can someone offer a TL;DR on who the author is? I feel like i lack context on this Tarsnap and Colin in general, and there is no about page on the site
Dr. Colin Percival studied mathematics at Simon Fraser University, entering at age 13, before going on to a doctorate in Computing at Oxford University, where his thesis covered problems in string matching, data compression, and file synchronization.
In January 2004, Colin became a FreeBSD committer and a member of the FreeBSD Security Team; he became the Security Officer for FreeBSD in August 2005, a position which he held until May 2012. Aside from his work as FreeBSD Security Officer, he is probably best known in the FreeBSD community for his work on FreeBSD Update and Portsnap.
In addition to direct experience handling security issues via his experience as FreeBSD Security Officer, Dr. Percival has published several research papers in areas ranging from numerical analysis to cryptography, including the first published cryptographic attack against shared caches in Intel's "HyperThreaded" processors.
