John Gilmore

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Person.png John Gilmore  Rdf-entity.pngRdf-icon.png
(activist, hacker)
John Gilmore in 2018.jpg
Born1955
York, Pennsylvania, U.S.
NationalityAmerican
Founder ofElectronic Frontier Foundation
Member ofElectronic Frontier Foundation
One of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation

John Gilmore (born 1955) is one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Cypherpunks mailing list, and Cygnus Solutions. He created the alt.* hierarchy in Usenet and is a major contributor to the GNU Project.

An outspoken civil libertarian, Gilmore has sued the Federal Aviation Administration, Department of Justice, and others. He was the plaintiff in the prominent case Gilmore v. Gonzales, challenging secret travel-restriction laws. He is also an advocate for drug policy reform.

Life and career

As the fifth employee of Sun Microsystems and founder of Cygnus Support, he became wealthy enough to retire early and pursue other interests.

He is a frequent contributor to free software, and worked on several GNU projects, including maintaining the GNU Debugger in the early 1990s, initiating GNU Radio in 1998, starting Gnash media player in December 2005 to create a free software player for Flash movies, and writing the pdtar program which became GNU tar. Outside of the GNU project he founded the FreeS/WAN project, an implementation of IPsec, to promote the encryption of Internet traffic. He sponsored the EFF's Deep Crack DES cracker, sponsored the Micropolis city building game based on SimCity, and is a proponent of opportunistic encryption.

Gilmore co-authored the Bootstrap Protocol (RFC 951) with Bill Croft in 1985. The Bootstrap Protocol evolved into DHCP, the method by which Ethernet and wireless networks typically assign devices an IP address.

Gilmore famously stated of Internet censorship that "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it".[1]

He unsuccessfully challenged the constitutionality of secret regulations regarding travel security policies in Gilmore v. Gonzales.[2][3]



 

A Quote by John Gilmore

PageQuote
Internet/Censorship“The Internet perceives censorship as damage, and routes around it.”
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References