John Markoff

John Markoff (born October 29, 1949) is a journalist best known for his work at The New York Times, and a book and series of articles about the 1990s pursuit and capture of hacker Kevin Mitnick.

Biography

Markoff was born in Oakland, California and grew up in Palo Alto, California. He graduated from Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington, with a BA in Sociology in 1971. Additionally he received a MA in sociology from the University of Oregon in 1976.

After leaving graduate school, he returned to California where he began writing for Pacific News Service, an alternative news syndicate based in San Francisco. He freelanced for a number of publications including The Nation, Mother Jones and Saturday Review. In 1981 he became part of the original staff of the computer industry weekly InfoWorld. In 1984 he became an editor at Byte Magazine and in 1985 he left to become a reporter in the business section of the San Francisco Examiner, where he wrote about Silicon Valley.

In 1988 he moved to New York to write for the business section of the New York Times. In November 1988 he reported that Robert Tappan Morris, son of National Security Agency cryptographer Robert Morris, was the author of what would become known as the Internet worm.

John Markoff (sociologist)

John Markoff (born 1942) is Professor of Sociology and History at the University of Pittsburgh.

Life, Education and Career

Markoff received a BA from Columbia College in 1962 and a PhD from Johns Hopkins in 1972. Prior to taking a position at University of Pittsburgh in 1972, Markoff taught at the City College of New York. He has also done research at the Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Sevilla, Spain.

He has published extensively in sociological, historical and political science journals. He states that his research "concerns the history of democratization, considered as a multi-continental process across several centuries".

Representative Publications