Recent news about the two Certificate Authorities (CAs) WoSign and StartCom has brought online privacy and security back into the spotlight. With penalties from Mozilla, Apple, and Google now finalized against these two CAs, many websites using their certificates are scrambling to find new issuers. While there are certainly plenty of trustworthy CA companies that can provide services, there is another non-profit organization offering free, reliable, and secure SSL certificate services 鈥?the Let's Encrypt project.
The Let's Encrypt project is a new type of digital Certificate Authority (CA) led and developed by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG). The project aims to develop a free and open automated CA suite and provide related certificate issuance services to the public at no cost, in order to lower the financial, technical, and educational barriers to secure communication.
Full website encryption is essential so that everyone can browse the web freely without worrying about their activities being monitored, intercepted, or modified.
Let’s Encrypt takes a different approach from typical CA providers. They offer free, easy-to-use services for obtaining and managing certificates for websites that need encryption, and these services are available in every country around the globe. These services help people and organizations overcome economic, technical, and training barriers to communicate securely on the Internet.
In just 10 months of operation, the number of encrypted pages saw rapid growth! The Let’s Encrypt project deserves significant credit for this; 90% of pages using Let’s Encrypt encryption had never been encrypted before.
However, over half of the pages on the Internet still remain unencrypted. So Let’s Encrypt still has a long way to go. To achieve their goal of making the entire Internet encrypted, they need your help! Therefore, Let’s Encrypt has launched a crowdfunding campaign on the platform generosity.com to raise more operating funds, aiming to do even better!
If you can donate to them, you are laying a foundation stone for a safer Internet. Every dollar you donate helps Let’s Encrypt create a privacy-respecting Internet experience for all users.
They have outlined several donation tiers ranging from $25 to $42,000, and to thank you for your support, they will send you some fun gifts as a token of appreciation:
The first tier at $25, you will receive a heartfelt thank you!
The second tier at $50, you will receive some stylish stickers that you can put on your bumper, water bottle, or anywhere else.
The third tier is $100, which they call “To Encryption and Beyond!” The gift is these attractive, well-fitting T-shirts.
If you donate $250, you will receive both a T-shirt and stickers.
Higher donation amounts won’t be listed here one by one; generous tech enthusiasts can head over to the crowdfunding site to check them out.
If you’re a bit short on cash at the moment, you have several other ways to support them:
Share this article or the video within it to your usual social media channels.
Forward this donation plan.
Participate in their community forum.
Help them find bugs so they can fix them.
For more information about Let's Encrypt, you can visit their official website: