Electronic Frontier Foundation
Abbreviation	EFF
Formation	1990, U.S.
Type	Non-profit organization
Legal status	Foundation
Purpose/focus	Law, Freedom, Privacy
Headquarters	San Francisco, California, U.S.
Website	www.eff.org

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an international non-profit digital rights advocacy and legal organization based in the United States. Its stated mission is to:^[1]

• Engage in and support educational activities which increase popular understanding of the opportunities and challenges posed by developments in computing and telecommunications.
• Develop among policy-makers a better understanding of the issues underlying free and open telecommunications, and support the creation of legal and structural approaches which will ease the assimilation of these new technologies by society.
• Raise public awareness about civil liberties issues arising from the rapid advancement in the area of new computer-based communications media.
• Support litigation in the public interest to preserve, protect, and extend First Amendment rights within the realm of computing and telecommunications technology.
• Encourage and support the development of new tools which will endow non-technical users with full and easy access to computer-based telecommunications.

The EFF is supported by donations and is based in San Francisco, California, with staff members in Washington, D.C. They are accredited observers at the World Intellectual Property Organization^[2] and one of the participants of the Global Network Initiative.^[3]

EFF has taken action in several ways. It provides funds for legal defense in court, presents amici curiae briefs, defends individuals and new technologies from what it considers baseless or misdirected legal threats, works to expose government malfeasance, provides guidance to the government and courts, organizes political action and mass mailings, supports some new technologies which it believes preserve personal freedoms, maintains a database and web sites of related news and information, monitors and challenges potential legislation that it believes would infringe on personal liberties and fair use, and solicits a list of what it considers patent abuses with intentions to defeat those that it considers without merit.

History[link]

Electronic Frontier Foundation founders Kapor, Gilmore and Barlow

Foundation[link]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation was formed in July 1990 by John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor in response to a series of actions by law enforcement agencies that led them to conclude that the authorities were gravely uninformed about emerging forms of online communication,^[4] and that there was a need for increased protection for Internet civil liberties.

In April 1990, Barlow had been visited by a U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation agent in relation to the theft and distribution of the source code for a series of Macintosh ROMs. Barlow described the visit as "complicated by [The Agent's] fairly complete unfamiliarity with computer technology. I realized right away that before I could demonstrate my innocence, I would first have to explain to him what guilt might be." Barlow felt that his experience was symptomatic of a “great paroxysm of governmental confusion during which everyone's liberties would become at risk”.

Barlow posted an account of this experience to The WELL online community and was contacted by Mitch Kapor, who had had a similar experience. The pair agreed that there was a need to defend civil liberties on the internet. Kapor agreed to fund any legal fees associated with such a defense and the pair contacted New York lawyers Rabinowitz, Boudin, Standard, Krinsky and Lieberman about defending several computer hackers from a Harper's magazine forum on computers and freedom who had been the target of Secret Service raids.^[4] This generated a large amount of publicity which led to offers of financial support from John Gilmore and Steve Wozniak. Barlow and Kapor continued to research conflicts between the government and technology and in June 1990 Barlow posted online the influential article entitled "Crime & Punishment" in which Barlow announced his and Kapor's plans to create an organization to "raise and disburse funds for education, lobbying, and litigation in the areas relating to digital speech and the extension of the Constitution into Cyberspace."^{[citation needed]}

This generated further reaction and support for the ideas of Barlow and Kapor. In late June, Barlow held a series of dinners in San Francisco with major figures in the computer industry^{[citation needed]} to develop a coherent response to these perceived threats. Barlow considered that: "The actions of the FBI and Secret Service were symptoms of a growing social crisis: Future Shock. America was entering the Information Age with neither laws nor metaphors for the appropriate protection and conveyance of information itself."^[5] Barlow felt that to confront this a formal organization would be needed and hired Cathy Cook as press coordinator and began to set up what would become the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation was formally founded on July 10, 1990, by Kapor, Gilmore and Barlow. Initial funding was provided by Kapor, Wozniak, and an anonymous benefactor.^[6][7]

In 1990, Mike Godwin joined the organization as the first staff counsel. Then in 1991 Esther Dyson and Jerry Berman joined the EFF Board. By 1992 Cliff Figallo became the new director of EFF-Cambridge and in December 1992 Jerry Berman became Acting Executive Director.

