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Facebook Sponsors Let's Encrypt
- toomim 11y agoAnd the bigger news is that letsencrypt starts its public beta today! You don't need to buy SSL certs anymore! Wow! Someone submit this story!
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jsprogrammer 11y agoYeah, but the commercials also need to be played.
- OldSchoolJohnny 11y agoThat's what they claimed but there's no evidence of it on their site.
- pfg 11y agoPublic beta starts around 6pm UTC, so I imagine an announcement will be posted soon. // edit: there we go, just posted: https://letsencrypt.org/2015/12/03/entering-public-beta.html https://letsencrypt.org/2015/12/03/entering-public-beta.html
- StavrosK 11y agoWell I just issued 7 certs, so it's working.
- patcon 11y agoYay! I've had the sliding deadline in my calendar for months! :)
- estefan 11y agoCool project. I hope nginx support for the client isn't far away.
- DiThi 11y agoThis involves a bit more manual (but scriptable) steps, but the example it shows is for nginx, in addition to being very small and having barely any dependencies. https://github.com/diafygi/acme-tiny https://github.com/diafygi/acme-tiny
- Someone1234 11y agoI wonder why, really. I read Facebook's statement. But everyone always has internal motives (in particular when money is involved), and I wonder what Facebook gains from this? I know why EFF/Mozilla does it (charity), Akamai do it ($$$ for them), Cisco might also profit from it somehow (e.g. upgraded enterprise appliances to support HTTPS on the proxy), but Facebook? I don't get Facebook's play here.
- jsprogrammer 11y agoDeliver funding on the day of the public opening. Get some of the PR; some may perceive you (a fictional, corporate entity) as the primary driver of the project.
- chipperyman573 11y agoThe only people who care about free SSL certs would know enough about Let's Encrypt to know facebook didn't do much. LE isn't something most people find interesting.
- ygjb 11y agoEh, I think you are underestimating how many people are interested in this. One of my friends who does small business web design and hosting has had several customers ask him about Let's Encrypt. SSL is a pretty big market, and the impending release of Lets Encrypt to the general market has some of the SSL vendors somewhat rattled, based on their FUDdy blog posts lately...
- estefan 11y agoMaybe when you're worth $40bn or whatever and you plan to give 99% of it away for philanthropic purposes, you don't need to live life with such a miserly attitude?
- Someone1234 11y agoFacebook, the company, is planning on giving away their entire net worth? Where are you getting this from? Also isn't Facebook worth somewhere in the region of $245 billion?
- Cherian 11y agoBefore the skeptical comments rush in, can we for a moment take a step back and appreciate this. Facebook has a lot of leaders who has worked in the industry for long and I am sure they understand the value as much as we do. There’s a very strong possibility that FB did this without any motives.
- mikecb 11y agoEspecially with the Stamos hire (not to say that there aren't plenty of previous FBers that shared his views, but he is particularly vocal on issues like this.)
- atomicfiredoll 11y agoThis was my first thought too. It's not hard to imagine him pushing the idea of sponsoring a project like Let's Encrypt to other higher-ups in the company.
- myth_buster 11y agoBefore the skeptical comments rush in If the comment is in relation to the criticism to Mark's donations, I think this is a non sequitur... I believe people understand that in large orgs there are factions that operate with different motives. Also this is a good cause so perhaps it helps their image too. So people won't be too critical of it.
- andreyf 11y agoI often wonder whether the relationships between brand-less factions in (and across) organizations has more of an impact than the official PR-heavy moves made under the institutional brand. Take, for example, the changes that have happened at Microsoft since Ballmer's departure. I have a hard time imagining the branching GitHub's Atom to make an open source "light IDE", deprecating IE, and Google's using TypeScript for Angular2 happening while Ballmer's faction was in power. Microsoft has the same name, but it's acting like a very different beast. I'm not sure how one could observe these factions cut across institutions, but I'd be interested if anyone has any suggested readings.
