# Phil Lapsley

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American engineer, hacker, author and entrepreneur (born 1965)

**Philip D. Lapsley** (born 1965) is an American [electrical engineer](/source/Electrical_engineer), [hacker](/source/Hacker_(computer_security)), author, and [entrepreneur](/source/Entrepreneur).

## Early life

Lapsley attended the [University of California, Berkeley](/source/University_of_California%2C_Berkeley), in the 1980s, graduating with a B.S. and M.S. in electrical engineering and computer science in 1988 and 1991. While there, he became involved in the [Berkeley UNIX project](/source/Berkeley_Software_Distribution) and co-founded the [eXperimental Computing Facility](/source/EXperimental_Computing_Facility), where he was involved in defending against the [Morris worm](/source/Morris_worm) in 1988.

Lapsley received an [M.B.A.](/source/M.B.A.) from the [MIT Sloan School of Management](/source/MIT_Sloan_School_of_Management).

## Career

Lapsley co-authored RFC 977, Network News Transfer Protocol ([NNTP](/source/Network_News_Transfer_Protocol)),[1] an Internet standard for transmission of [USENET](/source/USENET) news articles, and was the primary developer of the NNTP reference implementation, nntpd. After leaving, Berkeley he co-founded Berkeley Design Technology, Inc., a [digital signal processing](/source/Digital_signal_processing) technology advisory firm, and is the author of a book on DSP processors.[2] He later co-founded SmartTouch, a [biometric](/source/Biometric) financial transaction processing company.

Lapsley worked at [McKinsey & Company](/source/McKinsey_%26_Company) as a [management consultant](/source/Management_consulting) until 2008.

His book *Exploding the Phone*, on the history of phone [phreaking](/source/Phreaking), was published by [Grove/Atlantic](/source/Grove_Atlantic) in February, 2013.[3]

## References

1. **[^](#cite_ref-1)** Network News Transfer Protocol: A Proposed Standard for the Stream-Based Transmission of News, Request for Comments 977, [Brian Kantor](/source/Brian_Kantor) and Phil Lapsley, February 1986

1. **[^](#cite_ref-2)** DSP Processor Fundamentals: Architectures and Features (IEEE Press Series on Signal Processing), Phil Lapsley, Jeff Bier, Amit Shoham, and [Edward A. Lee](/source/Edward_A._Lee), IEEE-Wiley, February 1997, [ISBN](/source/ISBN_(identifier)) [978-0-7803-3405-2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-0-7803-3405-2)

1. **[^](#cite_ref-3)** [Exploding the Phone website](http://explodingthephone.com)

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