SoylentNews

upstart writes:

Honoring Peter Eckersley, Who Made the Internet a Safer Place for Everyone:

With deep sadness, EFF mourns the loss of our friend, the technologist, activist, and cybersecurity expert Peter Eckersley. Peter worked at EFF for a dozen years and was EFF's Chief Computer Scientist for many of those. Peter was a tremendous force in making the internet a safer place. He was recently diagnosed with colon cancer and passed away suddenly on Friday.

The impact of Peter's work on encrypting the web cannot be overstated. The fact that transport layer encryption on the web is so ubiquitous that it's nearly invisible is thanks to the work Peter began. [...]

While encrypting the web would have been enough, Peter played a central role in many groundbreaking projects to create free, open source tools that protect the privacy of users' internet experience by encrypting communications between web servers and users. Peter's work at EFF included privacy and security projects such as Panopticlick, HTTPS Everywhere, Switzerland, Certbot, Privacy Badger, and the SSL Observatory.

His most ambitious project was probably Let's Encrypt, the free and automated certificate authority, which entered public beta in 2015. [...]

By 2017 it had issued 100 million certificates; by 2021, about 90% of all web page visits use HTTPS. As of today it has issued over a billion certificates to over 280 million websites.

[...] Peter left EFF in 2018 to focus on studying and calling attention to the malicious use of artificial intelligence and machine learning. He founded AI Objectives Institute, a collaboration between major technology companies, civil society, and academia, to ensure that AI is designed and used to benefit humanity.

Original Submission