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Keith Winstein

U.S. computer scientist and journalist From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Keith Jonathan Winstein (born 1981[citation needed]) is a U.S. computer scientist and journalist. He is currently a professor at Stanford University.[1]

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Previously, he was the Claude E. Shannon Research Assistant[2] at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory's Networks and Mobile Systems group[3] at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pursuing a Ph.D. under Hari Balakrishnan. Winstein is best known as the author of Mosh, the mobile shell, a UDP-based ssh replacement optimized for mobile users featuring predictive local echo, automatic roaming, and high network resiliency.

He is the son of the late experimental physicist Bruce Winstein.

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Computer science

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Winstein was involved in several computer science projects.

  • Tyrannosaurus Lex is a system Winstein designed to hide messages in documents by altering specific words, published in 1999 while Winstein was in high school at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy.[4] The system was the original work in the field of "linguistic steganography."[5] However, analysis of Winstein's scheme by other researchers found that Tyrannosaurus Lex contains several vulnerabilities, allowing an eavesdropper to potentially decode hidden messages embedded using the system.[6][7][8]
  • Mosh, the mobile shell, first released in March 2012, is a computing tool used to connect from a client computer to a server over the Internet, to run a remote terminal.[9] Mosh is similar[10] to SSH, with additional features meant to improve usability for mobile users.
  • qrpff is one of the shortest programs that implements the DeCSS algorithm, co-authored by Winstein and Marc Horowitz, while at MIT.[11]
  • LAMP was a project at MIT that allowed users to play CDs from a music library over the cable TV system.[12]
  • Winstein, along with Joshua Mandel, built a device for Richard Stallman that allowed him to get past the MIT proximity-card-locked doors, while allowing him to remain anonymous. The device would identify itself as Winstein, Gerald Jay Sussman, or Hal Abelson, in order to open the door.[13]
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Journalism

Winstein was a news reporter for The Wall Street Journal's Boston bureau from 2005[14] to its closure in 2009,[15] focusing on the biomedical beat.[4] Prior to his stint at the Journal, he was a reporter and news editor for MIT's student newspaper, The Tech, and interned at The New York Sun.

As a reporter, Winstein wrote several articles critical of medical studies.[16][17][18]

Winstein also disclosed errors in Google Flu Trends.[19][20]

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References

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