This is probably the conversation I had in mind when I decided to start this podcast. Samy Kamkar is an old buddy of mine, a genius hacker. When you guys hear me praising the minds of hackers and how brilliant they can be and how they think, Samy is the example in my mind that I’m thinking of, and I always love to share him.
Samy’s famous for having written a computer virus that he was using to meet girls on the internet, which is probably ill-advised. The virus he wrote took over MySpace. It was incredibly genius! What would happen is: if you looked at Samy’s page on MySpace, it would just automatically add you as his friend.
MySpace is long gone, but you could imagine what that would be like on Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat nowadays. So, within 24 hour period, Samy had over a million friends on his MySpace profile, because the code not only would add you as his friend, it would copy itself to your page so that whenever anybody looked at your page, it would automatically add them as Samy’s friend too, and then do one other benign thing, which would change your profile page to list Samy as your HERO!
Samy is my hero. I love him so much. He’s done a lot of amazing, beautiful work and computer hacking. He has a YouTube channel that we’ll talk about on here, but you should definitely go watch his videos.
I’m not going to interview Samy. that has been done and you should listen to the Tim Ferriss interview of Samy. I think of this conversation is something you could listen to with or without having heard that, but if you want to know more about Samy and his background and all the stories, then you can go listen to Tim Ferris interviewing him. This however is a conversation between friends, it is very soulful.
There’s a lot in here that I’m looking forward to sharing with you guys.
Also, Samy is a co-founder of a couple of company that have been very successful and he sold his most recent company called Open Path to Motorola. This is not an ad, I’m just telling you because I’m impressed with what Samy built: Open Path is a physical door access control system that’s way better than those cards you used to have to use to get into your office. Now you can just do it with your phone and walk right in. Samy has helped build that product and the company is doing very well.
And I think you should all become, customers.
Oh, and I almost forgot to tell you Samy, at one point decided he wanted to become a DJ and learn how to make music. And he’s the one who created the track that we use for the podcast intro that you’re going to hear next.
Please listen to this conversation with me and Samy. I’m sure you’re going to get a lot out of it.
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About Samy Kamkar
Samy Kamkar is an American privacy and security researcher, computer hacker and entrepreneur. At the age of 16, he dropped out of high school.[One year later, he co-founded Fonality, a unified communications company based on open-source software, which raised over $46 million in private funding.
In 2005, he created and released the fastest spreading virus of all time, the MySpace worm Samy, and was subsequently raided by the United States Secret Service under the Patriot Act. He also created SkyJack, a custom drone which hacks into any nearby Parrot drones allowing them to be controlled by its operator and created the Evercookie, which appeared in a top-secret NSA document revealed by Edward Snowden and on the front page of The New York Times. He has also worked with The Wall Street Journal, and discovered the illicit mobile phone tracking where the Apple iPhone, Google Android and Microsoft Windows Phone mobile devices transmit GPS and Wi-Fi information to their parent companies. His mobile research led to a series of class-action lawsuits against the companies and a privacy hearing on Capitol Hill.
Recorded on September 17, 2021The post Samy is My Hero — Samy Kamkar appeared first on .