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🚨 Let’s Encrypt at risk from Trump cuts to OTF: “Let’s Encrypt received around $800,000 in funding from the OTF”

Dear @EUCommission, get your heads out of your arses and let’s find @letsencrypt €1M/year (a rounding error in EU finances) and have them move to the EU.

If Let’s Encrypt is fucked, the web is fucked, and the Small Web is fucked too. So how about we don’t let that happen, yeah?

(In the meanwhile, if the Let’s Encrypt folks want to make a point about how essential they are, it might be an idea to refuse certificates to republican politicians. See how they like their donation systems breaking in real time…)

CC @nlnet @NGIZero@mastodon.xyz

#USA #fascism #OpenTechFund #LetsEncrypt #SSL #TLS #encryption #EU #web #tech #SmallWeb #SmallTech mastodon.social/@publictorsten…

Ten wpis został zedytowany (3 tygodnie temu)
in reply to Aral Balkan

The main problem is the bureaucracy associated for this. Another issue is the ownership control of the organisation (DEP Cybersecurity), the organisation needs to be controlled by EU citizen and located in EU.

@EUCommission @letsencrypt @nlnet

in reply to Alexandre Dulaunoy

@a @letsencrypt None of that is insurmountable or even hard. Could be done in a week if the political will was there. It’s such a low hanging fruit.
in reply to Aral Balkan

I really would like to share your optimism too.

If I can help in some ways, let me know. I was tracking the RFA budget withdraw and wondering how long OTF can survive without the funding.

@EUCommission @letsencrypt @nlnet

in reply to Alexandre Dulaunoy

@a We don't need to move Let's Encrypt to the EU. We need to run a EU-based equivalent, and make it so that the infrastructure they run is easily replicated.

As this development clearly demonstrates, Let's Encrypt is a single point of failure. It was never a good idea. It was just a less bad idea than others.

And no, that's absolutely not suggesting they didn't do great work. This is about designing for resilience.

@EUCommission @letsencrypt @nlnet

in reply to Jens Finkhäuser

@jens @a @letsencrypt Agree. mastodon.ar.al/@aral/114228345…


So after listening to your feedback, I agree: let’s spend that money in the EU to create a publicly-owned, free and open ACME-compatible certificate authority.

See post quoted below, with links to Tom’s work as he’s already been thinking/working on this.

#EU #ACME #TLS #security #LetsEncrypt #technologyCommons #SmallTech mamot.fr/@tdelmas/114224564125…


in reply to Aral Balkan

@a @letsencrypt While I agree, given the amount of "hey could you please put a back door in the chat app?" bullshit that European governments have once again regressed to recently, I'm not particularly hopeful about the "political will" part
in reply to Aral Balkan

they can't. that'd completely go against their values.
this is like asking them to refuse letsencrypt in Russia, they can't. it's an automated certificate system, they can't just prevent the issuing certificates simply because of their party.

even big websites, like the national security agency, and even whitehouse.gov use letsencrypt as well, so it wouldn't be a good sign for anyone.

Ten wpis został zedytowany (3 tygodnie temu)
in reply to Aral Balkan

I will agree letsencrypt absolutely needs money to keep the lights on. and if worst comes to worst, hopefully they will move to EU. what I don't agree with is removing certificates from politicians that are in a different party
Unknown parent

mastodon - Odnośnik do źródła
Aral Balkan
@AlesandroOrtiz @letsencrypt I’d rather we (the EU, via our taxpayer money) had more of a role than Google for reasons I don’t believe I have to restate in 2025.
in reply to Aral Balkan

also, this wouldn't prevent shit because the federal government can either use digicert (which is what some agencies use for certificate generation) or Google trust services PKI.
google trust services also issues automated I believe.
so simply doing that to letsencrypt wouldn't exactly, hurt, politicians. they have money we don't, so issuing digicert, sectigo or even entrust is something they can absolutely do
in reply to Aral Balkan

I totally understand what you're saying and I'm behind it too. But you should still remember that before Letsencrypt there was already Internet and it wasn't broken. It just got prettier.
in reply to Aral Balkan

Or let's use the protocol they created - ACME - to create more independent CA, EU-based ! github.com/tdelmas/Let-s-Clone

Aral Balkan reshared this.

in reply to Tom

Nice + yep, we could have an EU-based provider and regulate so that browsers must accept them.

And have it work with OpenNIC so we can decouple domain names from the artificial scarcity of the commercial ICAAN.

Ten wpis został zedytowany (3 tygodnie temu)
in reply to Tom

Also, the problem is not only the funding. Under US law, they can't issue certificates to anybody under US-sanctions. It's only by chance that the International Criminal Court (whitehouse.gov/presidential-ac…) was not impacted.
in reply to Tom

@tdelmas Good shout. Yes. And what’s the use of a standard if there aren’t multiple implementations?
@Tom
in reply to Aral Balkan

LE is not the only Provider of free ACME-Issued certificates and some of the alternatives are even based in the EU.

@EUCommission @letsencrypt @nlnet

in reply to Saupreiss #Präparat500

@letsencrypt These folks? They seem very commercial. What’s to stop them offering the free certs tomorrow? There’s value in having a noncommercial EU alternative funded with taxpayer money.

buypass.com/products/tls-ssl-c…

Ten wpis został zedytowany (3 tygodnie temu)
in reply to Aral Balkan

ZeroSSL is also around (Austrian company).

But yes, indeed: They’re Both commercial, so not complete replacements. Still better than a monoculture under US jurisdiction.

