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

[Walt Mankowski via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

On Wed, Dec 22, 2021 at 10:39:19AM -0800, Elizabeth K. Joseph via plug wrote:
> 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.

Indeed, this is very sad news. I probably hadn't seen Darxus in person
for close to 20 years, but I'd still see him pop up on twitter or in
IRC channels occasionally. Thanks for sharing your story. It's a great
lesson that sometimes we never realize the profound effects that
simple things we do can have on others!

Walt

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