Bonum Certa Men Certa

Let's Encrypt is Garbage, Albeit It's Disguised as 'Free' Privacy

Earlier this year (an unexplained incident, still): Techrights Urges Readers to Ask the Linux Foundation's Let's Encrypt (Backed by Companies That Give the NSA Back Doors) Some Hard But Legitimate Questions

Let's Encrypt address

Let's Encrypt LF connection

Let's Encrypt and LF

The signature for Let's Encrypt

Source: The latest-available IRS filing. See the IRS filing in full [PDF] for a lot more.

Summary: The 'Linux' Foundation in 'privacy' clothing is more like a monopoly disguised as non-profit while taking money from monopolies (to do their biddings in the most surveillance-intensive country in the entire world)

Yesterday we asserted (and then explained why) today's Linux Foundation -- or LF for short (one way to avoid the misleading name) -- works for monopolies, not Linux. It uses the "Linux" brand to market itself.



One thing that came from LF is a CA that issues loads and loads of certificates which expire after 3 months.

"The aspect nobody wishes to talk about is that the Let's Encrypt monopoly is reinforcing monopoly and monopolies (Let's Encrypt itself is fast becoming a monopoly and it helps large companies further monpolise and thus centralise the Web)."Look who backs this. Look who funds this. Look where the code is hosted (proprietary Microsoft GitHub). Even the site itself is outsourced to proprietary Microsoft GitHub...

Let's Encrypt is partly funded by Microsoft/GitHub and various other unsavoury companies notorious for their back doors (we can name more than a handful).

So much for security, considering how close Microsoft and the NSA have long been.

But that's not the point. That's not the most important thing.

The aspect nobody wishes to talk about is that the Let's Encrypt monopoly is reinforcing monopoly and monopolies (Let's Encrypt itself is fast becoming a monopoly and it helps large companies further monpolise and thus centralise the Web).

It may sound peculiar at first, but considering the FIDO situation we've seen it elsewhere as well. Much power can be gained -- sometimes money follows -- by making oneself the de facto standard. Then abuse and chaos may ensue, as monopolies need not compete and appease/please anyboby.

Yesterday the Let's Encrypt site published a blog post which bears a rather meaningless if not misleading headline (because a suitable headline would likely upset people right from the get-go).

Put in simple terms, sites that adopt HTTPS with the 'free' (so-called, hence scare quotes) Let's Encrypt will become inaccessible to a lot of visitors. In the name of fake 'privacy', which does nothing about spying at the endpoints (like data sales to brokers). People who think HTTPS 'means privacy' should remind themselves that companies like Facebook -- a Let's Encrypt sponsor -- use HTTPS and it does nothing to prevent Facebook from assaulting privacy like Microsoft assaults love itself. HTTPS helps secure things not at the endpoints but during transit.

LWN's headline was vastly more informative than the waffle from Let's Encrypt and it said:

Fallout from upcoming Let's Encrypt certificate changes



As described in this Let's Encrypt blog entry, certificates issued by Let's Encrypt will soon be signed solely by that organization's own root certificate, which is accepted by all modern browsers. There is one little catch, though: versions of Android prior to 7.1.1 (released in late 2016) do not recognize that certificate and will start throwing errors. "Currently, 66.2% of Android devices are running version 7.1 or above. The remaining 33.8% of Android devices will eventually start getting certificate errors when users visit sites that have a Let’s Encrypt certificate. In our communications with large integrators, we have found that this represents around 1-5% of traffic to their sites." There appears to be little to be done about this problem other than to encourage owners of older Android devices to install Firefox.


It quotes part of what Jacob Hoffman-Andrews said, followed by: "Hopefully these numbers will be lower by the time DST Root X3 expires next year, but the change may not be very significant."

Next year?

Let's Encrypt moneyJust one year? Hardly anything would change by then. See the comments in LWN. One person said: "Rooting old phones requires erasing them. I'd hazard that the users of those phones would be cautious about that (data loss), as opposed to current phones (loss of access to baking and game apps)."

They're pushing people to buy new so-called 'phones' (spying devices). And further down it says: "Plausibly deniable way to send users up the upgrade treadmill. C'mon, Android users! Throw away your devices, again!"

