John Gilmore (advocate)

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John Gilmore

John Gilmore 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.

As the fifth employee of Sun Microsystems and founder of Cygnus Support, he accumulated sufficient wealth to take an early retirement 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 90s, initiating GNU Radio in 1998, starting Gnash in December 2005 to create a free software player for Shockwave 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 is a proponent of opportunistic encryption.

He owns the domain toad.com which is one of the 100 oldest active .com domains. It was registered on 08/18/1987. He runs the mail server at toad.com as an open mail relay, allowing friends who travel to send e-mail through his server. In March 2002, this was in the news since an Internet virus had that mail server hardcoded as one of the open mail relays it would use to propagate itself. In October 2002, John's ISP, Verio, cut off his Internet access because he refused to stop providing his service, even though John's relay was programmed to be essentially useless^{[citation needed]} to spammers and other senders of mass email.

John is co-author with Bill Croft of the 1985 Bootstrap Protocol (RFC 951), which evolved into DHCP, the primary way to obtain an IP address upon joining an Ethernet or wireless network.

An outspoken civil libertarian, Gilmore has sued the FAA, Department of Justice, and others. He argued the unconstitutionality of secret law regarding travel security policies in Gilmore v. Gonzales.

John is also a philanthropist, and has given financial support to, among others, Erowid, MAPS, and various organizations seeking to end the war on drugs.