Linus Torvalds

Linus Benedict Torvalds, born December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, Finland) is a Finnish software engineer best known for having initiated the development of the Linux kernel. He later became the chief architect of the Linux kernel, and now acts as the project's coordinator. Born in Helsinki Finland,He is son of journalists Anna and Nils Torvalds, and the grandson of poet Ole Torvalds. His family belongs to the Swedish-speaking minority (5.5%) of Finland's population. Torvalds was named after Linus Pauling, the American Nobel Prize-winning chemist, although in the book Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, Torvalds is quoted as saying, "I think I was named equally for Linus the peanut-cartoon character," noting that this makes him half "Nobel-prize-winning chemist" and half "blanket-carrying cartoon character." Both of his parents were campus radicals at the University of Helsinki in the 1960s. Torvalds attended the University of Helsinki from 1988 to 1996, graduating with a master's degree in computer science. His M.Sc. thesis was titled Linux: A Portable Operating System. From 1997 to 1999 he was involved in 86open helping to choose the standard binary format for Linux and Unix. His interest in computers began with a Commodore VIC-20. After the VIC-20 he purchased a Sinclair QL which he modified extensively, especially its operating system. He programmed an assembler and a text editor for the QL, as well as a few games. He is known to have written a Pac-Man clone named Cool Man. In 1990 he purchased an Intel 80386-based IBM PC and spent a few weeks playing the game Prince of Persia before receiving his MINIX copy which in turn enabled him to begin his work on Linux. Linus Torvalds is married to Tove Torvalds – a six-time Finnish national Karate champion – whom he first met in the autumn of 1993. Torvalds was running introductory computer laboratory exercises for students and instructed the course attendants to send him an e-mail as a test, to which Tove responded with an e-mail asking for a date. Tove and Linus were later married and have three daughters, Patricia, Daniela, and Celeste. After a visit to Transmeta in late 1996, he accepted a position at the company in California, where he would work from February 1997 through June 2003. He then moved to the Open Source Development Labs, which has since merged with the Free Standards Group to become the Linux Foundation, under whose auspices he continues to work. In June 2004, Torvalds and his family moved to Portland, Oregon to be closer to the consortium's Beaverton, Oregon-based headquarters. Red Hat and VA Linux, both leading developers of Linux-based software, presented Torvalds with stock options in gratitude for his creation. In 1999, both companies went public and Torvalds' net worth shot up to roughly $20 million. His personal mascot is a penguin nicknamed Tux, which has been widely adopted by the Linux community as the mascot of the Linux kernel. Unlike many open source icons, Torvalds maintains a low profile and generally refuses to comment on competing software products. Torvalds generally stays out of non-kernel-related debates. Although Torvalds believes that "open source is the only right way to do software", he also has said that he uses the "best tool for the job", even if that includes proprietary software. He has been criticized for his use and alleged advocacy of the proprietary BitKeeper software for version control in the Linux kernel. However, Torvalds has since written a free-software replacement for BitKeeper called Git. Torvalds has commented on official GNOME developmental mailing lists that, in terms of desktop environments, he encourages users to switch to KDE. Linus Torvalds was just 21 when he changed the world. Working out of his family's apartment in Helsinki in 1991, he wrote the kernel of a new computer operating system called Linux that he posted for free on the internet and invited anyone interested to help improve it. 15 years later, Linux powers everything from supercomputers to mobile phones around the world, and Torvalds has achieved fame as the godfather of the open-source movement, in which software code is shared and developed in a collaborative effort rather than being kept locked up by a single owner. Some of Torvalds' supporters portray him as a sort of anti-Bill Gates, but the significance of Linux is much bigger than merely a slap at Microsoft. Collaborating on core technologies could lead to a huge reduction in some business costs, freeing up money for more innovative investments elsewhere. Torvalds continues to keep a close eye on Linux's development and has made some money from stock options given to him as a courtesy by two companies that sell commercial applications for it. But his success isn't just measured in dollars. There's an asteroid named after him, as well as an annual software-geek festival. Torvalds' parents were student radicals in the 1960s and his father, a communist, even spent a year studying in Moscow. But it's their son who has turned out to be the real revolutionary.