Why would anyone wish to turn away users in the name of fake 'privacy' or dubious levels of confidentiality? If the Let's Encrypt folks somehow hand over keys to the government (e.g. under Trump NSLs), then what good is it really? It not only helps monopolies but also militant empires.

Let's Encrypt may claim to be a liberating and democratising force, but that's assuming it does what it says on the tin.

An encrypted systems specialist elaborated on this. "Trust should only exist between the provider of data and the consumer," he said to us. "Any other third party introduced into the system is an attack against privacy, security, and autonomy. Don't let quacks convince you otherwise."

"The discussion should lead the user to devices and browsers that let them have a local list of public keys they trust. That's the basic function of TLS anyways. The concept of a CA needs to be binned altogether. You can still trust certs yourself on Firefox. Just ignore the browser warnings."

He added that "what [we] should tell users is to start trusting self-signed certificates in favour of certs provided by CAs. Let's Encrypt is a vehicle for maintaining the trust monopoly. It's free so people blindly just use it, without realising they're just further entrenching the trust monopoly. Anyone can generate TLS certs with openssl (or even more secure libressl; libressl is by the OpenBSD team. It's the best TLS software around. There's nothing magical about TLS certificates. If someone has something like WordPress, you can just use libressl to generate your own certs and then put a banner on the top of your info page on your website asking users to trust whichever cert you generated and hasn't expired [and] what we really need in a truly security-and-privacy respecting Web browser is one that rejects all TLS certificates by default and only accepts certs the user agrees to accept. Right now the situation is the opposite of what it should be. Users have monopolised "trust providers" dictate which certs they accept. Kind of how you do when you set up SSH. You block all public keys by default and only allow ones you trust yourself. And you, the user, have full control of your trust system. Delegation of trust mechanisms to third parties is flagrant stupidity in any security system. In summary: right now you, the user, have a dictator ordering you whom you can and cannot trust. This is absurd. Your devices and software shouldn't stop functioning when you want to take back control over your trust. The current system is a dictatorship of CAs forcing people to give up control over their trust (and by extension, their security and privacy). These are abuses against articles 12 and 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights."

Don't forget that Let's Encrypt is US-based and monopolies-backed. They're not a charity, not a nonprofit either. They have motivations that aren't altruistic and we know who pays the salaries (not friends and allies of privacy, sometimes foes of it). They call themselves "[a] nonprofit Certificate Authority providing TLS certificates to 225 million websites." The Linux Foundation also calls itself "nonprofit", but we know that's a lie.

The encrypted systems specialist said he "[had] forgot[ten] to mention one other big point. The fact you can't block CAs in your browser and certain certificates is evidence enough of the malice behind the design and implementation of the web today."

The incidents of March (earlier this year) could be seen as an eye-opener. They never bothered explaining why they had issued millions of bad certificates, which they later revoked; they didn't explain what actually caused this incident and what was done about it.

As a side note, the SELinux project of Red Hat (now IBM) used to issue monthly declarations about no government interventions/involvement. Those stopped years ago. What is it they say about canaries?

"I have never seen any letsencrypt documentation say they have canaries," oiaohm wrote this morning, "and if you know USA law on the matter canaries is basically false. One of the USA encrypted email systems that is shutdown now had canaries and when the NSA with NSL stepped in they were forbid from using them. So their end users knew nothing."

A lot more discussion regarding this issue can be found in tomorrow's IRC logs.

Comments

Recent Techrights' Posts

New XBox Leaks Probably Serve to Confirm XBox's Collapse (Many More Layoffs)
It's very much consistent with what many other sites have reported lately
 
