John Graham-Cumming is a British programmer best known for having originated a successful petition to the British Government asking for an apology for its persecution of Alan Turing for his homosexuality.[1]
He wrote the open source POPFile email filtering program[2] and was one of the founding speakers at the annual MIT Spam Conference (with Paul Graham). He is the co-founder of California-based Electric Cloud, a company specialized in high-performance software build tools,[3].
He is listed as an inventor on six US patents. He studied at Oxford University gaining a BA in Mathematics and Computation and a DPhil in computer security.[4] He is the author of a travel book called The Geek Atlas (ISBN 978-0-596-52320-6)[5] and of a book called GNU Make Unleashed.[6]
In February 2010, The Times named his blog as one of its "top 30 science blogs".[7] After the release of data by the Met Office following the Climatic Research Unit hacking incident he found errors in the data and code which were subsequently confirmed by the Met Office.[8]
In October 2010, he started an organization whose aim is to build Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine.[9][10]