Elizabeth K. Joseph via plug on 22 Dec 2021 10:39:35 -0800


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Re: [PLUG] Sad news about Nathan Barwell (Darxus)


On Wed, Dec 22, 2021 at 12:50 AM Michael Toren via plug
<plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:
> Nathan organized our GPG keysignings, which became such a staple at our meetings
> that one of the people running the biglumber.com keysigning website commented that
> PLUG was the most crypto-aware LUG he knew of.  Nathan loved visualizations of all
> kinds, and created tools to plot the web-of-trust we were building out.  You can view the
> output of those tools at http://www.phillylinux.org/keys/historical.html, and see some
> fun 3D renderings at http://www.chaosreigns.com/code/springgraph/3d.html.

His passion for keysigning back in the day really put PLUG on the map
in the early 2000s, and I know I wouldn't have had a GPG key as early
in my tech career as I did without his efforts.

It may seem like a small thing, but GPG can be a tricky concept to
grasp as a newbie. It quickly turned out to be important for my work
in Debian, Ubuntu, and beyond. Already having a key signed by notable
community members in open source, and knowing how to care for and use
it got me up to speed on a lot of things more quickly than some of my
peers. I even had Debian Developers in my keyring very early on so
that was never a barrier for any of my work web of trust-wise.

This is indeed very sad news, thank you for letting our community know.

-- 
Elizabeth K. Joseph || Lyz || pleia2
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