-devel-announce mailing list: Debian Project Leader Election 2007 Results". http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2007/04/msg00004.html. Retrieved 2007-04-09.
- ^ Robert W. Smith (2007-04-11). "Debian picks new project head". Heise Online. http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/88080. Retrieved 2007-04-18.
- ^ Sam Varghese (2007-04-09). "Debian gets new leader as Etch emerges". iTWire. http://www.itwire.com/content/view/11154/1090/. Retrieved 2007-04-18.
- ^ Sean Michael Kerner (2007-04-09). "Debian Etch Takes Over Command From Sarge". InternetNews. http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3670521. Retrieved 2007-04-24.
- ^ Sam Hocevar. "Debian.org: Platform for Sam Hocevar". Debian project. http://www.debian.org/vote/2007/platforms/sho. Retrieved 2010-03-20.
- ^ "VideoLAN Team". http://wiki.videolan.org/VideoLAN_Team. Retrieved 2010-02-18.
- ^ Rumori, Martin (2005), "sam+hocevar"+elk&hl=en&as_sdt=1000 footils – Using the foo Sound Synthesis System as an Audio Scripting Language, Cologne, Germany: Klanglabor, Academy Of Media Arts, http://google.com/scholar?q=cache:hWsB05-xeZUJ:scholar.google.com/+"sam+hocevar"+elk&hl=en&as_sdt=1000, retrieved 2010-03-20
- ^ "DVD subtitles". http://sam.zoy.org/writings/dvd/subtitles/. Retrieved 2007-04-09.
- ^ "Suspicious Activity? Indeed". http://sam.zoy.org/blog/2005-11-21-suspicious-activity-indeed. Retrieved 2010-03-20.
- ^ Hussain, Muhammed Afzal (2005), "CD-DRM & Sony BMG: A Case Study", Penn State University Citeseer (Penn State University): 13, http://google.com/scholar?q=cache:TrIPnnXI-mkJ:scholar.google.com/&hl=en&as_sdt=1000, retrieved 2010-03-20
- ^ Hocevar, Sam; Niger, Gary (2008), written at Cherbourg-Octeville, France, "Reinstating Floyd-Steinberg: Improved Metrics for Quality Assessment of Error Diffusion Algorithms", Lecture Notes In Computer Science; Vol. 5099: Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Image and Signal Processing (Berlin, Heidelberg, Germany: Springer-Verlag), ISBN 978-3-540-69904-0, http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1426606.1426612, retrieved 2010-03-20
- ^ "PWNtcha website". http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/PWNtcha. Retrieved 2007-04-09.
- ^ "Defeating Captcha". Slashdot. 2005-08-24. http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/24/1629213. Retrieved 2007-04-09.
- ^ Bursztein, Elie; Bethard, Steven; Fabry, Celine; Mitchell, John C.; Jurafsky, Dan (2009), written at Oakland, California, USA, "How Good are Humans at Solving CAPTCHAs? A Large Scale Evaluation", Program of IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Stanford, California: Stanford University), http://google.com/scholar?q=cache:ytIm-8mlyOcJ:scholar.google.com/&hl=en&as_sdt=1000, retrieved 2010-03-20
- ^ "Licenses - Free Software Foundation". Free Software Foundation. http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses.
- ^ Eaton-Salners, Alex (2004), "DVD Copy Control Association v. Bunner: Freedom of Speech and Trade Secrets", Berkeley Technology Law Journal (Berkeley, California: UC Berkeley Law), https://litigation-essentials.lexisnexis.com/webcd/app?action=DocumentDisplay&crawlid=1&doctype=cite&docid=19+Berkeley+Tech.+L.J.+269&srctype=smi&srcid=3B15&key=3e70ccb3daa82efe8c0560eaa8253fd7, retrieved 2010-03-20
- ^ Keizer, Gregg (2010), "iPad hacker arrested on multiple drug charges after FBI search", Network World (IDG), http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/061710-ipad-hacker-arrested-on-multiple.html, retrieved 2010-08-02, "Another Goatse member, French hacker Sam Hocevar, said he couldn't answer questions about Auernheimer's arrest."
[edit] External links
| Preceded by Anthony Towns |
Debian Project Leader April 2007 - April 2008 |
Succeeded by Steve McIntyre |
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