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Mansa Musa was the ruler of the Mali Empire in West Africa. Details recorded here should be sourced; unknown information is left blank.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
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C2Net was an Internet cryptography company founded by Sameer Parekh, which was sold to Red Hat in 2000. It was best known for its Stronghold secure webserver software.
C2Net started out as Community ConneXion in 1994,[1][2] an Internet Privacy Provider similar to an Internet service provider providing customers with anonymous Internet services, from dialup access to email accounts. Community ConneXion implemented the first double-blind anonymous mail forwarding service, aka "nym server",[3][4][5][6] as well as being the company that commercialized the Anonymizer before selling it to Lance Cottrell's Anonymizer Inc.
After seeing a demand for an Apache-based SSL-capable web server, Sameer Parekh developed the first version of Stronghold by plugging together Apache with SSLeay, Apache-SSL, and a commercially licensed RSAref. The product was wildly successful but the company was unwilling to compromise security to get an export license for its products. Thus, C2Net purchased UKWeb, an Apache consultancy in Leeds, which independently re-engineered the Stronghold product (without RSAref) for the international market. This made C2Net the first American company to be capable of providing strong encryption solutions to a worldwide market.
Eventually C2Net hired the SSLeay developers Eric Young and Tim Hudson[1] in Brisbane, Australia to develop more encryption products. C2Net's relationship with RSA Data Security, Inc. was rocky because C2Net was using unlicensed versions of RC4, RC2, and other RSA algorithms (rather than a version licensed from them directly), which made it possible to develop a full strength version of Stronghold outside of the United States. Eventually, C2Net and RSA Data Security, Inc. resolved their differences, and C2Net purchased a patent license for RSA and a license to use RC4 and RC2 within the United States. During merger negotiations between RSA and C2Net, RSA hired C2Net's Australian team and set up their own overseas development effort in Australia in order to produce the BSAFE-SSL product for worldwide sales. Other companies began to emulate this development strategy and the United States government subsequently relaxed restrictions on export of cryptographic technology.
C2Net also offered SafePassage client-side products, including a web proxy and also a Virtual Private Network (VPN).[7]
In October, 1998, C2Net and the Apache Project hosted the first ApacheCon conference.[8][9][10]
After losing the Australian office, C2Net focused primarily on selling and supporting Stronghold and hired a new CEO, Bill Rowzee. He brought the company back to profitability, and as the RSA patent was due to expire in 2000, they shifted the company's strategy to focus primarily on support. Finally, they sold the company to Red Hat in 2000 for around $42.7 Million.[11][12]
"In 1998, there was an event called ApacheCon, in San Francisco, hosted by CNet, but that was before the Apache Software Foundation was formed." -- Rich Bowen, Vice President of Conferences, Apache Software Foundation.
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C2Net was an Internet cryptography company founded by Sameer Parekh, which was sold to Red Hat in 2000. It was best known for its Stronghold secure webserver software.
Sameer Parekh is the founder of C2Net Software, Inc. While in high school in Libertyville, Illinois, he published an underground newspaper called The Free Journal, promoting libertarian ideas. In 1993 Parekh moved to Berkeley, California, to attend the University of California, Berkeley, and joined the cypherpunks. In his second year at Cal, he started C2Net, a privacy-oriented ISP which provided anonymous accounts and an anonymous remailer, and was the first home of the Anonymizer web surfing proxy. Through the mid- to late 1990s, Parekh was a frequently cited critic of U.S. policy on encryption software. The cover story for the September 1997 issue of Forbes focused on his views of the political and social impact of cryptography. Through C2Net, Parekh pioneered the offshore development of cryptography by U.S. companies to avoid U.S. regulation, and later helped organize the first global conference on financial cryptography in Anguilla. He was also an advisor to and the chairman of HavenCo, a company that attempted to create a data haven in the Principality of Sealand. After selling C2Net to Red Hat, Parekh traveled around Central and Eastern Europe in 2001 on a DJ tour. He played in countries such as Poland, Serbia, Croatia, Latvia. He also produced a number of "renegade" events in the Port of Oakland. Parekh was a 2007 Lincoln Fellow of the Claremont Institute. As of spring 2012, Parekh is the proprietor of Falkor Systems, a flying robot startup based in the New York area. In 2014, he was "Entrepreneur in Residence" at the Correll Robotics lab, University of Colorado at Boulder.
Anonymizer, Inc. is an Internet privacy company, founded in 1995 by Lance Cottrell, author of the Mixmaster anonymous remailer. Anonymizer was originally named Infonex Internet. The name was changed to Anonymizer in 1997 when the company acquired a web based privacy proxy of the same name developed by Justin Boyan at Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science. Boyan licensed the software to C2Net for public beta testing before selling it to Infonex. One of the first web privacy companies founded, Anonymizer creates a VPN link between its servers and its users computer, creating a random IP address, rather than the one actually being used. This can be used to anonymously report a crime, avoid spam, avoid Internet censorship, keep the users identity safe and track competitors, among other uses.
Red Hat, LLC (formerly Red Hat Software, Inc. and then Red Hat, Inc.) is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises and is a subsidiary of IBM. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with other offices worldwide. Red Hat has become associated to a large extent with its enterprise operating system Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Having grown significantly beyond just Linux, it also includes the OpenShift Container Platform, Ansible Automation Platform, and Red Hat AI. Red Hat had acquired the open-source enterprise middleware vendor JBoss. Red Hat now offers OpenShift Virtualization, which replaces the long retired product Red Hat Virtualization (RHV), an enterprise virtualization product. Red Hat provides operating system platforms, middleware, applications, management products, support, training, and consulting services. Red Hat creates, maintains, and contributes to many free software projects. It has acquired the codebases of several proprietary software products through corporate mergers and acquisitions, and has released such software under open source licenses. In 2025, Red Hat was the third-largest corporate contributor to the Linux kernel, accounting for 6.5% of the changes, behind Intel and Google. On October 28, 2018, IBM announced its intent to acquire Red Hat for $34 billion. The acquisition closed on July 9, 2019, and it now operates as an independent subsidiary. On January 12, 2026, Red Hat converted from a corporation to a limited liability company.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Shirley Chisholm, elected in 1968.