1. John Gregory Markoff was born on October 24,1949 and is a journalist best known for his work covering technology at The New York Times for 28 years until his retirement in 2016, and a book and series of articles about the 1990s pursuit and capture of hacker Kevin Mitnick.
John Markoff freelanced for a number of publications including The Nation, Mother Jones and Saturday Review.
John Markoff co-wrote, with Tsutomu Shimomura, the book Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of America's Most Wanted Computer Outlaw about the chase.
John Markoff's writing about Mitnick was the subject of criticism by Mitnick supporters and unaffiliated parties who maintained that John Markoff's accounts exaggerated or even invented Mitnick's activities and successes.
John Markoff was accused by Jonathan Littman of journalistic impropriety and of over-hyping Mitnick's actual crimes.
John Markoff covered Jim Gillogly's 1999 break of the first three sections of the CIA's Kryptos cipher [1], and writes regularly about semiconductors and supercomputers as well.
John Markoff wrote the first two articles describing Admiral John Poindexter's return to government and the creation of the Total Information Awareness project.
John Markoff shared the 2005 Gerald Loeb Award in the Deadline Writing category for the story "End of an Era".
John Markoff contributed to the New York Times staff entry that received the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting.
John Markoff retired from his full-time position with The New York Times on December 1,2016.
John Markoff continues to work as a freelance journalist for the Times and other organizations and volunteers at the Computer History Museum.
John Markoff is an affiliated fellow of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.