Steve Linford

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Steve Linford, also nicknamed Stiff Linefeed following a fairly catastrophic Chinese mistranslation of his name [1], is the anti-spammer who founded Spamhaus.

Linford was born in England. His parents moved to Rome where his father ran an industrial platinum factory. After dropping out of photography school, Steve purchased a motor home shipped over from the U.S., parked it on beaches around the Mediterranean and made his living writing music and playing guitar in clubs. When artists such as Pink Floyd and Michael Jackson toured Italy, Linford served as their local production manager.

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 called ShowData [2] which, after the arrival of the Internet, in the early 90's changed its name to Ultradesign Internet.

After getting fed up with seeing Ultradesign Internet's customers bombarded with spam, he became an anti-spam activist.

In 1998, he founded Spamhaus. Currently his project's DNSBLs are used by major Internet service providers that collectively serve nearly 500-million e-mail users (April 2006).

Some believe that in several cases some people possibly associated with Linford have gone too far and are describing as spam, for example, legitimate email newsletters.

US-based health activist Tim Bolen certainly feels upset by what he sees as an attack on his rights to free speech http://www.bolenreport.net/feature_articles/feature_article037.htm

Bolen is, rightly or wrongly, convinced that Linford is personally responsible for the attack on the transmission of his email newsletter.