Michał Zalewski

prominent security researcher Michał Zalewski is a Hacker white hat Polish born the January 19th 1981. As of half of the Years 1990, it takes an active part in Bugtraq, and it writes programs for Unix (fenris, p0f). It was also one of the authors of the Argante system. Its research on the protocol TCP/IP aroused a great interest, just as its analyzes of the safety of the navigators Web. At the time of its stay to the the United States, he worked as a researcher within BindView Corporation, a specialized company in the computer security. After its return in Poland, it published a book, Silence one the Wire . One of its centers of interest is the Artificial intelligence. On Internet, it uses the pseudonym lcamtuf . He has been a frequent Bugtraq poster since mid-1990s and has authored a number of programs for Unix-like operating systems. During his years in the United States, he's been a researcher with BindView Corporation (a computer security firm). Zalewski authored a book, Silence on the Wire. Besides computer security, Michał's interests include artificial intelligence, applied mathematics, robotics, physics, chemistry, electronics, and photography. In October 2004, he won the Daniel Horn Obfuscated Challenge (Obfuscated Voting Contest).

Johan Helsingius

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 Internet 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 eighties he was the system administrator for the central Finnish news node as well as one of the founding members of the Finnish UNIX User Group. In February 1995, the Church of Scientology called in Interpol and Finnish prosecutors in order to find out user an144108's real identity, an online critic of Scientology. Pressured by possible police measures which would have meant disclosing not one but all of the registered names in the database, Julf revealed the identity of the person Scientology was looking for. One year later, on August 30, 1996, he announced his remailer would shut down. The American Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an Internet civil rights initiative, reported continuously on the incidents concerning anon.penet.fi. The EFF 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. Helsingius went on to help found EUnet in Finland and was part of the team of people that established the first Internet link to a Soviet country. 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.