Early cases[link]

The creation of the organization was motivated by the massive search and seizure on Steve Jackson Games executed by the United States Secret Service early in 1990. Similar but officially unconnected law-enforcement raids were being conducted across the United States at about that time as part of a state-federal task force called Operation Sundevil. However, the Steve Jackson Games case, which became EFF's first high-profile case, was the major rallying point where EFF began promoting computer and Internet-related civil liberties. In 1993, their offices moved to 1001 G Street in Washington, D.C. That same year Big Dummy's guide to the Internet, an Electronic Frontier Foundation publication, was made available for free download.

EFF's second big case was Bernstein v. United States led by Cindy Cohn, where programmer and professor Daniel J. Bernstein sued the government for permission to publish his encryption software, Snuffle, and a paper describing it. More recently the organization has been involved in defending Edward Felten, Jon Lech Johansen and Dmitry Sklyarov.

Expansion and development[link]

In early 2010, EFF released this poster in celebration of its founding 20 years before.

The organization was originally located at Mitch Kapor's Kapor Enterprises, Inc offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts. By the fall of 1993, the main EFF offices were housed in Washington, D.C., headed up by Jerry Berman. During this time, some of EFF's attention focused on the business of influencing national policy, a business that was not entirely palatable to parts of the organization. In 1994, Mr. Berman parted ways with EFF and formed the Center for Democracy and Technology. EFF moved offices across town, where Drew Taubman briefly took the reins as director. In 1995, under the auspices of director Lori Fena, after some downsizing and in an effort to regroup and refocus on their base support, the organization moved offices to San Francisco, California. There, it took up temporary residence at John Gilmore's Toad Hall, and soon afterward moved into the Hamm's building at 1550 Bryant St. After Fena moved onto the EFF board of directors for a while, the organization was led by Tara Lemmey. Just prior to the EFF's move into its new and present offices at 454 Shotwell St. in SF's Mission District, long-time EFF Legal Director Shari Steele became, and remains as of today, the Executive Director. In the spring of 2006, EFF announced the opening of an office in Washington, D.C. with two new staff attorneys.^[8]

DES Cracker[link]

By the mid-90s the EFF was becoming seriously concerned about the refusal of the US Government to license any secure encryption product for export unless it utilizes key recovery and claims that governments cannot decrypt information when protected by DES, continuing even after the public breaking of the code in the first of the DES Challenges. They coordinated and supported the construction of the EFF DES cracker, using special purpose hardware and software and costing only $210,000.^{[9] [10]} This brought the record for breaking a message down to 56 hours on 17 July 1998 and to under 24 hours on 19 Jan 1999 (in conjunction with distributed.net).

The EFF published the plans and source code for the cracker.^[11] Within four years the Advanced Encryption Standard was standardized as a replacement for DES.

Activities[link]

Litigation[link]

EFF booth at the 2010 RSA Conference

The EFF regularly brings and defends lawsuits at all levels of the US legal system in pursuit of its goals and objectives. Many of the most significant technology law cases have involved the EFF, including MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd., Apple v. Does, and others.

Awards[link]

The EFF organizes two sets of awards to promote work in accordance with its goals and objectives:

The EFF Pioneer Awards are awarded annually to recognize individuals who in its opinion are "leaders who are extending freedom and innovation on the electronic frontier."^[12] In 2009, the honorees were Limor Fried, Harri Hursti and Carl Malamud

The EFF Cooperative Computing Awards are a series of four awards meant "to encourage ordinary Internet users to contribute to solving huge scientific problems," to be awarded to the first individual or group who discovers a prime number with a significant record number of decimal digits. The awards are funded by an anonymous donor.^[13] The awards are:

• $50,000 to the first individual or group who discovers a prime number with at least 1,000,000 decimal digits – Awarded April 6, 2000^[14]
• $100,000 to the first individual or group who discovers a prime number with at least 10,000,000 decimal digits – Awarded October 14, 2009^[15]
• $150,000 to the first individual or group who discovers a prime number with at least 100,000,000 decimal digits
• $250,000 to the first individual or group who discovers a prime number with at least 1,000,000,000 decimal digits.

