Three years later, Let’s Encrypt has issued over 380 million HTTPS certificates

[steven36]

Bon anniversaire, Let’s Encrypt!

 

 

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.”

 

 

HTTPS is what keeps the pipes of the web secure. Every time your browser lights up in green or flashes a padlock, it’s a TLS certificate encrypting the connection between your computer and the website, ensuring nobody can intercept and steal your data or modify the website.

 

But for years, the certificate market was broken, expensive and difficult to navigate. In an effort to “encrypt the web,” the EFF and others banded together to bring free TLS certificates to the masses.

 

That means bloggers, single-page websites and startups alike can get an easy-to-install certificate for free — even news sites like TechCrunch rely on Let’s Encrypt for a secure connection. Security experts and encryption advocates Scott Helme and Troy Hunt last month found that more than half of the top million websites by traffic are on HTTPS.

 

And as it’s grown, the certificate issuer has become trusted by the major players — including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and more.

 

A fully encrypted web is still a ways off. But with close to a million Let’s Encrypt certificates issued each day, it looks more within reach than ever.

 

Source

[DKT27]

Before that, getting a site secured with HTTPS for free was next to impossible for most sites.

 

Having said, I think some sites are still not not having HTTPS there.

 

I prefer my ISP to not to see what I browse when I'm not using any VPN here.

[plb4333]

IP's aren't encrypted tho, and with just IP's, it's easy to see what the sites are about. So ISP's still know what's being chased

[steven36]

6 hours ago, plb4333 said:

IP's aren't encrypted tho, and with just IP's, it's easy to see what the sites are about. So ISP's still know what's being chased

ISP are watching , but there not smart enough to know what sites are about or do they really care ,  unless it's a well known site that billions use that is used for one thing , Social Media sites and many fourms , filehost etc, are used for many things.  Most Internet Techs are as dumb as a box of rocks when you talk to them on the phone they are told what to say, They are millions of people in the USA  alone who use filehost and warez sites  with no vpn  and the ISPs dont never do nothing .

 

.I used filehost and uploaded plus downloaded warez from 2001-2011 with no vpn and back then there was not many https sites and still most people who stream movies and things are mostly against vpns because they slow down there streams ..  In the USA the main thing you need to use a vpn for is torrents were the anti-piracy trolls can see your ip and report you to your isp and then they dont have no choice  but to notify you . ISPs dont care as much as you think , Also if you don't change your DNS and use your ISPs DNS  it dont do a bit of good they can poison your dns  and see what you do on a site anyways or send you ads or anything on a https site.

[plb4333]

I agree wholeheartedly what you're saying there. I was mostly looking at it as some kind of database aggregation of sorts. Possibly by 3rd party companies doing work for ISP's is all. Nothing like digging up anything that could be illegal or questionable, just demographics and interests of people perhaps, that's all. So sites would be generalized