Brian Kantor

[Eliot Lear <[e-mail]>]

It seems we can’t go long without another one of these unfortunate notes.

I imagine a great many at the IETF will not have heard of Brian Kantor, as he only briefly participated in standards meetings and mailing lists; but he was the co-creator of the Network News Transport Protocol (NNTP), RFC 977, and a regular for many years at USENIX. Before there was Facebook and Twitter and MySpace and AOL, there was NetNews, and it was Brian and Phil Lapsley, along with Rich Salz later, who designed how we would get our daily fix over the Internet of everything from soc.religion.{pick your favorite) to alt.sex. That same mechanism was used by molecular biologists to distribute updates to the GenBank database, precursor to the Human Genome Project, and was how we informed one another at SGI of disposition of bugs before there were such tools as Bugzilla or Service Now.
Brian had a definite preference for how RFCs should be developed. He believed that they service the community best when they document existing practice, rather than specifying wishful thinking as to how things might work. He was also an avid amateur radio practitioner (a ham – WB6CYT), and deeply involved in the packet radio community alongside Phil Karn. He was also involved in researching security of the Internet of Things, and together with Stefan Savage produced seminal work on automobile vulnerabilities.

Brian was a mentor to generations of both professionals and amateurs alike, and he will be dearly missed.

73s, Brian.

Eliot