@EUCommission @letsencrypt @nlnet

in reply to Saupreiss #Präparat500

@Saupreiss @letsencrypt Indeed. But nothing I would base a future system (e.g., the Small Web) on especially when there is a noncommercial alternative (I have no choice but to go commercial right now when it comes to DNS and VPS but the idea is to abstract that away as much as possible by supporting multiple. Easier said than done without standards but I guess that’s where it differs with ACME so, who knows, it might be an idea to support them. But still, we have an opportunity to build a not-for-profit EU ACME certificate provider and we should take it.) :)
in reply to Aral Balkan

Of course. And with commercial, I envy rather things like Cooperatives, a Model that I believe we all should be looking into when it comes to European Clouds.
(Not without tech examples; the German NIC is for example organized like that.)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperat…

@EUCommission @letsencrypt @nlnet

in reply to Aral Balkan

@letsencrypt @dalias Last time I checked, every public CA must log in the CT log, and they must at least log into Google’s log.

So if Google refuses your log entry, doesn’t matter if your CA is European, the certificate won’t be valid.

EU had an initiative for European CA, with eIDAS, but instead of improving it we were just very much against it. We get the future we voted for.

blog.mozilla.org/en/security/m…

in reply to Aral Balkan

Let's Encrypt states they are protecting 550M websites with their certificates. Imagine everyone would donate 1 cent per certificate per year. Yeah I know, payment processor fees, but hear me out: If Let's Encrypt would end up with 1 cent per certificate... this would mean 5.5 million Dollars per year. For each one of us it's just a few cents plus fees. But for them it would be about 7 times the amount they are endangered to loose now.

Yes, the EU could chip in for the US...

But so can we.

@EUCommission @letsencrypt @nlnet @dickenhobelix

in reply to Aral Balkan

@letsencrypt
EU really needs to take charge here. Let's Encrypt is essential.

Achim provides a bit more context about this move and the dubious legalities of cutting off OTF here:

eupolicy.social/@achimkla/1142…

Unfortunately it seems a number of Small Web/FOSS projects are affected by this.


OpenTechFund operated on budget committed by the US Congress. The US President cannot stop funding that the parliament has decided on. However, what he claims to be allowed to do is to reduce the staff of the agency in charge of administration of these funds so that it no longer can do its work.
What do you expect when government is handed over to BigTech?
Source (in German): netzpolitik.org/2025/projekte-…

in reply to Aral Balkan

@letsencrypt
zerossl.com/letsencrypt-altern…
Just saying
Yeah it would suck but it wouldn't be the end
in reply to Aral Balkan

@letsencrypt and again I can't see the countless replies, because the fediverse sucks ass
in reply to Aral Balkan

We already have multiple European alternatives to @letsencrypt

We have ZeroSSL (Austria) and Buypass Go SSL (Norway).

So no problem here.
#LetsEncrypt

in reply to Aral Balkan

@letsencrypt source link in English: heise.de/en/news/After-Trump-s…
in reply to Aral Balkan

@letsencrypt
These happenings affected us too. @delta could not get a fund from OTF, causing disturbances in DC's development.
Ten wpis został zedytowany (3 tygodnie temu)
Unknown parent

mastodon - Odnośnik do źródła
Aral Balkan
@opalfrost @letsencrypt Man, I was wondering what that AGPL thingamabob I’ve been adding to all my projects for at least a decade now was all about. Thanks for the lesson.
Unknown parent

mastodon - Odnośnik do źródła
Aral Balkan

@opalfrost @letsencrypt The thread’s broken. This was meant to be a reply to the four freedoms post?

Let’s Encrypr runs Boulder, released under MPL: github.com/letsencrypt/boulder

Afaik, everything they do is released under an open source license.

in reply to Aral Balkan

Why move? They publish their tools, and the legal framework needs to be done again anyway. Let's set up a parallel one here.

There are 13 DNS root servers, I think we should have at least two free public certificate authorities. (Or, dun'no, maybe one per continent if the others want to do it too).

in reply to Aral Balkan

"But what about funding IA-based innovation" (technofascism)…

EU probably doesn't give a flying fuck about small web…

@EUCommission @letsencrypt @nlnet

in reply to Aral Balkan

I wasn't even being sarcastic.

Giving a shitton of public money to technofascists 'because insert some bullshit about Artificial Stupidity" (according to people who don't know shit about computers but suddently decided "IA is the future/wijl improve everything cause marketing people said so") is actually one of the EU goals…

ec.europa.eu/commission/pressc…

@EUCommission @letsencrypt @nlnet

Ten wpis został zedytowany (2 tygodnie temu)
in reply to Aral Balkan

call me weird but the developments of @letsencrypt vs. @cacert shows everything wrong with the way #SSL works.

We would've had a superior alternative to #LetsEncrypt if #GAFAMs weren't able or even allowed to cockblock #CACert by refusing to import it's ROOT-CA, whilst every commercial #CA gets their keys imported, no matter how shit they are or that they are essentially a hostile state actor!

in reply to Kevin Karhan

@kkarhan @letsencrypt @cacert Yes, I’ve been yelling from the top of my lungs that core Internet infrastructure like domain names, DNS, and TLS certificates should be public infrastructure for as long as I can remember. These are perfect examples of manufactured scarcity.
in reply to Aral Balkan

@letsencrypt There are European alternatives to letsencrypt. I switched to Zerossl, a German company I believe. All I had to do was add acme_ca https://acme.zerossl.com/v2/DV90 to my Caddyfile. Should be just as simple for other servers.
in reply to Paul Campbell

@paul @letsencrypt AFAIK, they’re all commercial. Let’s Encrypt is a not for profit. That matters. We need a non-commercial ACME provider in the EU funded by taxpayer money.