Support[link]

The foundation receives support from its board members^[16] John Buckman (Chairman), Pamela Samuelson (Vice-Chairman), John Perry Barlow, Lorrie Cranor, David J. Farber, Edward Felten, John Gilmore, Brewster Kahle, Joe Kraus and Brad Templeton. The organization often receives additional pro bono legal assistance from Prof. Eben Moglen.

On February 18, 2004, the EFF announced that it had received $1.2 million from the estate of Leonard Zubkoff.^[17] It will use $1 million of this money to establish the EFF Endowment Fund for Digital Civil Liberties.

In April 2011 George Hotz donated $10,000, the remainder of his legal defense money in his case against Sony.

The agitprop art group Psychological Industries has independently issued buttons with pop culture tropes such as the logo of the Laughing Man from the anime series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (with the original Catcher in the Rye quotation replaced with the slogan of Anonymous), a bleeding roller derby jammer, and Rosie the Riveter on a series of buttons on behalf of the EFF.^[18]

Charity Navigator has given the EFF an overall rating of three out of four stars, and four for its financial efficiency and capacity.^[19]

In literature[link]

The EFF is featured in Dan Brown's techno-thriller novel Digital Fortress. The book was released in 1998, the same year as the EFF DES cracker was built.

See also[link]

Clipper chip Digital rights Digital rights management EFF-Austin Electronic Frontier Canada Electronic Frontiers Australia Free Software Foundation GNU Project Hardware restrictions Information freedom Internet censorship

League for Programming Freedom OpenMedia.ca Open Rights Group,(UK-based) Protection of Broadcasts and Broadcasting Organizations Treaty Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) Switzerland (software) Who Controls the Internet?, a book

Freedom of speech portal Internet portal San Francisco Bay Area portal Information technology portal

Notes[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikinews has related news: Electronic Frontier Foundation

• Official website
  • EFFector
  • Legal Guide for Bloggers
  • History
• Big Dummy's Guide to the Internet on Project Gutenberg
• How to Bypass Internet Censorship, also known by the titles: Bypassing Internet Censorship or Circumvention Tools, a FLOSS Manual, 10 March 2011, 240 pp.

This article relies on references to primary sources or sources affiliated with the subject, rather than references from independent authors and third-party publications. Please add citations from reliable sources. (July 2006)

Cindy Cohn is an American attorney specializing in Internet law. She represented Daniel J. Bernstein and the Electronic Frontier Foundation in Bernstein v. United States, and in 1997 was recognized by California Lawyer Magazine as one of the Lawyers of the Year for this work. She currently serves as Legal Director and General Counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In 2006, Ms. Cohn was named one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America by the National Law Journal. Ms. Cohn also serves on the Board of Directors of the nonprofits Human Rights Advocates and the Verified Voting Foundation.

She studied law at the University of Michigan. She received her undergraduate degree at the University of Iowa and the London School of Economics.

In addition to Bernstein, some of Ms. Cohn's significant cases include Hepting v. AT&T (class action against AT&T for collaborating with the National Security Agency program to wiretap and data-mine Americans' communications), In re Sony BMG Tech. litigation (class action against Sony BMG for placing dangerous digital rights management (DRM) on customers' computers), OPG v. Diebold (Diebold was held liable for sending out unfounded cease and desist notices to internet service providers (ISPs) in an effort to stop public discussion of the flaws in its electronic voting machines), and DVDCCA v. Bunner^[1] (representing Andrew Bunner against the DVD Copy Control Association defending his right to republish a computer program that he found republished elsewhere on the Internet).

