Let's Encrypt issued the first free HTTPS certificate

1990s: On the Internet, no one knows that you are a dog.
Today: Our data analysis shows that he is a brown Labrador. He lives with a black and white beagle, and in my opinion, they have a relationship.

Completely free certificates for encrypting web traffic, which promised to start issuing in mid-2015, were slightly delayed, but did not disappear altogether. On September 14, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) solemnly announced the issuance of the first such certificate by the Let's Encrypt system.

Let's Encrypt is a free, free certificate authority (certificate authority, CA). It should provide everyone with completely free certificates, and thereby gradually transfer the entire Internet to encrypt traffic.
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For obvious reasons, human rights activists and freedom fighters with both hands welcome this initiative. HTTPS (properly working) means protection against wiretapping and theft of personal, commercial and other user data.

A couple of years ago, all certification centers sold certificates, and today's free ones have a number of restrictions. After the purchase required knowledge in order to configure support for certificates in the browser. Now these times are passing.

So far, the new center does not have all the rights, and its certificates do not have a cross signature, as a result of which they are not perceived by browsers as reliable (the browser will display a “untrusted” message). The EFF are confident that in about a month the corresponding work in the IdenTrust consortium will be completed, after which the new free certificates will work without noise and dust.

EFF took care of the people who will receive the certificates - they prepared the letsencrypt utility , which is able to automatically configure the most popular web servers, Apache and Nginx, and automatically keep the certificate up to date.

The EFF noted the gigantic work they had done on the way to the center of free certification for several years, and they believe that it is time to open the champagne and celebrate. Even a special sarcastic song “ Party at the NSA ” is offered for the holiday, with lines like “We don’t need privacy”, “The party at the NSA is 24 hours a day” and “At the end of each PRISM there is a rainbow” which Edward Snowden exposed.