Peter Eckersley, Co-Creator of Let's Encrypt, Dies at 43 (sophos.com) 35
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."
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."
He will surely be missed (Score:4, Informative)
Oh man (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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)
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
Re: (Score:3)
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 older I get... (Score:2)
... 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.
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Thank you, and rest in peace, Peter.
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Brilliant, compassionate, and socially aware (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re: 43??? WTF!!! (Score:2)
Can you provide a source for that?
Re: 43??? WTF!!! (Score:5, Funny)
If I were the OP, I wouldn't bother posting it.
Right, because you'd be full of shit.
The truth is out there.
It was aliens!11!!!ones
Re: (Score:3)
And you're small minded.
Right, those of us who insist on citations for absurd claims are the small minded ones. Wait, what?
Re: 43??? WTF!!! (Score:4, Interesting)
Generally, if my claim is counter-intuitive or non-obvious, I will back it up. But sometimes people want a citation that the sky is blue, lest you be lying about that. Basically they use demanding citations as an offensive tactic in the argument. Playing their game can only lose.
This of course however is not a case of that. This person is obviously full of shit, and frankly, I'm actually surprised reverse moderation didn't happen. Instead, it seems like everything was moderated correctly. He's full of shit, you're funny and insightful. I swear to god there are days when there's nothing but Q crazies moderating... and days where they're all gone storming the capital or something.
Re: 43??? WTF!!! (Score:3)
No, it's true. You are full of shit. Why would you take the time to post legit information, but then refuse to provide the link? If you had legit information to warn people about, you'd either take the time to make the post AND provide the evidence, or you just say "they're not gonna believe me anyway, so fuck em" and not waste time posting anything.
Re: (Score:1, Informative)
I went to bed last night and this can be discovered by searching, but sure:
* Excess non-COVID deaths in the UK: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ne... [telegraph.co.uk] (paywall: https://archive.ph/VVQRL [archive.ph])
* Graph of excess deaths not involving COVID: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplep... [ons.gov.uk]
The graphs look similar in the US and other Western nations. Here's one I have on hand and uploaded for Chile, showing the age demographics: https://i.imgur.com/8b5HZ1i.jp... [imgur.com]
There's no controversy that the non-COVID excess mortality is up, the question
Re: (Score:2)
the question is why, and the most controversial hypothesis is that the vaccines are contributors.
This would be a controversial hypothesis. Mostly because it would be... fuck it, I'm done sugar coating it- stupid. Fucking stupid is what it would be.
Now why would it be stupid? Because the excess deaths appear as soon as COVID does, and long before there is a vaccine.
The excess deaths are explained. They're the miscounting of COVID deaths.
I love that you show that they had elevated biomarkers indications [things that COVID causes], and your disease-addled brain goes "Vacc1n3!?!?" rather than, "fuck, t
Re: (Score:1)
>This would be a controversial hypothesis. Mostly because it would be... fuck it, I'm done sugar coating it- stupid. Fucking stupid is what it would be.
Why wouldn't myocarditis and pericarditis cause mortality in some percentage of victims? It's not a question that it's happening, it's a question of how much and what the longer term effects are. There's especially an excess rate of deaths in athletes.
>I love that you show that they had elevated biomarkers indications [things that COVID causes], and yo
a possible answer: foreign dna (latent virus) (Score:2)
Systemic reactivation of herpesviruses may occur in intensive care unit (ICU) patients and is associated with morbidity and mortality. Data on severe Coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) and concomitant reactivation of herpesviruses are lacking.
Methods
We selected patients admitted to ICU for confirmed COVID-19 who underwent systematic testing for Epstein–Barr virus (EBV), cytomegalovirus (CMV) and human-herpes virus-6 (HHV-6) DNAemia while in the ICU. We retrospectively analysed frequency, timing, durati
Re: (Score:2)
Why wouldn't myocarditis and pericarditis cause mortality in some percentage of victims? It's not a question that it's happening, it's a question of how much and what the longer term effects are. There's especially an excess rate of deaths in athletes.
It probably does.
Myocarditis and pericarditis are not lethal problems.