Noteworthy Claim That IBM is Firing a Lot of Lawyers This Week (RAs in the Legal Department)
A lot of what they do is patent 'trolling' or lawyering up against their own staff (e.g. HR disputes)
Links 10/10/2025: US Judge Bars Attacks by ICE On Journalists and Protesters; “We Took The Freedom of Speech Away” Says the President
Links for the day
Slopwatch: Serial Sloppers, Google News Gifting Slopfarms, and Fake News/Plagiarism About "Linux"
Google itself is a slop pusher these days
Qualcomm, the New Owner of Arduino, Blasted for Its Software Patents Tax on 'Smartphones'
A lot of Qualcomm's patents are on software. We wrote about this in prior years.
XBox Layoffs Rumours, Downtime, and Criticism From XBox Co-Founder
"everyone is ditching the xbox."
Links 10/10/2025: Honoring The Legacy Of Robert Murray-Smith, Many Articles on the Hey Hi (AI) Bubble
Links for the day
Gemini Links 09/10/2025: October Gothic and Reading Middle Earth Role Playing; C and Ada
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, October 09, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, October 09, 2025
Links 09/10/2025: Farewell to Jane Goodall, California Bans Algorithmic Price-Fixing
Links for the day
Gemini Links 09/10/2025: Lost Wages and a Saga Of Continuing To Use Palm PDAs
Links for the day
Richard Stallman's Talk in Helsinki is Done. Tomorrow Göteborg.
There are scarce details in Finnish about Dr. Stallman's talk
The Slop Song
The train wreck marches on
LLM Slop/Advanced Plagiarism Flooding the Zone With Capital That Does Not Exist
Many publishers out there still participate in this bubble instead of calling it what it is
Links 09/10/2025: Sacked Microsoft Workers Make "Sackbird", IBM Taps CockroachDB for PostgreSQL
Links for the day
"Happy Hacking Day" Richard Stallman Talk This Afternoon (From 14:00 to 16:00) at Haaga-Helia University in Pasila
Richard Stallman in Helsinki, Finland
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, October 08, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, October 08, 2025
Links 09/10/2025: Impact of Microsoft Layoffs, More Data Breaches
Links for the day
Gemini Links 09/10/2025: Autumn Blues and C IRC Bot
Links for the day
Slopwatch Appreciated by Real Authors of GNU/Linux Articles
We do try to keep on top of those things
Upgraded R.R.R.R.R.R. Today
The Web of 2025 is full of garbage, not limited to slopfarms
Freedom From Proprietary Prisons
Forking always an option
IBM's Watson Died in 1956, Now Watson Dies Again
IBM is becoming just a reseller of GAFAM and other stuff
Slopwatch: LinuxSecurity, UbuntuPIT, and Google News
We've also just noticed more slop from UbuntuPIT
Microsoft Says That Constant Mass Layoffs Are Success, the Media Isn't Buying This Microsoft Narrative Anymore
If people in the media feel an obligation to repeat whatever lies Microsoft tells, what point will there be to the media?
Links 08/10/2025: "Mali Puts Free Speech on Trial" And Apple Enforces Dictatorship
Links for the day
Links 08/10/2025: ‘Death to Spotify’ and Law to Ban Loud Commercials on Streaming (Dis)Services
Links for the day
Links 08/10/2025: Real Innovation and Nina.chat is Dead
Links for the day
Links 08/10/2025: Y2K38 Bug is a Vulnerability, Chat Control in Europe a Threat
Links for the day
Microsoft Windows is No Longer an Operating System, It's Surveillance Project
Why is this even legal to preload on PCs outside the US?
How and Why Once-Legitimate Sites Turn Into Slopfarms
Many sites will go offline and many social control networks will shut down once they realise or even openly admit they spend money and time gardening a bunch of bots and slop
UbuntuPIT Became a Slopfarm and Gnoppix Tarnishes Its Own Brand With Slop
It fits all the characteristics of mildly-edited (if at all) slop
Slopwatch: Linux Journal and Other Slopfarms
GAFAM needs to go the way of the dodo
Gemini Links 08/10/2025: "Seek Seek Revolution" and Gradient Backgrounds
Links for the day
Qualcomm Arduino Takes Aim at Raspberry Pi
Qualcomm is a Microsoft partner
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, October 07, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, October 07, 2025
Stagnation of the Economy and What Free Software Can (or Could) Do For It
If your economic model is based on a pyramid of lies, it won't last very long
Social Control Media is Sinking
it would rightly seem like the era of centralised "social" sites (they're not social, they're about controlling the users) is ending, not overnight but gradually