The Free Software projects in question: Tor, Let's Encrypt, and F-Droid
Let’s Encrypt
God damn they literally just want to watch everything burn.
I did not knew that Tor was getting funded by the american state. Thats giving me some spooky vibes.
It was invented by the US Navy.
Well color me stupid color me gone.
... Except not using it would be less secure, so I'm not sure I'm following..
More exactly by Defense and secret services
One theory is that Tor was opened to the public by the United States Naval Research Laboratory only to create a crowd of users for their agents to hide in. You need a large enough anonymity set for these sorts of technologies to work.
F me
Well, at least the one he used for thruth is safe (mastodon IIRC?)
Elections have consequences. I am no longer on speaking terms w/ trump voters.
I'm no longer on speaking terms with any voters
I'm no longer on speaking terms
Hey! I'm speaking!
No.
Well it looks lime most of us are going to have to step up our donations foe the next few years
You will never approach the amount they receive from government funding. That is the point.
We're going to have to try or potentially lose the project
Let me spell it out for you. Trump has removed our cyber defenses and now he's defunding FOSS projects like Tor and Let's Encrypt!…
Now Trump wouldn't know a FOSS project from a hole in the ground but do you know who does? What world leader who has an entire cyber attack force on his payroll and wants to remove any barriers in finding dissidents who are probably using Tor to coordinate and hide from them?
Do the math. If the government funding of these projects is allowed to be removed it's gonna be a whole new ballgame on the internet and the only ones to reap the benefits are the dictators.
Wait you guys were getting paid to work on open source?
the guy is literally a political front for techbros, it's not like he would do something else.
Those mf build their empires on the back of open source.
As far as Let's Encrypt goes, the easy way to solve that is self-signed SSL certificates and Tofu. Just make it stupid obvious if an SSL certificate changes on a site that you go to. Like, turn your browser into a giant red screen that says that the security of the website has changed and may be broken obvious. Maybe you could have search engines also index SSL certificates so you could see if Google and Bing and DuckDuckGo and whoever else all say that this website has the same SSL certificate that it has had for X amount of time and if the search engines start showing different results you get suspicious.
Edit: Using self-signed certificates and tofu fits better with the decentralized ethos of the original web anyway since you're not relying on some third-party authority to tell you what's safe and what's not.
i don't think this is a good idea. govs could just set up a big reverse proxy for lots of sites to serve them with their own certs, and you wouldn't know
Seems like no change from right now, because currently the certificate authorities are centralized entities, which could be pressured by governments to add their own certificates.
How about a Blockchain or Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) out of SSL certs 🤔
I think that would finally be a use case for that tech, lol
This is terrible news, anyone know of alternatives to let's encrypt?
they have more sponsors and won't go broke because of this
HTTP works pretty well, if you don't mind various governments spying on the traffic.
Make America great again
The solution to this is simple. A change to the MIT license to bar .gov projects to use the open source projects.
These are FOSS projects, not open source. They'd no longer be FOSS and that would be bad. Freedom 0 is important.
Its possible to add free for all except US govt and that does not stop it from being free for the rest of the world.
That stops it from being Free, which is freedom 0. From GNU.org:
A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms:
- The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
A program is free software if it gives users adequately all of these freedoms. Otherwise, it is nonfree. While we can distinguish various nonfree distribution schemes in terms of how far they fall short of being free, we consider them all equally unethical.
What you're talking about is changing Free software to be non-Free. No thanks.
Why would making government more proprietary help?
Trump needs that money for his big boy parade.
This is it... This is the last straw!!! I was ok with the destruction of free trade, I was ok with the genocide funding, I was ok with the bastardisation of the administrative branch, and I was absolutely okay with the racism!!! But this, THIS??? ABSOLUTELY UNACCEPTABLE!!! As a MAGA supporter, I cannot stand for this any longer! You should be dismantling the minorities, not my website!!!
/s
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