References[link]

External links[link]

• Cindy Cohn's Bio on EFF Site
• Human Rights Advocates Home Page

This American law-related biographical article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

John Perry Barlow
At his home in California, USA, December 2010
Born	(1947-10-03) October 3, 1947 (age 64) Sublette County, Wyoming, United States
Occupation	lyricist, essayist
Nationality	American
Period	1971-1995 (lyrics) 1990-present (essays)
Subjects	Internet (essays)
homes.eff.org/~barlow/

John Perry Barlow (born October 3, 1947) is an American poet and essayist, a retired Wyoming cattle rancher, and a cyberlibertarian^[1] political activist who has been associated with both the Democratic and Republican parties. He is also a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead and a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Since May 1998, he has been a Fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Biography[link]

Born in Sublette County, Wyoming, Barlow attended elementary school in a one-room schoolhouse. He was a student at the Fountain Valley School in Colorado. There Barlow met Bob Weir, who would later join the music group the Grateful Dead. Weir and Barlow maintained contact throughout the years; a frequent visitor to Timothy Leary's facility in Millbrook, New York, Barlow introduced the musical group to Leary in 1967. In 1969, Barlow graduated with high honors in comparative religion from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and spent two years traveling. In 1971, he began practicing animal husbandry in Cora, Wyoming, at his family's Bar Cross Land and Livestock Company. He sold that business in 1988.

Barlow in 2006, European Graduate School, Leuk, Switzerland

The seeds of the Barlow-Weir collaboration were sown at a Grateful Dead show at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York, in February 1971. Until this point, Weir had mostly worked with resident Dead lyricist Robert Hunter. Hunter preferred that those who sang his songs stuck to his "canonical" lyrics rather than improvising additions or rearranging words. A feud erupted backstage over a couplet in "Sugar Magnolia" from the band's most recent release (most likely "She can dance a Cajun rhythm/Jump like a Willys in four wheel drive"), culminating in a disgruntled Hunter summoning Barlow and telling him "take him (Weir) -- he's yours.^[2]" In the fall of 1971, with a deal for a solo album in hand and only two songs completed, Weir and Barlow began to write together for the first time.

Fueled by massive amounts of Wild Turkey^{[citation needed]} and a traditional Native American creativity spell recommended by band friend Rolling Thunder, the twosome hammered out such enduring songs as "Cassidy," "Mexicali Blues," and "Black Throated Wind," all three of which would remain in the repertoires of the Grateful Dead and Weir's varied solo projects for years to come. Other songs to emerge from the Weir-Barlow collaboration include "Let It Grow," "The Music Never Stopped," "Estimated Prophet," "I Need A Miracle," "Lost Sailor," "Saint of Circumstance," and "Throwing Stones." Barlow also did collaborations with Grateful Dead keyboardists Brent Mydland then later Vince Welnick.

In 1986, Barlow joined The WELL online community, then known for a strong Deadhead presence. He served on the company's board of directors for several years. In 1990, Barlow founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) along with fellow digital-rights activists John Gilmore and Mitch Kapor. As a founder of EFF, Barlow helped publicize the Secret Service raid on Steve Jackson Games. Barlow's involvement is later documented in the non-fiction book The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier (1992) by Bruce Sterling.^[3] EFF later sponsored the ground-breaking case Steve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United States Secret Service. Steve Jackson Games won the case in 1993.

He married Elaine Parker Barlow, with whom he had three daughters: Amelia Rose, Anna Winter, and Leah Justine. Elaine and John were separated in 1992. He was engaged to Dr. Cynthia Horner, whom he met at a convention center. She died in 1994 from a heart arrhythmia, apparently caused by undetected viral cardiomyopathy.^[4]

Barlow was a good friend of John F. Kennedy Jr.^[5]

Politics[link]

Barlow is a former chairman of the Sublette County Republican Party and served as western Wyoming campaign coordinator for Dick Cheney during his 1978 Congressional campaign.^[6] By the early 2000s, Barlow was unable to reconcile his ardent libertarianism with the prevailing neoconservative movement and "didn't feel tempted to vote for Bush"; after an arrest for possession of a small quantity of marijuana while traveling, he joined the Democratic Party and publicly committed himself to outright political activism for the first time since his spell with the Republican Party.^{[citation needed]} Barlow has subsequently declared that he is a Republican.^[7] He has also claimed on many occasions to be an anarchist.^[8] Barlow has said he voted for Natural Law Party Presidential candidate John Hagelin in 2000 after discovering in the voting booth that his friend Nat Goldhaber was Hagelin's running mate.^[9] He said in 2004: "I'm embarrassed for my country that in my entire voting life, there has never been a major-party candidate whom I felt I could vote for. All of my presidential votes, whether for George Wallace, Dick Gregory, or John Hagelin, have been protest votes."^[9] Barlow said that year he was "voting for John Kerry, though with little enthusiasm."^[9]

