Vipul Ved Prakash

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Vipul Ved Prakash (born 1977) is a software engineer and entrepreneur. He is perhaps best known for creation of Vipul's Razor, a collaborative anti-spam system. In 2001, Vipul co-founded Cloudmark, a company that builds email security software for consumers, enterprises and ISPs based on the collaborative filtration technology of Vipul's Razor. He currently works at Cloudmark in the capacity of Chief Scientist.

Vipul grew up in various parts of New Delhi, India. A determined autodidact, he spent most of his teenage years outside classrooms, reading voraciously, playing competitive Table Tennis and tinkering with Computers. At the age of 13, he became the junior state champion and played on the national Table Tennis circuit till he graduated from high school. Vipul attended St. Stephen's College, Delhi for undergraduate studies in Mathematics, Physics and Computer Science, but eventually dropped out to pursue his interests in software design. In the years that followed, Vipul co-founded, with Ashish Gulhati, an Internet privacy company (Sense/Net) for early Internet users in India and wrote extensively for computer magazines and industry journals, including a regular column, Net Zeppelin, on networking protocols for the Indian edition of the PC World Magazine.

[edit] Open Source and Cryptography

Vipul is an ardent supporter of the Open Source movement and has published a lot of his work under Open Source licenses. He has written several popular extensions to the Perl programming language, that include Crypt::RSA, Crypt::Primes and Net::XWhois. Vipul has a strong interest in cryptography and considers himself a cypherpunk. He built and managed a comprehensive archive of cryptography software known as munitions, from 2000 till 2004, when export of cryptography was severely restricted in the United States. Vipul also implemented the RSA cryptosystem in an export-friendly form factor as Perl code in the shape of a dolphin. For a time, ThinkGeek carried a t-shirt with this RSA dolphin code. More recently, he published a design for an electronic voting system dubbed Athens that uses cryptographic methods to provide proofs of correctness.

In May, 2000, Vipul and Rishab A. Ghosh, published the Orbiten Free Software Survey, which is considered to be the first successful attempt at building a comprehensive empirical model of contribution to Open Source projects. The software and methodologies developed for the survey are now widely used in Open Source research.