John Gilmore (activist)

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John Gilmore
John Gilmore in 2018.jpg
Gilmore in 2018
Born1955 (age 68–69) [1] [2]
York, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Known forCo-Founder of the EFF
Website new.toad.com/gnu/ OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

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.

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

He co-authored the Bootstrap Protocol in 1985, which evolved into Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), the primary way local networks assign an IP address to devices.

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 also one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation based in San Francisco. [3]

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.

On October 22, 2021, EFF announced that they had removed Gilmore from the Board following a governance dispute. [4] The details of the dispute were not made public. [5]

On June 23, 2024, Gilmore was selected as a board member of the Free Software Foundation. [6]

Activism

Gilmore owns the domain name toad.com, which is one of the 100 oldest active .com domains. It was registered on August 18, 1987. He runs [7] the mail server at toad.com as an open mail relay. In October 2002, Gilmore's ISP, Verio, cut off his Internet access for running an open relay, a violation of Verio's terms of service. Many people contend that open relays make it too easy to send spam. Gilmore protests that his mail server was programmed to be essentially useless to spammers and other senders of mass email and he argues that Verio's actions constitute censorship. He also notes that his configuration makes it easier for friends who travel to send email, although his critics counter that there are other mechanisms to accommodate people wanting to send email while traveling. The measures Gilmore took to make his server useless to spammers may or may not have helped, considering that in 2002, at least one mass-mailing worm that propagated through open relays — W32.Yaha — had been hard-coded to relay through the toad.com mail server. [8]

Gilmore famously stated of Internet censorship that "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it". [9]

He unsuccessfully challenged the constitutionality of secret regulations regarding travel security policies in Gilmore v. Gonzales . [2] [10]

Gilmore is also an advocate for the relaxing of drug laws and has given financial support to Students for Sensible Drug Policy, the Marijuana Policy Project, Erowid, MAPS, Flex Your Rights, and various other organizations seeking to end the war on drugs. He is a member of the boards of directors of MAPS and the Marijuana Policy Project. [11] Until October 2021, he was also a board member of the EFF. [12]

Affiliations

Following the sale of AMPRNet address space in mid-2019, Gilmore, under amateur radio call sign W0GNU, was listed as a board member of Amateur Radio Digital Communications, a non-profit involved in the management of the 44.0.0.0/8 resources on behalf of the amateur radio community. [13] [14]

Honours

Gilmore has received the Free Software Foundation's Advancement of Free Software 2009 award. [15]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Email</span> Mail sent using electronic means

Electronic mail is a method of transmitting and receiving messages using electronic devices. It was conceived in the late–20th century as the digital version of, or counterpart to, mail. Email is a ubiquitous and very widely used communication medium; in current use, an email address is often treated as a basic and necessary part of many processes in business, commerce, government, education, entertainment, and other spheres of daily life in most countries.

Within the Internet email system, a message transfer agent (MTA), mail transfer agent, or mail relay is software that transfers electronic mail messages from one computer to another using the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. In some contexts, the alternative names mail server, mail exchanger, or MX host are used to describe an MTA.

The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an Internet standard communication protocol for electronic mail transmission. Mail servers and other message transfer agents use SMTP to send and receive mail messages. User-level email clients typically use SMTP only for sending messages to a mail server for relaying, and typically submit outgoing email to the mail server on port 587 or 465 per RFC 8314. For retrieving messages, IMAP is standard, but proprietary servers also often implement proprietary protocols, e.g., Exchange ActiveSync.

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 and early 1990s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open mail relay</span>

An open mail relay is a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server configured in such a way that it allows anyone on the Internet to send e-mail through it, not just mail destined to or originating from known users. This used to be the default configuration in many mail servers; indeed, it was the way the Internet was initially set up, but open mail relays have become unpopular because of their exploitation by spammers and worms. Many relays were closed, or were placed on blacklists by other servers.

A Domain Name System blocklist, Domain Name System-based blackhole list, Domain Name System blacklist (DNSBL) or real-time blackhole list (RBL) is a service for operation of mail servers to perform a check via a Domain Name System (DNS) query whether a sending host's IP address is blacklisted for email spam. Most mail server software can be configured to check such lists, typically rejecting or flagging messages from such sites.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GNU Mailman</span> Mailing list manager software

GNU Mailman is a computer software application from the GNU Project for managing electronic mailing lists. Mailman is coded primarily in Python and currently maintained by Abhilash Raj. Mailman is free software, licensed under the GNU General Public License.

Various anti-spam techniques are used to prevent email spam.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Email spam</span> Unsolicited electronic advertising by email

Email spam, also referred to as junk email, spam mail, or simply spam, is unsolicited messages sent in bulk by email (spamming). The name comes from a Monty Python sketch in which the name of the canned pork product Spam is ubiquitous, unavoidable, and repetitive. Email spam has steadily grown since the early 1990s, and by 2014 was estimated to account for around 90% of total email traffic.

Greylisting is a method of defending e-mail users against spam. A mail transfer agent (MTA) using greylisting will "temporarily reject" any email from a sender it does not recognize. If the mail is legitimate, the originating server will try again after a delay, and if sufficient time has elapsed, the email will be accepted.

