Peter Eckersley is back (online)
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
When Peter Eckersley passed away in 2022, donors contributed a vast sum of money to preserve his brain.
Sadly, nobody remembered to preserve Peter's blog.
Peter had chosen to use a domain name from Iceland, pde.is. Iceland has become well known for hosting web sites that come under attack for their accurate coverage of the toxic culture in some free software organizations.
The sum raised to freeze Peter's brain was $29,007 according to GoFundMe. The cost of registering an .is domain was just EUR 68 with Orange Website, an Icelandic hosting company.
Reading Peter's blog posts again? Priceless.
Back in our student days, I was the sysadmin at the Virtual Moreland Community Network. The service hosted various organizations that we both participated in and I was also hosting one of Peter's email accounts.
Running certbot for pde.is
After securing Peter's domain, I immediately wanted to run certbot from Peter's Let's Encrypt project and obtain a certificate. Should it really be this easy to obtain a certificate for a domain previously owned by somebody else? Make of that what you will.
Here is the certificate. Notice the timestamp, the domain was registered and the certificate was issued on 22 June 2024, the same time that another well known University of Melbourne alumnus, Julian Assange, was packing up his prison cell with help from Kristinn Hrafnsson. Another uncanny coincidence.
Remembering the Edward Brocklesby affair in Debian
The Debian community is still waiting for answers about Edward Brocklesby, the Debian Developer who was secretly expelled just a few weeks after uploading a new version of the SSH2 package.
If Peter hadn't frozen his brain, he would turn in his grave at the manner in which Debian has been hijacked today. █
- Edward Brocklesby (ejb) & Debian: Hacking expulsion cover-up in proximity to Oxford and GCHQ
- British Intelligence, GCHQ, Oxford & Debian conspiracy theories, Edward & Una Brocklesby fact checking
- Edward Brocklesby: how expelled hacker took over Debian's SSH2 package
- Edward Brocklesby: hacker received advance notice of zero-day vulnerabilities in MH and NMH email software
- Wookey, Intrigeri, Cryptie & Debian pseudonyms beyond Edward Brocklesby
- Sheriff of Cork & Debian Edward Brocklesby or Brockelsby Street confusion
- Trial by IRC, judgments, Edward Brocklesby, Norbert Preining & Debian expelled due process