Peter Eckersley RIP

Peter Eckersley, one of the original founders of the Let's Encrypt non-profit TLS certificate authority, has died suddenly, as reported by Seth Schoen:

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.