Like the TSA at the airport.
Security that we never needed before, but now suddenly we do.
Now we’re dependent on a third party gatekeeper for permission to have a web site.
Free, for now.
It’s a move by the weasels-that-be to turn the Internet into yet another tool for profit and control.
But 99% of us with websites don’t take credit card numbers.
Do you take login credentials that could be skimmed and used for identity theft?
Maybe this one will strike home for people who think it’s a scam by The Man:
With no HTTPS, every single thing you do on the web can be monitored by your ISP’s automated tracking system and sold to data warehouses that then sell the data on to AI aggregators who can profile your activity to figure out how to shape your future behaviour based on how you responded in the past.
And HTTPS isn’t just about protecting secrets, it’s about validating the communication channel hasn’t been tampered with. Without it, anyone between you and your destination could be modifying what actually gets sent back to you, injecting anything from malware to slight changes in text content based on the above profiling info.
HTTPS is part of what keeps the web free and federated.
Yes, security. We love security now. The argument is well known.
But now you need permission from an official to have a web site. That’s bad, right?
You should probably be more concerned about DNS than HTTPS. DNS is a point where government censors actually do go after web sites they don’t like.
What? I’ve got all sorts of self hosted websites. Encrypted by HTTPS. No permission needed. If Let’s Encrypt vanished, I’d just switch to self-signing my certificates and using a pinning service.
Doesn’t chrome flag self-signed certificates?
Ok, I didn’t know that was a thing. Thanks
Wait, what? Who needs permission from whom to run a website? I can spin up a website right now, I can spin up as many as I want. You can too. There is no permission needed to get https setup on your website, it can be simple or a bit more involved depending on who you are using as your host or if you are handling everything yourself from a vps or locally hosted server.
Please do yourself a favor and delete this thread and stop commenting. You are way out your depths here and have no idea how anything works.
I don’t need permission to have a website. I need to prove I have control over a domain so that I can get a certificate for it. That way I can’t get a certificate for lemmy.org when I don’t own or control lemmy.org.
I don’t know what drug You’re smoking friend but please stop. It’s giving you brainrot.
Yes, you need an organization which signs your certificate, so it is trusted by default. This is our trust-anchor so we know the certificate presented was validated and it was given only to the website owner.
There are numerous around the world for that.
And if that is no longer offered, you can just not have your certificate signed, which means browsers will complain about it.
But you can trust your own certificate yourself. Or create your own certificate authority which can then sign other certificates for the community as their new trust anchor.
I think we would very quickly build the web-of-trust, but for certificates.
You can even not have certificates, but keep an weak form of TLS (no idea if browsers support TLS_DH_anon_*), but its still encrypted and can only be broken by an active Man-in-the-Middle-attack. (which is theoretically detectable later on)
Diffie-Hellman is an awesome key-exchange.