John Gilmore
More info
- Born
- 1955
- Known for
- EFF, Cygnus Solutions, cypherpunks, Deep Crack
Early Sun employee who spent his money founding the EFF, the cypherpunks and a company that sold support for free software.
Gilmore was employee number five at Sun Microsystems. In 1989 he co-founded Cygnus Solutions, one of the first companies to make money supporting GNU tools, and in 1990 he started the EFF with Mitch Kapor and John Perry Barlow. He was also one of the people behind Usenet's alt.* hierarchy.
He coined "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it", and in 1998 he funded the EFF's Deep Crack, the machine that broke a DES key in a matter of days and punctured the claim that 56 bits was enough. He later sued the US government for the right to fly without showing ID. That went less well.