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A select group representing the highest achievements in technology and leadership.
Jacob Appelbaum, the Tor Project; Alec Muffett, Facebook software engineer and internet security evangelist
In the near future, professors, journalists, or anyone who wants or needs to remain anonymous on the internet should thank Jacob Appelbaum and Alec Muffett for protecting their privacy.
Only they're not likely to have heard of the duo who were instrumental in carving out a private corner on the web by getting the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to formally recognize .onion as a Special-use Domain Name.
It's an accomplishment that Appelbaum, a security researcher and developer, privacy expert and a core member of the Tor Project has called "a small and important landmark in the movement to build privacy into the structure of the internet."
Appelbaum and Muffett, a Facebook software engineer and internet security evangelist, began working to keep .onion from becoming a Top Level Domain (TLD) in 2013, or as Appelbaum calls it, the "Summer of Snowden."
As a TLD, the domain could have been sold by The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).
"Losing control of .onion had the potential to create confusion for all hidden services, not just Facebook," Muffett says. "This is really about securing the way people connect to Facebook. With our .onion site on the TOR network, people can confidently connect to Facebook knowing their link is genuine and end-to-end secure."
And Appelbaum adds that "end users now have the security and privacy they thought they had."
But the designation came after two years of dogged work by Muffet and Appelbaum, who both have more than a passing acquaintance with privacy issues. Appelbaum now resides in Berlin after his own privacy was compromised following the U.S. Justice Department's push to obtain his email records from Google while investigating his work as a WikiLeaks volunteer. Google was slapped with a gag order forbidding the company from notifying Appelbaum of the government's request and prompting a slow-burning legal battle when the search engine company refused to turn over the information. [[Alec quote tk]]
As for Muffett, he wasn't long graduated from college when he wrote the first version of Crack, a Unix passwordcracking program that helps systems administrators sniff out...