Steve Linford

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Steve Linford is a British anti-spam campaigner best known for founding The Spamhaus Project.[1]

Linford was born in England. His parents moved to Rome where his father ran an industrial platinum factory.[2] After leaving college to pursue a music career,[2] Linford purchased a motor home shipped over from the US, parked it on beaches around the Mediterranean, and made his living writing music and playing guitar in clubs.[2] When artists such as Pink Floyd and Michael Jackson toured Italy, Linford served as their local production manager.[2]

As computers began to be used in music production and touring, Linford turned to computing and in 1986 drove his motor home back to England where he set up a computer company with his brother Julian, called Ultradesign Technology. Their flagship product for many years was a file-searching program called UltraFind for the Macintosh similar to, but predating by many years, Apple's Sherlock.[2] After Julian Linford left to work with the European Space Agency,[2] Linford refocused the company in 1995 as a web service company called Ultradesign Internet.

Finding his customers were being harassed with junk emails, he sought ways to stop the problem and in doing so he became an anti-spam campaigner. In 1998, he founded Spamhaus. Currently his project's DNSBLs are used by an estimated two-thirds of the world's Internet service providers and collectively serve over 800 million e-mail users.[1]

In 2003 the New York Times dedicated the front page of its Business section to an article about Steve Linford.[3] Since then he has regularly spoken on spam and security at government hearings, the European Parliament and the UN.[1] In 2004 he was given the Internet Hero Award by the British ISP Association ISPA.[4]

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b c About Spamhaus
  2. ^ a b c d e f Brian McWilliams (2004). Spam Kings, pp 76-77. O'Reilly Media. ISBN 0596007329
  3. ^ Hansel, Saul. "Spammers Can Run But They Can't Hide", New York Times, 2003-11-09. 
  4. ^ ISPA Internet Hero Award