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Electronic Frontier Foundation Encryption Security

Peter Eckersley, Co-Creator of Let's Encrypt, Dies at 43 (sophos.com) 35

Posted by EditorDavid from the sad-news dept.
Seven years ago, Slashdot reader #66,542 announced "Panopticlick 2.0," a site showing how your web browser handles trackers.

But it was just one of the many privacy-protecting projects Peter Eckersley worked on, as a staff technologist at the EFF for more than a decade. Eckersley also co-created Let's Encrypt, which today is used by hundreds of millions of people.

Friday the EFF's director of cybersecurity announced the sudden death of Eckersley at age 43. "If you have ever used Let's Encrypt or Certbot or you enjoy the fact that transport layer encryption on the web is so ubiquitous it's nearly invisible, you have him to thank for it," the announcement says. "Raise a glass."

Peter Eckersley's web site is still online, touting "impactful privacy and cybersecurity projects" that he co-created, including not just Let's Encrypt, Certbot, and Panopticlick, but also Privacy Badger and HTTPS Everywhere. And in addition, "During the COVID-19 pandemic he convened the the stop-covid.tech group, advising many groups working on privacy-preserving digital contact tracing and exposure notification, assisting with several strategy plans for COVID mitigation." You can also still find Peter Eckersley's GitHub repositories online.

But Peter "had apparently revealed recently that he had been diagnosed with cancer," according to a tribute posted online by security company Sophos, noting his impact is all around us: If you click on the padlock in your browser [2022-09-0T22:37:00Z], you'll see that this site, like our sister blog site Sophos News, uses a web certificate that's vouched for by Let's Encrypt, now a well-established Certificate Authority (CA). Let's Encrypt, as a CA, signs TLS cryptographic certificates for free on behalf of bloggers, website owners, mail providers, cloud servers, messaging services...anyone, in fact, who needs or wants a vouched-for encryption certificate, subject to some easy-to-follow terms and conditions....

Let's Encrypt wasn't the first effort to try to build a free-as-in-freedom and free-as-in-beer infrastructure for online encryption certificates, but the Let's Encrypt team was the first to build a free certificate signing system that was simple, scalable and solid. As a result, the Let's Encrypt project was soon able to to gain the trust of the browser making community, to the point of quickly getting accepted as a approved certificate signer (a trusted-by-default root CA, in the jargon) by most mainstream browsers....

In recent years, Peter founded the AI Objectives Institute, with the aim of ensuring that we pick the right social and economic problems to solve with AI:

"We often pay more attention to how those goals are to be achieved than to what those goals should be in the first place. At the AI Objectives Institute, our goal is better goals."
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Peter Eckersley, Co-Creator of Let's Encrypt, Dies at 43 More

Peter Eckersley, Co-Creator of Let's Encrypt, Dies at 43

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  • He will surely be missed (Score:4, Informative)

    by ddtmm ( 549094 ) on Monday September 05, 2022 @12:04AM (#62852641)
    A certified genius. RIP

  • Oh man (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Monday September 05, 2022 @12:53AM (#62852691)

    The older I get, the more sensitive I am to people who die well before their time. Especially those that are younger than I am...

    Rest in Peace, Peter, and thanks for all your contributions.

    • Re:Oh man (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sg_oneill ( 159032 ) on Monday September 05, 2022 @02:21AM (#62852767)

      Yeah its disturbing isn't it. When I was younger, my dad warned me that "As you get older, people start dying around you a lot sooner than you'd expect". He wasn't wrong. 43, shit man, he had half a lifetime left. Cancer is the worst.

      Lets Encrypt has made a huge difference on the world in terms of getting companies on HTTPS and out of the snooping eyes of a lot of malicious governments and corporate actors (Its far from a complete defence, but it helps and is still a big part of the complete solution). We've lost someone important here.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Yeah its disturbing isn't it. When I was younger, my dad warned me that "As you get older, people start dying around you a lot sooner than you'd expect". He wasn't wrong.

        It's always a good reminder that everybody can, and will, die at some point. Every day is a good day to die, so every day is a good day to work on some open issue so it won't be a loose end come the day you finally do die. I find that works better than letting people dying disturb you.

        Still and all, tip of the hat to him.

        Let's Encrypt has made a huge difference on the world in terms of getting companies on HTTPS and out of the snooping eyes of a lot of malicious governments and corporate actors (It's far from a complete defence, but it helps and is still a big part of the complete solution). We've lost someone important here.

        I'm actually not sure if this is more of a good thing to everybody than a boon to the likes of google, protecting them (and not you) from asshole ISPs injecting/replacing adverts in http s

      • I had a couple classmates die shortly after university. So hard to see people struck down before they even had a chance to really live life. They were some of the most outgoing people in my class too. Still think about them from time to time, 20 years later.

    • ... the more I feel my own mortality particularly when someone younger than me such as this chap dies even though I'm still a long way from retirement age. But then I guess thats part of the human condition.

    • Seconded. I'm amazed that he was into so many things that I actually use, amazing reach! Sad that such a talented person gets so little time... Makes you think.

      Thank you, and rest in peace, Peter.

    • Oh hell yes. I'm about 9 years older than Peter (was). And it makes me so sad when people go before their time.

  • Brilliant, compassionate, and socially aware (Score:5, Informative)

    by narcc ( 412956 ) on Monday September 05, 2022 @01:17AM (#62852715) Journal

    There's no telling what he could have achieved had he not been lost to us at such a young age.

    I'll be watching closely to see what his AI Objectives Institute produces. This needs more views [youtube.com] You'll find Peter's presentation about 50 minutes in, but the whole thing is worth a watch. He brought a lot of great people together there.

  • May his soul rest in peace beyond TLS offloading.
  • I'm from Melbourne, Peter's home town. He and I had a fair few mutual friends, and I got to talk to him a few times when he was on a flying visit here. Very interesting guy. There have been a large number of memorials organised for him, online and off-line. He was nicknamed "Fuzzy" because of his bushy hair and beard. I also work in the IT industry, where Let's Encrypt has become an essential tool for every company.
  • Without giving away too much private information, I can report that Peter died of bowel cancer, which was not detected until two weeks before he died. He had complained of symptoms since the start of 2022. My takeaway here is get yourself checked out if you notice marked and ongoing changes in the way your body is working. Bowel cancer is apparently treatable if caught early enough. Look after yourselves people! Also, if you can, find out as much as you can about your extended family's health history. There

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