Stephen John "Steve" Linford (born 12 December 1956) is a British entrepreneur and

anti-spam Various anti-spam techniques are used to prevent email spam (unsolicited bulk email). No technique is a complete solution to the spam problem, and each has trade-offs between incorrectly rejecting legitimate email (false positives) as opposed to ...

campaigner best known for founding

The Spamhaus Project The Spamhaus Project is an international organisation based in the Principality of Andorra, founded in 1998 by Steve Linford to track email spammers and spam-related activity. The name ''spamhaus'', a pseudo-German expression, was coined by Lin ...

.About Spamhaus
/ref>

Biography

Linford was born in

London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

, in 1956. His family moved to

Rome , established_title = Founded , established_date = 753 BC , founder = King Romulus (legendary) , image_map = Map of comune of Rome (metropolitan city of Capital Rome, region Lazio, Italy).svg , map_caption ...

Italy Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical re ...

, where Steve attended

St. George's British International School St George's British International School is an independent, not-for-profit international school located in Rome, Italy. It was founded in 1958 to serve Rome's British, international and expatriate communities, and today educates more than 900 ...

. After leaving college to pursue a music career, Linford made his living writing music and playing with Italian, German and English rock groups.Brian McWilliams (2004). ''Spam Kings'', pp 76-77. O'Reilly Media. For a number of years he was under contract to Italy's 'GM' record label and worked on film music with composer

Ennio Morricone Ennio Morricone (; 10 November 19286 July 2020) was an Italian composer, orchestrator, conductor, and trumpeter who wrote music in a wide range of styles. With more than 400 scores for cinema and television, as well as more than 100 classica ...

In the early 1980s he became involved in concert production. When artists including

Pink Floyd Pink Floyd are an English rock band formed in London in 1965. Gaining an early following as one of the first British psychedelic music, psychedelic groups, they were distinguished by their extended compositions, sonic experimentation, philo ...

and

Michael Jackson Michael Joseph Jackson (August 29, 1958 – June 25, 2009) was an American singer, songwriter, dancer, and philanthropist. Dubbed the "King of Pop", he is regarded as one of the most significant cultural figures of the 20th century. Over a ...

toured Italy, Linford served as their Production Manager. As computers began to be used in the music industry, Linford developed an interest in computer technology. In 1986 he moved to England, where he set up a software company whose flagship product was a file-searching program called UltraFind for the Apple

Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...

similar to, but predating by many years, Apple's Sherlock. With the arrival of the Internet Linford refocused the company in 1996 as an internet technologies company called Ultradesign Internet, around which he built a server hosting network called UXN. Finding that his customers were being harassed with junk emails, he sought ways to stop the problem and in doing so became an anti-spam campaigner. In 1998 he founded Spamhaus. With the support of the internet's major networks, Spamhaus started a real-time spam-blacklisting database which was then used by internet service providers, governments and military networks to block billions of junk and virus emails from reaching internet users and this activity made Linford a target for cyber-criminals whose operations were crippled by Spamhaus. He received death threats from criminal spam gangs around the world, many of which were posted online.Top 10 Security Heroes
/ref> Today his project's technologies are used by an estimated three-quarters of the world's internet networks and serve over 1.7 billion email users. In 2005 Linford left England and currently resides in the Principality of Andorra.https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-linford-65271b115 He is CEO of the Spamhaus organisation, a group of several companies based in Andorra and the UK working in communications filter technology and internet security.

Awards

In 2003 the ''New York Times'' dedicated the front page of its Business section to an article about Steve Linford. Since then he has spoken on spam and security at government hearings, the European Parliament and the UN. In 2003 he was named as one of the technical industry's 'Top 50 Agenda Setters' by Silicon Magazine.
In 2004 he was given the Internet Hero Award by the British ISP Association

ISPA ISPA may refer to: * Indian Space Association (ISpA) * Institute of Space and Planetary Astrophysics * Instrument for Structural Policies for Pre-Accession, part of the European Union Regional policy * International Sleep Products Association * I ...

.ISPA Internet Hero Award
/ref> In 2005 he was nominated for Outstanding Contribution to the UK Technology Industry.
/ref>

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Linford, Steve English computer scientists Living people 1956 births