Internet Privacy and Security: EFF Announces That “Let’s Encrypt” is Now a Public Beta
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Today [December 2, 2015] marks a major milestone for the encrypted Web. Let’s Encrypt, the free and automated certificate authority, has entered Public Beta. That means it’s easier than ever for websites to adopt HTTPS encryption. A huge percentage of the world’s daily Internet usage currently takes place over unecrypted HTTP, exposing people to illegal surveillance and injection of unwanted ads, malware, and tracking headers into the websites they visit. EFF’s Encrypt the Web project aims to fix that, and Let’s Encrypt—a collaboration with Mozilla, the University of Michigan, Cisco, Akamai and many other sponsoring organizations—should be a huge step forward.
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So if you run a server, and need certificates to deploy HTTPS, you can run the beta client and get one right now. If you have any questions, you can get answers on community.letsencrypt.org.
We’ve still got a lot to do. This launch is a Public Beta to indicate that, as much as today’s release makes setting up HTTPS easier, we still want to make a lot more improvements towards our ideal of fully automated server setup and renewal. Our roadmap includes may features including options for complete automation of certificate renewal, support for automatic configuration of more kinds of servers (such as Nginx, postfix, exim, or dovecot), and tools to help guide users through the configuration of important Web security features such as HSTS, upgrade-insecure-requests, and OCSP Stapling. And of course, if you have some Python coding knowledge, you can come and help us reach those objectives.
Much More in the Complete Blog Post
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About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.