From: "Len Sassaman" Subject: Obituary for Janis Jagars (Disastry) Date: Thursday, February 13, 2003 2:36 PM Janis Jagars, known to many people on the Internet by his handle Disastry, was a prolific programmer who made numerous valuable contributions to the Internet. I am afraid I cannot do his memory justice, having known him only a short number of years and only through his work on privacy enhancing programs, but he earned my respect and appreciation for his achievements in that area. I first "met" Janis Jagars while I was employed by PGP Security. In preparation for the release of PGP 7, I located and contacted the people responsible for other implementations of OpenPGP, in order to set up interop testing. Janis was working on updating the DOS-aware PGP 2.6.3i program to work with modern implementations of PGP. His work on that program, and his presence in the IETF OpenPGP working group, helped to smooth over a number of PGP compatibility problems. On the PGP newsgroups and mailing lists, Janis helped many new PGP users get started using email encryption, and tirelessly answered support questions for privacy-related programs. To my knowledge, Janis operated the only anonymous remailer to exist in Latvia. Janis was, by the original definition, a true Cypherpunk. He believed that privacy was a right that must not be denied to Internet users, and he wrote code to help ensure that it could not be. When he needed a way to easily send encrypted email through Netscape, he wrote a plugin. When he wanted a way to mount PGPdisk volumes under Linux, he wrote a conversion tool. When Windows users wanted a pre-compiled version GnuPG, Janis gave them one. Janis understood that the fight for Internet privacy must take place at the hands of programmers, and he rose to the challenge of bring useful privacy-enhancing programs into existence, and into the hands of the public. Immediately after the terrorist attacks in September, 2001, I took over maintenance of the Mixmaster anonymous remailer project. Mixmaster had been unmaintained for over a year, and needed serious work. I was delighted when I received email from Janis, offering his help. Over the next year, entirely of his own initiative, Janis ported Mixmaster's server functionality to Windows, brought Mixmaster's OpenPGP support from an unstable "alpha" state to a solid, usable feature set, and established himself as an invaluable member of the Mixmaster development team. The upcoming Mixmaster 3.0 release features a number of crucial improvements which would not have happened had it not been for Janis's involvement. My last communication with Janis was on October 11th of last year. He had planned a vacation in Nepal, and expected to return a month later. When he did not return, we feared the worst. Sadly, it turns out that our fears were true: On October 31, while descending from Lobuche summit, Janis fell 250m, and did not survive. I am dedicating this year's CodeCon conference to Janis's memory. Janis will be missed, but his contributions will still be appreciated and utilized. It is my hope that Janis's work will serve as an example for other like-minded programmers, who chose to give their time and code in the name of free speech and privacy. Len Sassaman 13 February 2003 San Francisco, CA -- Janis's home page may be viewed here: http://web.archive.org/web/20010927055328/disastry.dhs.org/ News of his accident can be found here: http://www.vertikalex.lv/minisurvey/Discussion/ShowMessage.asp?ID=4703