On December 3rd the public beta starts for Let’s Encrypt.  When it does, I’ll be the first on the list for a free digital certificate and (hopefully) this site will become HTTPS only.  The EFF kicked off this effort last year, and the fruit is ready to eat for the December holidays.

Anyone that’s administered a web domain with TLS knows that the process of obtaining a digital certificate to HTTPS secure your site is 100% manual and somewhat costly.  That’s basically the reason why blogs and public content like this site is not encrypted . Let’s Encrypt provides a simple protocol that automates most if not all of the process.  It lets you obtain a browser-trusted certificate, sets it up on your web server, keeps track of when it’s going to expire, and automatically renews it for you.  It also handles revocation should that ever becomes necessary.

BUT the best bit of all is that the certificates it provides are 100% FREE!  So no reason not to encrypt EVERYTHING.  It fully supports certificate transparency and so provides a truly enterprise-class HTTPS solution even for the web hobbyist like me 🙂