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Johan "Julf" Helsingius, born in 1961 in Helsinki, Finland, started and ran the Anon.penet.fi internet remailer.
| The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's general notability guideline .(July 2023) |
Johan "Julf" Helsingius, born in 1961 in Helsinki, Finland, started and ran the Anon.penet.fi internet remailer.
Anon.penet.fi was one of the most popular anonymous remailers, handling 10,000 messages a day. The server was the first of its kind to use a password-protected PO box system for sending and receiving e-mails. In the 1980s, he was the system administrator for the central Finnish news node as well as a founding members of the Finnish UNIX User Group. In a 1994 interview with Wired, he said he created the service because "It's important to be able to express certain views without everyone knowing who you are." [1]
In 1996, he announced his remailer would shut down due to legal pressure from the Church of Scientology. [2] Scientology officials, upset that some users of Helsingius' service were sending information about the church, obtained a court order to force him to reveal the identity of many of the site's users. [3] [4] When announcing the service's closure, he wrote, "I will close the remailer for the time being because the legal issues concerning the Internet in Finland are yet undefined." [5] The American Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an Internet civil rights initiative, reported continuously on the incidents concerning anon.penet.fi and collected donations to cover legal costs should Helsingius be involved in a court case to settle whether Finnish law could force him to reveal the identity of anon.penet.fi users. The closing down of anon.penet.fi led to an outbreak of outrage and solidarity with Helsingius throughout the Internet in order to protect freedom on the Internet. [6]
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Helsingius went on to help found EUnet in Finland and was part of the team of people that established the first Internet link to USSR. Later, when EUnet was acquired by Qwest Communications and soon after moved into KPNQwest, Qwest's joint venture with KPN International, Julf became Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for KPNQwest. He is now an Internet entrepreneur and is serving on the board of various companies (e.g. BaseN, which is based in Finland). Helsingius lives in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Helsingius has studied music and traveled widely. His interests include active sports, like mountain climbing, and aviation.
A cypherpunk is any individual advocating widespread use of strong cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies as a route to social and political change. Originally communicating through the Cypherpunks electronic mailing list, informal groups aimed to achieve privacy and security through proactive use of cryptography. Cypherpunks have been engaged in an active movement since at least the late 1980s.
A pseudonym or alias is a fictitious name that a person or group assumes for a particular purpose, which differs from their original or true name (orthonym). This also differs from a new name that entirely or legally replaces an individual's own. Many pseudonym holders use pseudonyms because they wish to remain anonymous, but anonymity is difficult to achieve and often fraught with legal issues.
An anonymous remailer is a server that receives messages with embedded instructions on where to send them next, and that forwards them without revealing where they originally came from. There are cypherpunk anonymous remailers, mixmaster anonymous remailers, and nym servers, among others, which differ in how they work, in the policies they adopt, and in the type of attack on the anonymity of e-mail they can resist. Remailing as discussed in this article applies to e-mails intended for particular recipients, not the general public. Anonymity in the latter case is more easily addressed by using any of several methods of anonymous publication.
There are a number of disputes concerning the Church of Scientology's attempts to suppress material critical of Scientology and the organization on the Internet, utilizing various methods – primarily lawsuits and legal threats, as well as front organizations. In late 1994, the organization began using various legal tactics to stop distribution of unpublished documents written by L. Ron Hubbard. The organization has often been accused of barratry through the filing of SLAPP suits. The organization's response is that its litigious nature is solely to protect its copyrighted works and the unpublished status of certain documents.
The Penet remailer was a pseudonymous remailer operated by Johan "Julf" Helsingius of Finland from 1993 to 1996. Its initial creation stemmed from an argument in a Finnish newsgroup over whether people should be required to tie their real name to their online communications. Julf believed that people should not—indeed, could not—be required to do so. In his own words:
A pseudonymous remailer or nym server, as opposed to an anonymous remailer, is an Internet software program designed to allow people to write pseudonymous messages on Usenet newsgroups and send pseudonymous email. Unlike purely anonymous remailers, it assigns its users a user name, and it keeps a database of instructions on how to return messages to the real user. These instructions usually involve the anonymous remailer network itself, thus protecting the true identity of the user.
