On the other hand, he probably wouldn't have been of much interest to a real hacker.

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Some joked about whether Treyarch was making Anonymous, the real-life hacker group dedicated to promoting free flow of information, the game's main villain.

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But the most compelling keynote was the one at 9:30 pm in the hotel bar by Paul Pablos Holman, a real-life hacker from the envelope-pushing, avant-guarde Intellectual Ventures founded by Nathan Myhrvold.

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But some security researchers imagine a less sensational, if equally troubling possibility: Hundreds or thousands of aircraft radioing their approach to an air traffic control tower, and no way to sort through which are real and which are ghost plane signals crafted by a malicious hacker.

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So industry experts, professors and the school's very own "Hacker In Residence, " Dan Guido, collaborate to create exercises that expose the students to real-world hacking scenarios.

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