Peter Eckersley, the founder of Let’s Encrypt has left the tech industry in tears

Today, On 3rd September 2022 Peter Eckersley died a very sudden death, the reason for it unknown. He had contributed a lot in the field of technology. He helped begin the resistance to the SOPA/PIPA internet blacklist legislation in addition to carrying out the first controlled tests to show that Comcast was using fake reset packets to obstruct P2P protocols. Peter Eckersley was a University of Melbourne Ph.D. in Computer Science and Law.

Peter Eckersley was the director of computer science at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Among the privacy and security efforts he has worked on with the EFF are Panopticlick, HTTPS Everywhere, the SSL Observatory, Let’s Encrypt CA, and the latter two. In this capacity, he also fought to keep modern computing platforms open and established a campaign for open wireless networks.

Former EFFer Peter Eckersley died very suddenly today. 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. Raise a glass.

— Eva (@evacide) September 3, 2022

Peter Eckersley formerly conducted research, created policies, and served in leadership positions about challenges with AI ethics, security, and privacy. He was the Chief Scientist and co-founder of the AI Objectives Institute, a recently established non-profit organization devoted to studying artificial intelligence and transforming capitalism. Peter used to serve as the principal computer scientist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation for a long time. Additionally, he served as a visiting senior fellow at OpenAI and the first director of research for the Partnership on AI.

Peter’s work on AI policy has been focused on establishing sensible regulations for risky machine learning applications like recidivism prediction, autonomous vehicles, cybersecurity, and military applications. He was also interested in gauging the state of the field as a whole. His technical initiatives included examining the need for and function of uncertainty in the ethical goals of strong optimizing systems evaluating calibration and overconfidence in big language models and creating SafeLife, a benchmark environment for reinforcement learning safety.

Peter organized the stop-covid.tech group during the COVID-19 pandemic, provided guidance to numerous organizations working on privacy-preserving digital contact tracing and exposure notification, and assisted with a number of strategic plans for COVID mitigation. Along with these notable projects, Peter also cofounded or [co]created Let’s Encrypt, Certbot, Privacy Badger, HTTPS Everywhere, and Panopticlick.