In Gemini, Over 90% of Capsules Self-Sign Their Certificates and Let's Encrypt Usage Falls to Just 7.5%
THIS past weekend Soylent News failed to renew its expired certificate (it took a long time to correct this), so people were unable to access the site. Quoting janrinok: "Many of you will have experienced the problems with the expired certificates. Unfortunately, our one remaining sysadmin is away from home until 1400 Monday (US time - tz unknown) and he has been away for a while. We have requested NCommander and k0lie to assist. They have declined. We all have real jobs and lives to live too and this is just one of those things. Unfortunately it seems that the problem will continue for another 36 hours."
As the top comment correctly notes: "Why are we advertising HSTS anyway? If I want to connect insecurely, isn't that my business? Shouldn't I be able to pull a 286 out of mothballs and connect with NCSA Mosaic if I wish to?"
Gemini Protocol is a lot more robust than this. There's no need for 24/7 "on-tap" sysadmin skills.
In Gemini one can set up a certificate for a decade to come and then "forget about it". We had lengthy discussions about it in recent days because of what had happened to Soylent News (internal social problems, exacerbated by aggravations [1, 2]). A few days ago someone in IRC (#governance at their own network) "attacked" janrinok by saying: "Can a community member call for a general vote on the proceedings? Can we veto the janrinok coup d'etat?"
At least janrinok is one of the few people who work hard to keep the site going. All the recent editorial work (latest 13 articles) was his.
Contrariwise, Gemini has a lot less drama and no certificate panic.
According to Lupa's latest survey output: "2399 (90.4 %) capsules are self-signed, 200 (7.5 %) use the Certificate Authority Let's Encrypt, 54 (2.0 %) are signed by another CA (may be not a trusted one)."
We've been in Gemini for 3 years; both this site and its sister site are at the top of Lupa's list (for scale).
So the Linux Foundation's Let's Encrypt is down and self-signing is up. The latter is more secure as it is robust to arbitrary moods of a corporate entity that arbitrarily revokes millions of certificates without bothering to explain what exactly happened. In practice, Certificate Authorities do not tackle the main risks to sites; they act as site assassination and centralised censorship authorities. █