Eric Corley

Eric Corley also known as Emmanuel Goldstein is the long standing publisher of 2600, The Hacker Quarterly and founder of the H.O.P.E. conferences. He has been part of the hacker community since the late '70s. Eric Corley, Born 1959, also frequently referred to by his pen name of Emmanuel Goldstein, is a figure in the hacker community. He and his non-profit organization 2600 Enterprises, Inc., together publish a magazine called 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, which Corley founded in 1984. Corley's pseudonym, Emmanuel Goldstein, is taken from the George Orwell book Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the book, Emmanuel Goldstein is the mysterious, and questionably existent leader of the opposition to Big Brother and the totalitarian state. In 1999, Corley was named as a defendant in Universal v. Reimerdes, the movie industry's attempt to squelch DeCSS. DeCSS is a computer program capable of decrypting content on a DVD video disc encrypted using the Content-Scrambling System (CSS). 2600.com had provided links to websites which contained the DeCSS code. Corley was the only defendant who chose to fight the industry in court. United States District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan ruled against Corley. In 2001, Mr. Corley released the full length documentary Freedom Downtime (which he wrote, directed and produced), which was about convicted hacker Kevin Mitnick and the Free Kevin movement, among other things. Furthermore, he was creative advisor to the movie Hackers. He was arrested on August 31, 2004 in New York City, while trying to videotape a demonstration against the Republican National Convention, in which Corley asserts he was not a participant. After being detained for more than 30 hours, he was charged with disorderly conduct. At a hearing on November 29, 2004, the city dropped all charges against Corley. Corley hosts a radio show Off The Hook on WBAI, and is concerned with legal matters related to social engineering and other issues affecting the hacker world. Corley also hosts a show on WUSB 90.1 FM called Off the Wall, a semi call-in show that discusses current world topics, and usually whatever is on his mind. He has done other radio shows there, including The Voice of Long Island, News Of The World and Brain Damage. Corley is an alumnus of Ward Melville High School and the State University of New York at Stony Brook, which is host to WUSB. He attended from 1977 to 1982, graduating with a degree in English. No stranger to the film world, Corley was featured as "The Outside Man" in the film Urchin,[2] completed August 2006. Corley has also testified[3] before the United States Congress. Mr. Corley recently wrote a book titled The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey which was released July, 2008. The book consists of articles from the magazine 2600 set in chronological order to show the evolution of the internet and technology. one of corley mistaken such as: Judges Seek Answers on Computer Code as Free Speech In what may signal a heightened significance for a case testing the constitutionality of a 1998 digital copyright law, a panel of appeals court judges has asked both sides of a case to answer a list of 11 questions on whether computer code can qualify as free speech.The case pits the major Hollywood studios against Eric Corley, the publisher of an online magazine, 2600. A federal judge has prohibited Mr. Corley from distributing a computer program that can break the security lock on a digital videodisc. Once the lock is broken, an individual could copy the movie from the DVD to a computer hard drive or send it over the Internet.Lawyers for Mr. Corley have appealed, asserting that the judge's injunction violates his First Amendment right to free speech. The judge, Lewis Kaplan of Federal District Court in Manhattan, also prohibited Mr. Corley from placing a link on his World Wide Web site, www.2600.com, to other sites distributing the program.At the end of oral arguments earlier this month, the three-judge panel at the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit told both sides to submit their final briefs on May 10. But in what appears to be an unusual move, this week the panel instead invited responses to 11 questions that seek to determine how to apply the First Amendment to computer code.The judges also asked for arguments on the validity of Judge Kaplan's test for determining whether banning an online publication from linking to other sites infringed on the right to free speech.''I've never seen this happen before,'' said one of Mr. Corley's lawyers, Martin Garbus of the law firm of Frankfurt Garbus Kurnit Klein & Selz. ''What's clear is that neither Judge Kaplan's decision nor the briefs nor the oral arguments have given them the answer to the questions they think are the most important.''Mr. Garbus said the detailed questions indicated that the three judges -- Jon O. Newman, Jose A. Cabrenes and Alvin W. Thompson -- were preparing to write a definitive opinion on the case, rather than limiting themselves to ruling on Judge Kaplan's decision. The questions also suggested that the judges were thinking beyond Mr. Corley's specific circumstances to how the ruling might apply more generally.The statute Mr. Corley is challenging, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, criminalizes the distribution of any device that can be used to break a security code intended to protect digital movies, music and books from being copied. The computer program Mr. Corley distributed, known as DeCSS, is such a device.One question raised in the case is whether a computer program is more like a list of instructions -- traditionally protected by the First Amendment -- or a machine that simply happens to be built with speech, which would not fall under the scope of the First Amendment. Even if the judges decide that a computer program has elements of speech, they could rule that the government's interest in preventing the illegal copying of digital works is great enough to restrict it in certain instances. But Mr. Garbus said the more the panel sees the case in terms of the First Amendment, the better it will be for Mr. Corley. Charles Sims, a lawyer for the Motion Picture Association of America, the film industry trade group that sued Mr. Corley, said the questions were unremarkable. ''Any one law clerk can persuade any one judge to propound questions like these,'' said Mr. Sims, of the law firm of Proskauer Rose. ''I think it would be a mistake to read anything into them.'' the others corley mistake:

Web Site for Hackers Will Not Appeal

2 Copyright Cases Decided in Favor of Entertainment Industry

Judges Weigh Copyright Suit On Unlocking DVD Shield

Judge Halts Program to Crack DVD Film Codes

Free Speech Rights For Computer Code; Suit Tests Power of Media Concerns To Control Access to Digital Content

DVD SOFTWARE TRIAL ENDS

SOFTWARE; DVD PROGRAMMER SPEAKS

SOFTWARE; REMOVAL OF JUDGE SOUGHT

Movie Studios Seek to Stop DVD Copies

Trial Involving DVD Software And Copyrights Set to Begin