Current work[link]

Barlow currently serves as vice-chairman of the EFF's board of directors. The EFF was designed to mediate the "inevitable conflicts that have begun to occur on the border between Cyberspace and the physical world."^[10] They were trying to build a legal wall that would separate and protect the Internet from territorial government, and especially from the U.S. government.^[11]

He is a Fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and Diamond Management & Technology Consultants, and a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. He spends much of his time on the road, lecturing and consulting about civil rights, freedom of speech, the state of the internet and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He delivered lectures and panel discussions at TWiT Live,^[12] TedxHamburg, Hamburg (Germany),^[13] Greenfest SF,^[14] Civitas (Norwegian think tank),^[15] Internet Society (NY Chapter, New York),^[16] the USC Center on Public Diplomacy,^[17] and the European Graduate School (EGS), Saas-Fee, Switzerland.^[18]

Barlow also serves on the advisory boards of Clear Path International, TTI/Vanguard and the global company Touch Light Media^[19] founded by Anita Ondine.

He is listed as a Managing Partner at Algae Systems^[20] of Nevada, a company dedicated to commercializing a novel method for growing microalgae offshore as a biofuel feedstock. He is listed as a member of the faculty of the European Graduate School (EGS), in Saas-Fee, Wallis, Switzerland.

Barlow sits on the advisory board of the Marijuana Policy Project.^[21]

Writing[link]

From 1971 until 1995, Barlow wrote lyrics for the Grateful Dead, mostly through his relationship with Bob Weir. Among others, Barlow's songs include "Cassidy" (about Neal Cassady and Cassidy Law),^[22] "Estimated Prophet", "Black-Throated Wind", "Hell in a Bucket", "Mexicali Blues", "The Music Never Stopped", and "Throwing Stones".

His writings include "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace", which was written in response to the enactment of the Communications Decency Act in 1996 as the EFF saw the law as a threat to the independence and sovereignty of cyberspace. He argued that the cyberspace legal order would reflect the ethical deliberation of the community instead of the coercive power that characterized real-space governance.^[23] Since online "identities have no bodies," they found it inappropriate to obtain order in the cyberspace by physical coercion. ^[24] Instead ethics, enlightened self-interest and the commonwealth were the elements they believed to create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace.^[23] Later, articles such as "The Economy of Ideas" were also widely circulated in providing a vision for human creativity online.

Barlow has written extensively for Wired magazine, as well as The New York Times, Nerve, and Communications of the ACM. In his writings, he explained the wonder of the Internet. The Internet to him is more than a computer network. It is a place that he called an "electronic frontier".^[1] "He frequently wrote in language that echoed Henry Stanley's African diary. "Imagine discovering a continent so vast that it may have no end to its dimensions. Imagine a new world with more resources than all our future greed might exhaust, more opportunities than there will ever be entrepreneurs enough to exploit, and a peculiar kind of real estate that expands with development. Imagine a place where trespassers leave no footprints, where goods can be stolen infinite number of times and yet remain in the possession of their original owners, where business you never heard of can own the history of your personal affairs.""^[25] He has wanted to encourage and provoke youngsters to explore the cyberspace through his writing.

Barlow has also returned to writing lyrics, most recently collaborating with The String Cheese Incident's mandolinist and vocalist Michael Kang, including their song "Desert Dawn." Barlow is often seen at String Cheese Incident concerts mixing with the fans and members in the band.

He has also recently collaborated with the Chicago-based jamband Mr. Blotto on their release Barlow Shanghai. He is an advisor to the Hypothes.is project. ^[26]

Further source[link]

• Goldsmith, Jack, and Tim Wu (February 24, 2006). Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World. USA: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-515266-2. 

