Chris Dixon tells the story of his friend and business partner Tom Pinckney, who got into MIT without ever having received a high school diploma.

Tom grew up in rural South Carolina and mostly stayed at home writing video games on his Apple II.  There was no place nearby to go to high school. He took a few community college classes but none of those places could give him a high school degree. It didn’t really matter – all he wanted to do was program computers.  So when it came time to apply to college, Tom just printed out a pile of code he wrote and sent it to colleges.

It’s a heartwarming story, but it also underscores the de-emphasis of human judgment in the college admissions process.  For all to many, college admissions is a calculus of pre-determined measures of academic worth: SAT scores, cumulative GPA, extracurricular activities.

Tom Pinckney’s story gets even better.  After doing his undergraduate work at MIT (who gave him a chance without a college degree), he was recruited by the four best CS (Computer Science) schools in the country: Stanford, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon and MIT.  He stayed at MIT, the school that gave him his chance originally.

And finally, this closing quip by Dixon:

MIT is a national treasure.  If you believe in meritocracy and the American dream, you believe in MIT.

Related post: On Parenting, College Admissions and Continuous Learning

###

More links:

MIPRO Consulting main website.

MIPRO on Twitter and Facebook.

About this blog.

It’s Friday, so allow me to be a bit aloof as I meander around conceptually for a few minutes.

We hear constant talk of security in the IT space, from desktops to networks to servers to enterprise applications to how the top-grade SaaS/on-demand companies can possibly harden client datastores to keep the important bits contained and private.  Some of the most provocative writing out there is on this very topic (to us, at least).

But step back for a second – actually, step way back – and ask yourself, “Who protects the Internet from attacks?  Who protects the Internet as a whole here in the US from outside attacks?”  In other words, aside from advancing protocols and standards and architecture, who really owns this whole security thing for the United States?

In an interview with TechCrunch, US STRATCOM commander and head of all military cyber-warfare General Kevin Chilton gives a great overview of security operations as they relate to the Internet (including the military’s inherent obligation to defend the .mil networks) and the overall magnitude of the security problem.  However, when asked, “Who protects us on the internet?”, Chilton recalls a reply he got via email from cyberlaw expert Jonathan Zittrain:

“Basically no one. At most, a number of loose confederations of computer scientists and engineers who seek to devise better protocols and practices — unincorporated groups like the Internet Engineering Task Force and the North American Network Operators Group. But the fact remains that no one really owns security online, which leads to gated communities with firewalls — a highly unreliable and wasteful way to try to assure security.”

It’s almost as if we’re counting on the complexity, evolving topography of the Internet and efforts of a few non-federated compsci groups to serve as the primary obstacle to grand-scale cyberattack on the Internet at large.

Something to ponder loosely in the larger security question.

Have a great weekend, everyone.