- obeone 11y agoBeing careful not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but... It is interesting that Facebook ($300 Billion market cap) decided to support at the $150k level instead of the $350k level (i.e. saving themselves from a rounding-error $200,000 additional commitment). It cost them more than that to make the decision and the press release.
- dubcanada 11y agoWhat does a companies donation amount have to do with anything?
- danso 11y agoMaybe there's an internal policy at which $199,999 is a cut-off, i.e. at a certain point, the sponsorship decision is moved to a higher-level of bureaucracy and approval. Which is completely the sensible thing to do: there's no reason why President Obama has to be the one who personally signs off on million-dollar toilets in Iraq (even if the buck stops with the President), and neither should every sponsorship decision be put on the desk of Mark Zuckerberg or Sheryl Sandberg...and an efficient way to do that is to set off a discrete cut-offs, so that you don't have a middle manager thinking they have the discretion to do the exact same moral reasoning as you suggest, "Oh why just give the Palo Alto Elementary Science Fair $10,000 when we could give it $100,000 and no one would even notice?" Besides internal order, I imagine there's additional concerns and contractual obligations that relate to a public company's stakeholders, e.g. the shareholders who invest with a guarantee that a company has consistent policies in place to manage its spending, whether operational or charitable.
- gmisra 11y agoTaken in isolation, this is a laudable move. But shouldn't it be evaluated within the context of their own internet.org initiative? For those unaware, internet.org does not support TLS/HTTPS for most connections. It is probably the single largest attempt in history to remove secure access from a population, just in the name of advertising instead of national security.
- andreyf 11y agoInternet.org does not support TLS/HTTPS for most connections Source, please? EDIT: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/05/internetorg-not-neutral-not-secure-and-not-internet https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/05/internetorg-not-neutra... EDIT2: this is from May. I wonder if anything has changed since.
- brwnll 11y agoIs there any indication what the sponsorship money of Let's Encrypt goes toward? Corporate sponsorship looks to be somewhere around $2m/year. Is the money needed for scaling? Hiring engineers? Broadening product line?
- pfg 11y agoI would imagine most of the money goes towards: - Development of the official client[1] and boulder[2], the CA server software behind Let's Encrypt. Both are relatively big projects with lots of things to add/improve on. - Hosting CA servers in two separate data centers. HSMs for key storage are usually rather expensive as well. CRLs and OCSP are quite bandwidth-intensive[3], that's probably where Akamai's sponsorship comes in. Ops teams have to be available 24/7 in case of outages. - I'd guess the auditing costs are quite substantial as well. I'm not sure what's necessary to get added to the various root programs out there (Microsoft, Mozilla etc.), but I doubt it's free (unless that's part of some sponsorship). (I'm not affiliated with Let's Encrypt, just my perspective) [1]: https://github.com/letsencrypt/letsencrypt https://github.com/letsencrypt/letsencrypt [2]: https://github.com/letsencrypt/boulder https://github.com/letsencrypt/boulder [3]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-hard-costs-of-heartbleed/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-hard-costs-of-heartbleed/
- joshmoz 11y agoHead of Let's Encrypt here. Our #1 expense is salary/benefits (we are hiring, letsencrypt.org/jobs). Other major costs include hosting, auditing, hardware, and legal/administrative.
- electriclove 11y agoWhy not a Platinum sponsor?
- merpnderp 11y agoReact, Casandra, Flux, and tons more, Internet.org and now this? I can now feel a little less bad that every time I click like, that at least my personal information is supporting some great projects. https://code.facebook.com/projects/ https://code.facebook.com/projects/
- SuperKlaus 11y agoI don't see Casandra on that list. Isn't that an Apache project?
- scott_karana 11y agoI don't see it either, probably because after creating it, they eventually passed stewardship over to the Apache Foundation. I'm not sure how much they still use it, even. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Cassandra#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Cassandra#History
- merpnderp 11y agoYes it's an Apache project, but was created by Facebook.