Peter Eckersley RIP
Peter was the leader of EFF's contributions to Let's Encrypt and ACME over the course of several years during which these technologies turned from a wild idea into an important part of Internet infrastructure. He also took a lot of initiative in coalescing the EFF, Mozilla, and University of Michigan teams into a single team and a single project. He later served on the initial board of directors of the Internet Security Research Group.[...] Toward the end of his life, Peter focused his career on ethics and safety of artificial intelligence, and he founded the AI Objectives Institute to examine the concrete parallels he saw between surprising and undesirable outcomes that can emerge within economies and those that can emerge in machine learning systems.
More about Eckersley can be found at his web site, on his Wikipedia page, and in a Hacker News discussion.
Posted Sep 4, 2022 19:28 UTC (Sun)
by jfebrer (guest, #82539)
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Posted Sep 5, 2022 2:57 UTC (Mon)
by thwutype (subscriber, #22891)
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Posted Sep 5, 2022 13:17 UTC (Mon)
by Ptolemy (subscriber, #153718)
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Posted Sep 6, 2022 18:42 UTC (Tue)
by dkg (subscriber, #55359)
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The prospects for the Internet and tech in general are less hopeful with him gone. But we can honor him by trying to imagine what we actually want to see in this space, and to think concretely about what steps we might take to make it happen. If you see a problem, don't just sigh at it and accept. Ask "what do we need to do to fix it?" If you're an expert in your field, as many LWN readers are, and as Peter was, you have a responsibility to think about and work on its broader impact, like he did.
And if you're not yet an expert, you have incredibly valuable outside perspective that might let you identify problems that people with more experience have grown accustomed to and started to ignore. Don't squander that perspective just to fit in or claim "expertise"!
And don't be afraid to be a little bit strange.
I'll miss you, Peter.
Posted Sep 7, 2022 7:42 UTC (Wed)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
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AOL!
I know people like that can often be seagulls, but all too often the experts have blinkers on - you need someone with the big picture to ask "why are you going down that rabbit hole?".
Cheers,
Peter Eckersley RIP
Peter Eckersley RIP
Peter Eckersley RIP
Peter was a great person. As i wrote to a friend earlier, he was clever and open and contrary and friendly and kind and weird. He had a boldness to try to do things differently than anyone expected, and a knack at working through a problem that made you look at it in a way you hadn't seen it before.
Peter Eckersley RIP
Peter Eckersley RIP
Wol