Submitted via IRC for Fnord666
The free-to-use nonprofit was founded in 2014 in part by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and is backed by Akamai, Google, Facebook, Mozilla and more. Three years ago Friday, it issued its first certificate.
Since then, the numbers have exploded. To date, more than 380 million certificates have been issued on 129 million unique domains. That also makes it the largest certificate issuer in the world, by far.
Now, 75 percent of all Firefox traffic is HTTPS, according to public Firefox data — in part thanks to Let's Encrypt. That's a massive increase from when it was founded, where only 38 percent of website page loads were served over an HTTPS encrypted connection.
"Change at that speed and scale is incredible," a spokesperson told TechCrunch. "Let's Encrypt isn't solely responsible for this change, but we certainly catalyzed it."
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/14/three-years-later-lets-encrypt-now-secures-75-of-the-web/
Previously: "Let's Encrypt" Has Issued 1 Million Certificates
Let's Encrypt Issues 100 Millionth Certificate
Let's Encrypt is Now Officially Trusted by All Major Root Programs
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 19 2018, @09:39PM (2 children)
You're making the RIAA/MPAA mistake there, most of these sites would not have been using HTTPS without let's encrypt. So that's not really lost revenue.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday September 19 2018, @10:20PM (1 child)
Did sites adopt HTTPS because Let's Encrypt was free? Or was there another reason?
HTTPS Introduced as Google Search Ranking Criterion [soylentnews.org]
Mozilla Considers Phasing Out Unencrypted HTTP [soylentnews.org]
Mozilla: HTTPS is Coming. Get Out of the Way! [soylentnews.org]
Google to Start Punishing HTTP-Only Sites [soylentnews.org]
Google Chrome Will Mark Non-HTTPS Sites as "Not Secure" Starting in July 2018 [soylentnews.org]
Seems like sites were forced into adopting HTTPS, or at least if they wanted to stay relevant or revenue-generating.
Let's Encrypt is mainly a project of EFF and Mozilla, but Google's presence is easily felt:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let%27s_Encrypt [wikipedia.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 20 2018, @12:39AM
Google did these things after Let's Encrypt was already a thing (presumably they realized they could bully people into doing it at that point without repercussion).