How many of us recognize the name of this man?

Mitch Kapor was the founder of the Lotus corporation. He was the man who designed the Lotus 1-2-3. If you know you history, Lotus was one of the only large applications companies that was a serious challenger for Microsoft in its early years. There were years spent over the battle for the spreadsheet that was fought on both the old Mac as well as the old DOS machines.

Microsoft’s offering those days were called Multiplan. Multiplan was fairly beat by Lotus 123 in almost all fronts. Microsoft eventually thought through their faults and strengths and eventually released Excel – the spreadsheet battle was over.

Mitch Kapor himself, is one person I think of as being fairly amazing.

He was co founder of the EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation along with John Perry Barlow. The EFF was the organization that for the first time stood up for hackers rights and digital rights. This was of significant and epic proportions in the early 90s when hacker arrests and crackdowns were gaining a witch-hunt like momentum.

“The EFF is a non-profit civil liberties organization working in the public interest to protect privacy, free expression, and access to public resources and information online, as well as to promote responsibility in new media.”

The EFF was the organization that for the first time took the American Secret Service to court over the ruling and prosecution of the ‘hacker’ Knight Lightning. The EFF won and it literally brought the end of an era about how people of ‘hackers’ and the rules for information security.

I highly recommend reading this book called the Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling. The book reflects the ethos of a time when the parameters of information security were very different from how we think of them now. Considering the license of the book, what it intends to convey and what I hope it may change about your thinking, I would recommend downloading a softcopy of the book.

Today I happened to come across Mitchell Kapor’s website and blog.

Website: http://www.kei.com/homepages/mkapor/

Blog: http://blogs.osafoundation.org/mitch/

I found this entry, right on top and I couldn’t help smiling:

May 09, 2004

Now I'm Mad

Some idiot Atkins Diet spammer just posted 53 bogus comments in this blog. I'm disabling comments (globally) shortly and figuring out if there's any recourse.

They don't know it yet, but they picked the wrong person to do this to.