Julian Assange

Updated: 11/16/2019 by Computer Hope
Julian Assange

Name: Julian Assange aka Mendax

Born: July 3, 1971, in Townsville, Queensland, Australia

Computer-related contributions

  • Editor, activist, political talk show host, computer programmer, hacker, publisher, and journalist from Australia.
  • He is best known as the editor-in-chief and founder of WikiLeaks, a media website which has published information from whistleblowers.
  • Around 1997, he co-invented the Rubberhose deniable encryption system, and a software package for Linux designed to provide plausible deniability against Rubberhose cryptanalysis.
  • In 1995, he wrote Strobe, the first free and open source port scanner.
  • In 1993, Assange was involved in starting one of the first public Internet service providers in Australia, Suburbia Public Access Network.

Significant publications

  • Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness, and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier (1997).
  • "State and Terrorist Conspiracies" (2006).
  • "Conspiracy as Governance" (2006).
  • "The Hidden Curse of Thomas Paine" (2008).

Honors and awards

  • Amnesty International Media Award (2009).
  • Readers' Choice for Time magazine's Person of the Year (2010).
  • Sydney Peace Foundation gold medal (2011).
  • Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism (2011).
  • Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize (2011).

Quotes

"To radically shift regime behaviour, we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not."

Website