Trespass to chattels is a tort whereby the infringing party has intentionally interfered with another person's lawful possession of a chattel. The interference can be any physical contact with the chattel in a quantifiable way, or any dispossession of the chattel. As opposed to the greater wrong of conversion, trespass to chattels is argued to be actionable per se.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kontact</span> Personal information manager software

Kontact is a personal information manager and groupware software suite developed by KDE. It supports calendars, contacts, notes, to-do lists, news, and email. It offers a number of inter-changeable graphical UIs all built on top of a common core.

The following tables compare general and technical features of notable email client programs.

Email authentication, or validation, is a collection of techniques aimed at providing verifiable information about the origin of email messages by validating the domain ownership of any message transfer agents (MTA) who participated in transferring and possibly modifying a message.

Forward-confirmed reverse DNS (FCrDNS), also known as full-circle reverse DNS, double-reverse DNS, or iprev, is a networking parameter configuration in which a given IP address has both forward (name-to-address) and reverse (address-to-name) Domain Name System (DNS) entries that match each other. This is the standard configuration expected by the Internet standards supporting many DNS-reliant protocols. David Barr published an opinion in RFC 1912 (Informational) recommending it as best practice for DNS administrators, but there are no formal requirements for it codified within the DNS standard itself.

SORBS was a list of e-mail servers suspected of sending or relaying spam. It had been augmented with complementary lists that include various other classes of hosts, allowing for customized email rejection by its users.

In networking, a black hole refers to a place in the network where incoming or outgoing traffic is silently discarded, without informing the source that the data did not reach its intended recipient.

Email encryption is encryption of email messages to protect the content from being read by entities other than the intended recipients. Email encryption may also include authentication.

hMailServer Open-source e-mail server

hMailServer was a free email server for Windows created by Martin Knafve. It ran as a Windows service and includes administration tools for management and backup. It had support for IMAP, POP3, and SMTP email protocols. It could use external database engines such as MySQL, MS SQL or PostgreSQL, or an internal MS SQL Compact Edition engine to store configuration and index data. The actual email messages were stored on disk in a raw MIME format. As of January 15th, 2022, active support and development were officially halted, although version 5.6 will continue to receive updates for critical bugs.

Backscatter is incorrectly automated bounce messages sent by mail servers, typically as a side effect of incoming spam.

References

  1. ↑ The Internet: A Historical Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO. 2005. p. 115. ISBN   9781851096596. John Gilmore (1955-)
  2. 1 2 Willing, Richard (October 10, 2004). "Airline ID requirement faces legal challenge". USA Today . Archived from the original on June 15, 2011.
  3. ↑ Sengupta, Somini (June 13, 2013). "Secret Surveillance Court May Reveal Some Secrets". Bits Blog. Retrieved July 1, 2024.
  4. ↑ Cohn, Cindy (October 22, 2021). "John Gilmore Leaves the EFF Board, Becomes Board Member Emeritus". Electronic Frontier Foundation. Retrieved October 23, 2021.
  5. ↑ "EFF co-founder John Gilmore removed from org's Board". TheRegister.com. October 25, 2021.
  6. ↑ "FSF adds three highly qualified board members — Free Software Foundation — Working together for free software". www.fsf.org. Retrieved June 30, 2024.
  7. ↑ As of June 1, 2023, new.toad.com is still an open mail relay.
  8. ↑ Knowles, Douglas (February 13, 2007). "W32.Yaha@mm technical details". Symantec. Archived from the original on May 24, 2007. Retrieved September 26, 2016. if it cannot connect to the email server listed in that registry key, it will use one of the following: [...21 domain names snipped...], toad.com, [...2 more...]
  9. ↑ Elmer-Dewitt, Philip (December 6, 1993). "First Nation in Cyberspace". Time International. Archived from the original on April 8, 2021. Retrieved July 31, 2009.
  10. ↑ Egelko, Bob (December 9, 2005). "Judges cool to ID complaint". San Francisco Chronicle . Archived from the original on April 15, 2021.
  11. ↑ "Board of Directors". Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. Archived from the original on May 6, 2016. Retrieved October 16, 2014.
  12. ↑ "John Gilmore Leaves the EFF Board, Becomes Board Member Emeritus". Electronic Frontier Foundation. October 23, 2021. Retrieved October 23, 2021.
  13. ↑ ARDC Board of Directors (July 18, 2019). "AMPRNet Address Sale". Amateur Radio Digital Communications. Archived from the original on July 19, 2019. Retrieved July 20, 2019. The sale amounts to some millions of dollars, which will be used in the furtherance of ARDC's continuing public benefit purpose.... The uppermost 1/4 of the former AMPRNet address space (44.192.0.0/10) has been ... sold to another owner ... over 12 million IPv4 addresses remain{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
  14. ↑ Kantor, Brian; Karn, Phil; Claffy, K. C.; Gilmore, John; Magnuski, Hank; Garbee, Bdale; Hansen, Skip; Horne, Bill; Ricketts, John; Traschewski, Jann; Vixie, Paul (July 20, 2019). "AMPRNet". Amateur Radio Digital Communications. Archived from the original on July 19, 2019. Retrieved July 20, 2019. in mid-2019, a block of approximately four million consecutive AMPRNet addresses denoted as 44.192.0.0/10 was ... sold to the highest qualified bidder at the then-current fair market value ... leaves some twelve million addresses ... The ARDC Board of Directors ... John Gilmore, W0GNU
  15. ↑ "2009 Free Software Awards Announced". Free Software Foundation. March 23, 2010. Retrieved May 26, 2023.
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