computer science

Ryan Lackey

Ryan Lackey is a computer science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Ryan Lackey rather than just read about it. In short: Ryan Donald Lackey (born March 17, 1979) is an entrepreneur and computer security professional. He was a co-founder of HavenCo, the world's first data haven, and operated BlueIraq, a communications company.

Key takeaways

Ryan Lackey belongs to computer science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Ryan Lackey to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Ryan Lackey from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Ryan Donald Lackey (born March 17, 1979) is an entrepreneur and computer security professional. He was a co-founder of HavenCo, the world's first data haven, and operated BlueIraq, a communications company. He speaks at numerous conferences and trade shows, including DEF CON and the RSA Data Security Conference, on various topics in the computer security field, and has appeared in a Wired magazine cover story and in numerous television, radio, and print articles, concerning HavenCo and Sealand.

Early life Lackey was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania and has lived throughout the US and Europe, and in Anguilla, Sealand, Dubai, and Iraq. As a teenager, he was briefly involved with the Globewide Network Academy. Lackey attended MIT and majored in Course 18 (mathematics), eventually dropping out due to financial constraints. While there, Lackey became interested in electronic cash and distributed systems, originally for massively multiplayer online gaming. This interest led to attending several conferences (Financial Cryptography 98, various MIT presentations), participating on mailing lists such as "cypherpunks" and "dbs", and, with Ian Goldberg, eventually implementing patented Chaumian digital cash in an underground library, HINDE, which was named after Hinde ten Berge, a Dutch cypherpunk also present at FC98. He contributed to the cypherpunks movement as one of the longest anonymous remailer operators.

Career In 1999 Lackey lived in the San Francisco Bay Area before moving to the self-proclaimed state of Sealand and establishing HavenCo. In December 2002, he left HavenCo, following a dispute with other company directors and the Sealand "Royal Family". During the US conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, Lackey operated BlueIraq, a VSAT communications and IT company serving the DoD and domestic markets in those countries. BlueIraq's business model eventually became economically unfeasible due to an escalation in anti-Western violence (primarily in the form of improvised explosive devices) and troop drawdowns. BlueIraq sought venture capital to transform itself into a large general consumer cellular telephone company, but the 2008 financial crisis and the instability of Iraq and Afghanistan made fundraising impossible. Lackey returned to the US and located in San Francisco, where he worked for a number of start-up companies before applying to Y Combinator. He was accepted into Y Combinator's Summer 2011 round. Lackey founded CryptoSeal, a VPN as a service start-up with a small group of people well known in the computer security community, and secured funding from Ron Conway and a well known venture capital fund. In June 2014, CryptoSeal was acquired by Cloudflare. In 2017, he began working as Chief Security Officer for the Tezos Foundation in support of the Tezos blockchain. According to his LinkedIn profile, Lackey left that position in November of 2020, and as of 2021 is employed at a crypto-related insurance company in Puerto Rico.

See also ecash Satellite Internet access Information security Iraq War

Footnotes

External links HavenCo Ryan Lackey's personal site Answers From Sealand: CTO Ryan Lackey Responds July 3, 2000 Welcome to Sealand. Now Bugger Off July 2000 Avi Freedman and Ryan Lackey gave a talk about HavenCo at H2K2 July 13, 2002 DefCon 11 Talk about HavenCo August 3, 2003 Has 'haven' for questionable sites sunk? August 4, 2003. Wiring the War Zone: Blue Iraq September 2005 Blood, Bullets, Bombs, and Bandwidth 2005

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Ryan Lackey

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Ryan Lackey claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In computer science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Ryan Lackey before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Ryan Lackey ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Ryan Lackey

In research: Ryan Lackey appears in computer science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Ryan Lackey in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Ryan Lackey is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1979 births, American businesspeople in the computer industry, Cloudflare people, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Ryan Lackey outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

Affiliate

Preply — study more efficiently by working with a personal tutor. 50% off.

How to study Ryan Lackey in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Ryan Lackey means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Ryan Lackey out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Ryan Lackey in simple terms?

Why does Ryan Lackey matter?

Because it connects several computer science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Ryan Lackey?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Ryan Lackey.