References[link]

External links[link]

Biography portal

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: John Perry Barlow

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: John Perry Barlow

• "Barlow Home(stead)Page". Electronic Frontier Foundation. https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/. Retrieved 2010-11-27. 
• "John Perry Barlow Profile (Biography, filmography, photos and video lectures)". European Graduate School. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/john-perry-barlow/biography/. Retrieved 2010-11-27. 
• List of Barlow's lyrical work for the Grateful Dead, in Allan, Alex (ed.). "John Perry Barlow Songs". Grateful Dead Lyric And Song Finder (clearlight.com). http://www3.clearlight.com/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/~acsa/findbarl.pl. Retrieved 2007-11-12. 
• Davis, Aaron (July 28, 2005). "Interview: John Perry Barlow, Wyoming's Estimated Prophet". Planet Jackson Hole. http://www.planetjh.com/news/A_100072.aspx. Retrieved 2007-11-12. 
• This American Life "74:Conventions" Featuring John Perry Barlow in the 3rd Part
• An interview given to Reason magazine
• Publications John Perry Barlow at EFF
• Personal blog copy hosted on Internet Archive.
• Managing Partner at Algae Systems

Adam Savage
Savage in July 2011
Born	Adam Whitney Savage[1] (1967-07-15) July 15, 1967 (age 44) New York City, U.S.
Nationality	American
Education	Tisch School of the Arts
Occupation	MythBusters co-host, designer/fabricator, actor, educator
Height	6'0"
Religion	None (Atheist)
Spouse	Julia Savage (2002-present)
Children	Two
Website
adamsavage.com

Adam Whitney Savage (born July 15, 1967)^[2] is an American industrial design and special effects designer/fabricator, actor, educator, and co-host of the Discovery Channel television series MythBusters.^[1] His model work has appeared in major films, including Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones and The Matrix Reloaded. He is a prominent member of the skeptic community. He lives in San Francisco with his twin sons and wife, Julia.

Early life and education[link]

Born in New York City, Savage was raised in Sleepy Hollow in Westchester County New York.^[3] He graduated from Sleepy Hollow High School in 1985.^[4] His father, Whitney Lee Savage (1928-1998), was a painter, filmmaker and animator known for his work on Sesame Street, and has a permanent exhibit in the Avampato Discovery Museum.^[5] His mother is a psychotherapist. His sister Kate Savage is also an artist. As a teenager in Sleepy Hollow, he routinely visited the local bike shop to have flat tires fixed. The shop showed him how to do the repairs himself. From this experience, Savage said, "I realized you could take a bike apart and put it back together and it wasn't that hard...I've been building and putting bicycles together since then."^[4]

Adam Savage began acting as a child, and has had five years of acting school.^[1] His early credits include voicing animated characters that his father produced for Sesame Street, Mr. Whipple's stock boy "Jimmy" in a Charmin commercial, a helper in the special effects of Star Wars, and a drowning young man saved by a lifeguard in the 1985 Billy Joel music video "You're Only Human (Second Wind)."^[6] He attended New York University's Tisch School of the Arts for acting for six months before dropping out.^[7]

Describing the early abandonment of his acting career, Savage said "...by the time I was, I guess probably nineteen, I had passed on that in favor of doing stuff with my hands – graphic design, assistant animation in New York, and then eventually working in theater in San Francisco, and film special effects. Then MythBusters came along and it was the perfect marriage of two things, performance and special effects."^[8] On November 25, 2011, Savage received an honorary doctorate from the University of Twente (Enschede, Netherlands) for his role in the popularization of science and technology.^[9][10]

Career[link]

Savage in July 2008

Savage has worked as an animator, graphic designer, carpenter, projectionist, film developer, television presenter, set designer, toy designer, and gallery owner. He worked as a model maker on the films Galaxy Quest, Bicentennial Man, Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones, The Matrix Reloaded, and Space Cowboys, among others.

Savage played the role of a helpful engineer in the 2001 film Ever Since the World Ended^[11] and the role of an army surplus store owner who sells a man a rocket engine for his pickup truck in 2006 in The Darwin Awards, which also featured MythBusters co-star Jamie Hyneman.^[12] He made a cameo appearance along with Jamie Hyneman on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation on the May 1, 2008, episode "The Theory of Everything." In the "making of" material for The Matrix Revolutions, he appears in his role as a special effects artist and discusses some of the miniature effects used and the difficulties involved.

