‘Hacker’ Altman takes mystery out of electronics – Providence Business News

“Hacking, the way I describe it, is learning about a technology, exchanging it, and sharing it,” said Altman, who is an Artist in Residency this month at AS220, the nonprofit community arts center in downtown Providence. As Altman sees it, hackers are like accountants – there are good ones and bad ones – but they perform an important service by finding and demonstrating vulnerabilities in the technologies we depend on.

Altman himself is a hacker extraordinaire. An electrical engineer by training, he is best known as the inventor of TV-B-Gone, a $20 electronic keychain device that is programmed with the codes for thousands of TVs and thus can turn off almost any set – a blessing for those exhausted by the numbing drone of CNN at an airport terminal or a Laundromat. He also writes for the do-it-yourself electronics magazine Make, and was invited to spend August in Providence by local tech guru Brian Jepson, an AS220 board member and an editor at Make.