Noncryptographic Security Issues - Codes: The Guide to Secrecy from Ancient to Modern Times - page 385

hacker at MIT's Artificial Intelligence 10.10 Lab (AI Lab). After graduating
from Harvard in 1974 with a B.A. in physics, he wrote the first extensible
Emacs text editor 10.11 in 1975, largely done at that AI Lab. By 1984, he had
the GNU project ready to launch, so he resigned from MIT to pursue that
project. Although many others left the MIT lab in the early 1980s, Stallman
was seemingly the only one with the philosophy that software should be free.

In fact, several of those
former MIT hackers estab-
lished the enterprise called
Symbolics, which was a
company interested in pro-
prietary software. They
even attempted to poach
the remaining MIT hack-
ers to work for their com-
pany in this endeavor.
Stallman actually felt a
certain betrayal when he
was asked to sign nondis-
closure agreements. In
1985, he published the
GNU Manifesto , which he
had first written in 1983.
This document outlined
his motivation for creat-
ing GNU, which he wanted
to be Unix-compatible. In
fact, by 1991, the final
bugs were worked out via
Linux, so that now the OS
is called GNU/Linux . 10.12
Although Stallman did
not complete his Ph.D., he

Figure 10.2: Richard Stallman.

10.10 Artificial Intelligence is intelligence manifested by anything constructed by sentient beings
(namely, “self-aware” beings). AI is also commonly called “machine intelligence”. Of course,
the definition of intelligence itself comes into play here. Since human beings are the only
sentient beings we know (so far), then we may accept, as an informal definition here, that AI
is any system that can think, and act rationally as do humans (at least most of us).
10.11 This is a text editor whose source code is freely copyable and redistributable. Moreover,
it will run on most machines with differing operating systems (OS)s. Being extensible means
that its usage is customizable and programmable to accomplish varying tasks limited only by
the users' imagination. “Emacs” actually represents a collection of text editors that evolved
from one another in some fashion. Stallman was also the author of GNU Emacs. In the early
distribution days of GNU Emacs, a hole was found in the security through which malicious
hackers could enter. An interesting real-life tale about one such event is woven in the intriguing
topic, The Cuckoo's Egg (see [273]).
10.12 Linux is a free Unix-type OS originally created by Linus Torvalds with global assistance
from a number of developers.