The Usenet newsgroup alt.religion.scientology started in 1991 to discuss the controversial beliefs of Scientology, as well as the activities of the Church of Scientology, which claims exclusive intellectual property rights thereto and is viewed by many as a dangerous cult. The newsgroup has become the focal point of an aggressive battle known as Scientology versus the Internet, which has taken place both online and in the courts.
Masters of Deception (MOD) was a New York–based group of hackers, most widely known in media for their exploits of telephone company infrastructure and later prosecution.
.fi is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Finland. It is operated by TRAFICOM, the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency.
The Publius Enigma is an Internet phenomenon and an unsolved problem that began with cryptic messages posted by a user identifying only as "Publius" to the unmoderated Usenet newsgroup alt.music.pink-floyd through the Penet remailer, a now defunct anonymous information exchange service. The messenger proposed a riddle in connection with the 1994 Pink Floyd album The Division Bell, promising that the answer would lead to a reward.
Electronic Frontiers Georgia (EFGA) is a non-profit organization in the US state of Georgia focusing on issues related to cyber law and free speech. It was founded in 1995 by Tom Cross, Robert Costner, Chris Farris, and Robbie Honerkamp, primarily in response to the Communications Decency Act.
An anonymous post, is an entry on a textboard, anonymous bulletin board system, or other discussion forums like Internet forum, without a screen name or more commonly by using a non-identifiable pseudonym. Some online forums such as Slashdot do not allow such posts, requiring users to be registered either under their real name or utilizing a pseudonym. Others like JuicyCampus, AutoAdmit, 2channel, and other Futaba-based imageboards thrive on anonymity. Users of 4chan, in particular, interact in an anonymous and ephemeral environment that facilitates rapid generation of new trends.
William Grady Ward is an American software engineer, lexicographer, and Internet activist who has been prominent in the Scientology versus the Internet controversy.
EUnet was a very loose collaboration of individual European UNIX sites in the 1980s that evolved into the fully commercial entity EUnet International Ltd in 1996. It was sold to Qwest in 1998. EUnet played a decisive role in the adoption of TCP/IP in Europe beginning in 1988.
A Usenet personality was a particular kind of Internet celebrity, being an individual who gained a certain level of notoriety from posting on Usenet, a global network of computer users with a vast array of topics for discussion. The platform is usually anonymous, although users can get celebrity status, usually by being deemed different from other posters in some way.
Anonymizer, Inc. is an Internet privacy company, founded in 1995 by Lance Cottrell, author of the Mixmaster anonymous remailer. Anonymizer was originally named Infonex Internet. The name was changed to Anonymizer in 1997 when the company acquired a web based privacy proxy of the same name developed by Justin Boyan at Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science. Boyan licensed the software to C2Net for public beta testing before selling it to Infonex. One of the first web privacy companies founded, Anonymizer creates a VPN link between its servers and its users computer, creating a random IP address, rather than the one actually being used. This can be used to anonymously report a crime, avoid spam, avoid Internet censorship, keep the users identity safe and track competitors, among other uses.
Project Chanology was a protest movement against the practices of the Church of Scientology by members of Anonymous, a leaderless Internet-based group. "Chanology" is a combination of "4chan" and "Scientology". The project was started in response to the Church of Scientology's attempts to remove material from a highly publicized interview with Scientologist Tom Cruise from the Internet in January 2008.
Anonymous is a decentralized international activist and hacktivist collective and movement primarily known for its various cyberattacks against several governments, government institutions and government agencies, corporations and the Church of Scientology.
Qwest Communications International, Inc. was a United States telecommunications carrier. Qwest provided local service in 14 western and midwestern U.S. states: Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota,Texas, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming.
Eric Hughes is an American mathematician, computer programmer, and cypherpunk. He is considered one of the founders of the cypherpunk movement, alongside Timothy C. May and John Gilmore. He is notable for founding and administering the Cypherpunk mailing list, authoring A Cypherpunk's Manifesto, creating and hosting the first anonymous remailer, and coining the motto, "Cypherpunks write code".
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