Now, is there a subset of people who may have comorbidities that pericarditis can be dangerous for? Absolutely. These people are obviously recommended by their physician not to be vaccinated if they have a bunker to hide in, because the vaccination is potentially dangerous. Of course the other side of that, is the vaccination is far less dangerous than getting COVID itself, which causes exponentially higher rates of the above mentioned
Re:43??? WTF!!! (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
The excess deaths are the indication that we systematically undercount COVID deaths. This has been known (and expected) since the first wave in 2020.
It's only controversial among conspiracy theorists.
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>You first heard that term as a rebuttal to a claim you undoubtedly made that COVID deaths are highly overestimated.
I made no such claim. They're under-counted, but the excess death rate as reported by the FDA has always been a good indicator during the early waves as to the larger effects of COVID.
>The excess deaths are the indication that we systematically undercount COVID deaths.
COVID is now listed as a contributor to a death if the person was sick with it at the time of death. In the sources I men
Re: (Score:2)
I made no such claim. They're under-counted, but the excess death rate as reported by the FDA has always been a good indicator during the early waves as to the larger effects of COVID.
Fair enough. I stereotyped you, and seemingly incorrectly.
COVID is now listed as a contributor to a death if the person was sick with it at the time of death. In the sources I mentioned they clearly tell you that they're considering non-COVID excess mortality, which includes people who were infected with COVID at the time of death.
I think you and I passed each other in the skies, here.
Undercounted means incorrectly attributed as non-COVID related.
So, uh, of course the sources you mention call them non-COVID excess mortality. That's literally the definition of undercounted, if my claim proves true.
If your hypothesis is that COVID is causing excess mortality long after the fact, you're going to have to back it up. And explain that preprint I linked you to where the researchers excluded COVID-positive people and found that vaccine recipients had elevated biomarkers indicating heart damage shortly after receiving the vaccine.
Nope. If you look at the graphs of excess deaths, they very closely track COVID deaths.
I see no evidence that there's an "after the fact" element.
To claim that it's impossible that this is a contributing factor in the non-COVID excess mortality that we're seeing now (especially as we know Omicron has a much lower IFR), isn't rationality, it's dogma.
Didn't say it wasn't possible. I s
you want citations, here you go (Score:4, Informative)
Background
Italy has been the first European country to be affected by the COVID-19 epidemic which started out at the end of February. In this report, we focus our attention on the Veneto Region, in the North-East of Italy, which is one of the areas that were first affected by the rapid spread of SARS-CoV-2. We aim to evaluate the trend of all-cause mortality and to give a description of the characteristics of the studied population.
Methods
Data used in the analyses were released by the majority of municipalities and cover the 93% of the total population living in the Veneto Region. We evaluated the trend of overall mortality from Jan.01 to Jun.30. 2020. Moreover we compared the COVID-19-related deaths to the overall deaths.
Results
From March 2020, the overall mortality rate increased exponentially, affecting males and people aged >76 the most. The confirmed COVID-19-related death rate in the Veneto region between Mar.01 and Apr.302020 is 30 per 100,000 inhabitants. In contrast, the all-cause mortality increase registered in the same months in the municipalities included in the study is 219 per 100,000 inhabitants.
Conclusions
COVID-19 has a primary role in the increase in mortality but does not entirely explain such a high number of deaths. Strategies need to be developed to reduce this gap in case of future waves of the pandemic.
https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889... [doi.org]
Re: (Score:2)
You're right- I totally left out the excess deaths caused by a lack of available medical care, or desire to avoid hospitals.
Also not controversial, and predicted to occur.
Re: (Score:2)
Can a virus in the latency phase cut the lifespan of a healthy person? This question is answered by Dr. Hanan Polansky and Adrian Javaherian in a new video released on Youtube.com. The video was produced by the Center for the Biology of Chronic Disease (CBCD).
The video can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
The video explains the findings of a paper published in the medical journal, Open Medicine in easy to understand, everyday language. The title of the paper is “The Latent Cytomegaloviru
SSL termination (Score:1)
Met Peter a few times. (Score:1)
The nature of his Cancer :-( (Score:1)