Let’s Encrypt has done so much for encouraging the spread of HTTPS and good certificate practices. If they went away, I honestly think a good chunk of the internet would start breaking after ~6 months.
At least there’s some competitors now, which could be used as drop-in replacements if Let’s Encrypt were to disappear.
I suspect the vast majority of certificate authorities will implement the ACME protocol eventually, since the industry as a whole is moving towards certificates with shorter expiry times, meaning that automation will essentially be mandatory unless you like manually updating certs every 90-180 days.
But if you try to load a local resource as localhost in Firefox…
For the sake of completeness:
Firefox contains a security patch which restricts the kinds of files that pages can load (and methods of loading) when you open them from a file:// URL. This change was made to prevent exfiltration of valuable data within reach of a local page, as demonstrated in an available exploit.
Tailscale is also ridiculously easy to use for this purpose. The serve and Funnel features make secure self hosting really easy from your tailnet (one can easily provision certificates for nodes using Let’s Encrypt from the CLI: https://tailscale.com/blog/reintroducing-serve-funnel
Let’s Encrypt has done so much for encouraging the spread of HTTPS and good certificate practices. If they went away, I honestly think a good chunk of the internet would start breaking after ~6 months.
At least there’s some competitors now, which could be used as drop-in replacements if Let’s Encrypt were to disappear.
I suspect the vast majority of certificate authorities will implement the ACME protocol eventually, since the industry as a whole is moving towards certificates with shorter expiry times, meaning that automation will essentially be mandatory unless you like manually updating certs every 90-180 days.
Less HTTPS = easier government & advertiser data collection
I’m pretty sure browsers don’t even load http sites anymore.
HTTP works fine in Firefox unless you set it to HTTPS only. Even then, you only have to click off a warning to open an HTTP site.
But if you try to load a local resource as localhost in Firefox…
For the sake of completeness:
Firefox contains a security patch which restricts the kinds of files that pages can load (and methods of loading) when you open them from a file:// URL. This change was made to prevent exfiltration of valuable data within reach of a local page, as demonstrated in an available exploit.
More info: https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Web/HTTP/CORS/Errors/CORSRequestNotHttp
Insecure, but fast fix, if you don’t want to install a local webserver:
about:config
security.fileuri.strict_origin_policy
change to false
When I spin up a new self hosted service it’s easier to add caddy to the stack than to convince Firefox to load http.
Tailscale is also ridiculously easy to use for this purpose. The serve and Funnel features make secure self hosting really easy from your tailnet (one can easily provision certificates for nodes using Let’s Encrypt from the CLI: https://tailscale.com/blog/reintroducing-serve-funnel