He previously taught advanced model making in the department of Industrial Design at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.^[1]

Savage has become a regular presenter at magician James Randi's annual skeptics' conference, The Amaz!ng Meeting, since first appearing in January 2006.^[13] He also appeared in the UK, giving a talk at the first Amazing Meeting London from October 3–4, 2009, hosted at the Mermaid Conference Centre, Blackfriars.^[14]

Savage was a featured performer at the three w00tstock v1.x shows in 2009, and appeared in four w00tstock v2.x shows in 2010. He also appeared as a guest on Diggnation's 220th show.^[15]

Savage has also been a regular guest speaker at the annual Maker Faire since 2008, speaking on different topics such as his obsession with the dodo bird and problem solving, and also taking questions from the audience members about the Mythbusters and other things.

Savage hosted an episode of the Discovery Channel series Curiosity, in which he speculated as to whether or not it is possible for humans to live forever. During the program various topics such as limb regeneration, organ printers, and even age reversal are discussed.

Savage and Hyneman are judges on the game show Unchained Reaction which premiered in March 2012.^[16]

[edit] MythBusters

Savage has been involved in MythBusters since its creation. His role in the show (that he shares with all the other talent) is to either disprove ("bust") myths or confirm them through testing and experiments done at different scales. If the myth is about a one-time occurrence and not about whether or not something can happen at all, it is often deemed "plausible" instead.

Savage's demeanour on MythBusters is animated and energetic, providing a foil to Jamie Hyneman's more reserved straight man persona.^[17]

Savage and Hyneman were the only hosts of the show for the first season of MythBusters, but starting with the second season, members of Hyneman's staff were introduced and began to appear regularly in episodes; Kari Byron, Tory Belleci and welder Scottie Chapman appeared in the second season. In the third season, Chapman was replaced by Grant Imahara, a robot builder and model maker. In an interview Savage gave during The Amaz!ng Meeting 5, he expressed an interest in proving natural selection over creationism on MythBusters.

Savage also stated that such an episode is unlikely because MythBusters has a policy against trying to disprove supernatural phenomena.^[19]

Personal life[link]

At Reason Rally Washington D.C. March 23, 2012

Savage and his wife Julia were married in 2002. He has twin sons from a previous relationship.^[20] He wears a hearing aid on his left ear due to a congenital condition.^[21] He is a practiced juggler, as seen on Mythbusters. He is also an atheist.^[22] He has a lifelong interest in costume making. He said, "I remember my mom getting me a 'Jaws' costume when 'Jaws' came out...and wearing a Batman costume. Back then, everyone dressed up as hobos." He strives for authenticity with his costumes. While in high school, he and his father made a suit of armor out of aluminum roof flashing that had 700 rivets. He said, "I wore it to school and passed out from heat exhaustion in math class. I woke up in the nurse's office and the first thing I said was 'Where's my armor'?" In 2011, he built a costume based on the character No-Face from the film Spirited Away.^[4] In early 2012, it was announced that he would be the commencement speaker at Sarah Lawrence College.^[23]

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Adam Savage

• Adam Savage's personal website
• Adam Savage at the Internet Movie Database
• Adam Savage on Twitter
• Adam Savage's biography from the Discovery Channel
• Interview with The Sneeze
• Interview with Reddit.com
• Adam Savage interviewed on Penn Radio
• Discovery
• Savage Presentation at The Entertainment Gathering (December 2008)
• Adam Savage on Diggnation (September 2009)
• Adam Savage interviewed on Geek a Week

Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow signing a book during June 2010.
Born	(1971-07-17) July 17, 1971 (age 40) Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Occupation	Author, blogger
Genres	Science fiction, postcyberpunk
Notable work(s)	Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Little Brother
Notable award(s)	John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, John W. Campbell Memorial Award, Prometheus Award, Sunburst Award
Spouse(s)	Alice Taylor
Children	Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow
Influences William Gibson [1]
craphound.com

Cory Efram Doctorow (/ˈkɒri ˈdɒktəroʊ/; born July 17, 1971) is a Canadian-British^[2] blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who serves as co-editor of the weblog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licences for his books. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, and "post-scarcity" economics.^[3]