Jason Scott

Jason Scott Sadofsky[6] graduated from Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua, New York, and served on the staff of the school newspaper under the title "Humor Staff". While in high school he produced the humor magazine Esnesnon ("nonsense" backwards).[7] He later graduated from Emerson College in 1992 with a film degree.[8] While at Emerson, he worked for the school humor magazine, school newspaper, WERS 88.9 FM radio, and served as art director on several dramatic plays.

After graduating from Emerson, Scott lived in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was employed as a temp worker while also drawing caricatures for pay on the streets of Cambridge.[9]

In 1990, Scott co-created TinyTIM, a popular MUSH that he ran for ten years.[10] In 1995, Jason joined the video game company Psygnosis as a technical support worker, before being hired by a video game startup, Focus Studios, as an art director. After Focus Studios' closure, Jason moved into UNIX administration,[11] where he remained until 2009.

He has been a speaker at DEF CON, an annual hacker conference, the first time at the 7th conference in 1999, and has spoken there almost every year since then. Scott also spoke at PhreakNIC 6 and 9, Rubi Cons 4 and 5, the 5th H.O.P.E. conference in 2004, Notacons 1, 2 (as a backup), 3 and 4, Toorcon 7, and beta premiered his documentary at the 7th annual Vintage Computer Festival. Most of his talks focus on the capturing of digital history or consist of narratives of stories relevant to his experiences online.[12]

In 2006, Scott announced that he was starting a documentary on video arcades, titled ARCADE.[13] Although he did not complete the project, all of the footage he shot for ARCADE has been made available on the Internet Archive.[14][15]

In 2007, he co-founded Blockparty, a North American demoparty.[16] For their inaugural year, they paired up with Notacon which takes place annually in Cleveland, Ohio. This collaborative effort allowed the fledgling party to utilize the existing support structure of an established conference.

In January 2009, he formed "Archive Team,"[17][18] a group dedicated to preserving the historical record of websites that close down.[19] Responding[20] to the announcement by AOL of the closure of AOL Hometown, the team announced[21] plans to save[22] Podango and GeoCities.

In October 2009, he started raising funds for a year-long sabbatical from his job as a computer systems administrator, to pursue technology history and archival projects full-time. By November 2009, he had reached his funding goals, with the support of over 300 patrons.[23]

In early 2011, he was involved in Yahoo! Video and Google Video archive projects.[24][25][26]

Scott announced the creation of Archive Corps, a volunteer effort to preserve physical archives, in 2015.[27][28]

Scott has been hosting his own podcast called Jason Scott Talks His Way Out of It since 2017.[29]

Scott is the software curator at the Internet Archive.[30] In April 2019, he uploaded all of the source code for Infocom's text-based adventure games and interactive fiction, including Zork and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, to GitHub.[31][32]

Sockington

Main article: Sockington

Scott's cat, Sockington

Sockington was a domestic cat who lived in Waltham, Massachusetts. He gained large-scale fame via the social networking site Twitter. Scott regularly posted from Sockington's Twitter account from late 2007.[33] As of January 2018, Sockington's account has over 1.4 million followers, many of which are pet accounts themselves.[33][34] Sockington died on July 18, 2022.[35]

Divorced,[6] Scott was engaged as of 2017.[36]

• BBS: The Documentary (2005) (director)
• GET LAMP (2010) (director)
• Going Cardboard (2012) (editor)
• DEFCON: The Documentary (2013) (director)[37]
• Traceroute (2016) (interviewee)
• Glossary of Broken Dreams (2018) (actor)
• Class Action Park (2020) (interviewee)
• Je Suis Auto (2023, upcoming) (actor)

Scott in front of a PetaBox. Scott was hired by the Internet Archive in 2011.

Scott delivering a presentation at a Wikipedia conference in 2018.

• TEXTFILES, G-PHILES, AND LOG FILES: Remembering the 1980s Through ASCII – DEF CON 7, July 10, 1999
• TEXTFILES.COM: One Year Later – DEF CON 8, July 29, 2000
• So You Got Your Lame Ass Sued: A Legal Narrative – DEF CON 9, July 2001
• Documenting the BBS – Rubi-Con 4, April 2002
• History of Phreaking 101 – PhreakNIC 6.0, November 1, 2002
• Keynote: The Future is Now – Rubi-Con 5, March 28, 2003
• Apple II Pirate Lore – Rubi-Con 5, March 29, 2003
• 100 Years of the Computer Art Scene (with RaD Man) – Notacon 1, April 2004
• Saving Digital History: A Quick and Dirty Guide – H2K4, July 11, 2004
• BBS: The Documentary: A Preview – DEF CON 12, August 2004
• The History of the Coleco Adam (mp3) – Notacon 2, April 2005
• Why Tech Documentaries are Impossible (And why we have to do them anyway.) – DEF CON 13, July 31, 2005
• Fidonet Presentation and Q&A – ToorCon 7, September 17, 2005
• BBS Documentary Presentation – PhreakNIC 9.0, October 22, 2005
• ConCon: A History of Hacker Conferences – Shmoocon 2, January 13, 2005
• Your Moment of Audio Zen: A History of Podcasts – Notacon 3, April 7, 2006
• The Great Failure of Wikipedia – Notacon 3, April 8, 2006
• Retrocomputing (with Sam Nitzberg, Cheshire Catalyst, Sellam Ismail) – H.O.P.E. Number Six, July 2006
• Underground Documentaries: The Art of the Interview and the Access (with Julien McArdle) – H.O.P.E. Number Six, July 2006
• Wheel of Internet Knowledge – Phreaknic X, October 2006
• Mythapedia – STM (Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers) Innovations Seminar, December 1, 2006
• Wikipedia, Brick by Brick – Notacon 4, April 27, 2007
• The Edge of Forever – Making Computer History – DEF CON 15, August 4, 2007
• Making a Text Adventure Documentary – DEF CON 16, August 10, 2008
• Keynote speech – KansasFest, July 22, 2009
• That Awesome Time I Was Sued for Two Billion Dollars – DEF CON 17, July 30, 2009
• Atomic Porn: What is the smallest particle of erotica? – Arse Elektronika 2009, October 2, 2009
• DistriWiki: A Proposal – May 11, 2010
• You're Stealing It Wrong! 30 Years of Inter-Pirate Battles - DEF CON 18, July 31, 2010
• Archive Team: A Distributed Preservation of Service Attack - DEF CON 19, August 6, 2011
• DEF CON Documentary Trailer - DEF CON 20, July 27, 2012
• Wanted: Dead or Alive – Webstock, February 15, 2013
• Making Of The DEF CON Documentary - DEF CON 21, August 2, 2013
• From COLO to YOLO: Confessions Of The Angriest Archivist — Bacon, May 16, 2014
• Thwarting the Peasants: A Guided and Rambunctious Tour Through the 2600 DeCSS Legal Files – HOPE X, July 19, 2014[38]
• So You Want To Murder a Software Patent – Derbycon, September 26, 2014[39]

Wikiquote has quotations related to Jason Scott.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Jason Scott.

• Jason Scott – Personal homepage (Archived)
• Jason Scott on Twitter
• Jason Scott Sadofsky at IMDb
• Collector's Trove of Podcasts, an interview with Jason Scott in Wired magazine online
• The Whole Lawsuit Thing – HarvardNetSucks account of the lawsuit.
• https://web.archive.org/web/20170911133405/http://sadofsky.com/
• leahpeah interview with Jason Scott
• fsck interview with Jason Scott
• Jason Scott critiquing Wikipedia, 2006 on Vimeo
• Jason Scott talking about acting