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

Seven years ago, Slashdot reader #66,542 announced "Panopticlick 2.0," a site showing how your web browser handles trackers.

Peter was a staff technologist at the EFF for more than a decade and worked on a number of privacy-protecting projects. Let'sEncrypt is used by hundreds of millions of people.

The sudden death of Eckersley was announced by the EFF's director of cyber security. The announcement says that if you've ever used Let's Encrypt or Certbot, you owe it to him. A glass is raised.

Privacy Badger and HTTPS Everywhere are two of the privacy and security projects co-created by Peter Eckersley on his website. He convened the stop-covid.tech group, advising many groups working on privacy-preserving digital contact tracing and exposure notification. Peter Eckersley's repository can be found 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 was the first to build a free certificate signing system that was easy to use andScalable. The Let's Encrypt project was soon able to gain the trust of the browser making community, to the point of quickly getting accepted as a approved certificate signer by most mainstream browsers.

The aim of Peter's institute is to make sure that we pick the right social and economic problems to solve with artificial intelligence.

"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."