March 29th, 2024


You can also download a printable PDF version of Dr. Levine's curriculum vitae.

About John R. Levine

John R. Levine writes, lectures, and consults on the Internet, email and spam, and related computer topics.

He has written or co-authored many books including the best-selling Internet for Dummies.

He consults for multiple clients on Internet and e-mail topics. Past clients have included Orbitz and Industry Canada.

He speaks to many trade, policy, and general groups. He's spoken at the Federal Trade Commission spam forum, the International Telecommunications Union thematic meeting on spam, and the Internet Law and Policy Forum as well as to CBS television, Minnesota Power, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, Alex. Brown &: Sons, Hewlett Packard (Mexico), and IBM Canada.

He's also served as an expert witness in civil and criminal legal action, including the October 2004 trial of Jeremy Jaynes, convicted of criminal spamming, and Field vs. Google in 2006.

Professional Background

In 2006, he co-founded the Domain Assurance Council, a non-profit trade association created to simplify organizations' access to accreditation and reputation services. DAC is dedicated to eliminating the confusion and complexity of disparate solution providers by providing a common way to publish information.

From 2005 to 2007 he was a partner in Blackvine Consulting, G.P. Montreal, Québec. Blackvine provided project consulting to government and industry in Canada. In 2005 it created an in-depth study on international aspects of Canadian spam to Industry Canada.

Between 1993 and 1996 he published and edited The Journal of C Language Translation, a quarterly technical journal. Contributors included P. J. Plauger, Dennis Ritchie, and many others.

In 1989 he co-founded Segue Software (Lexington, Mass.) a NASDAQ listed software company. He participated in software re-engineering from DOS to UNIX, including Lotus 1-2-3 for Unix and the Norton Utilities for UNIX. After a change in direction, Segue is now a leading provider of web and client/server validation and testing tools. He continued as a director of the corporation and an informal consultant until the company was sold to Borland Software in early 2006.

From 1984 to 1987, he was a Senior MTS with Javelin Software (Cambridge, Mass.) He was one of the authors of Javelin, an award-winning PC modelling and analysis program. He also acted as corporate DP director during the year that they needed one.

From 1979 to 1984 he was with Interactive Systems Corp. (Santa Monica Calif. and Boston, Mass.) He was a principal developer at Interactive, the first commercial provider of UNIX software, and opened their Boston Technical Office, where he was the primary kernel architect for AIX 1.0, the UNIX implementation for the IBM RT PC, wrote the original Unix C compiler and assembler for the RT, and wrote INfort, Interactive's Fortran 77 for 16 bit systems.

Related Activities

Since 2005, he's been a Senior Technical Advisor to the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, an organization of large ISPs and infrastructre vendors such as AOL, Comcast, Microsoft, and Yahoo.

From 2005 to 2007 he was a member of the ICANN At Large Advisory Committee (ALAC) which is charged with the daunting task of representing at-large Internet users to ICANN.

Since late 2003 he's been chair of the Internet Research Task Force's Anti-Spam Research Group (ASRG). He has rechartered the ASRG, established informal contacts with large Internet providers, and set up new working groups.

Since 2008 he's been President of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail, a user advocacy group, and had previously been a board member since 1997. He also runs the Network Abuse Clearinghouse, a popular free service that helps Internet users report and deal with with on-line abusive behavior.

Since 1986 he has been the moderator of the comp.compilers usenet group, a technical interest group on compilers (programs that translate among different computer languages), with an estimated readership of over 100,000.

Publications

He has written or co-authored over twenty books, from the best selling Internet for Dummies, now in its twelfth edition, to technical works on compiler and graphics software.

Public Service

From 2004 to 2007 he was the Mayor of the Village of Trumansburg NY. From March 1999 was an elected member of the Village's governing board of trustees. He also acted as commissioner of the water and sewer departments. He's worked on utility regulation, including cable TV franchise renegotiation and cellular tower regulation, and upgrades to village-owned utility infrastructure. As mayor, he supervised the village's staff of 12 full time and about 40 part time employees.

Education

Dr. Levine holds two degrees from Yale University (New Haven, Conn.) He has a B.A., 1975, in Computer Science, and a PhD, 1984, Computer Science, advised by A.J. Perlis. His thesis was A Data Base System for Small Interactive Computers in which he developed one of the earliest report-by-example systems and a pioneering outline document editor.



John R. Levine
Taughannock Networks
Post Office Box 727
Trumansburg NY 14886
+1 607 330 5711
info@taugh.com