1w ago

Trump cuts funding to FOSS projects.

thelibre.news

Trump cuts funding to FOSS projects

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/28204065

45 comments

Relevant to !selfhosted because one of the projects getting funding cut is Let's Encrypt.
- 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.
  
  Less HTTPS = easier government & advertiser data collection
  
  I’m pretty sure browsers don’t even load http sites anymore.
  
  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
  
  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.strictoriginpolicy
  change to false
  
  They load. I have to specify http:// to get it to work though.
  
  I’m sure google will fix that in chrome, like killing adblocker functionality.
  
  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.
- It’s okay, Let’s Encrypt only provides SSL certs for… 63.7% of the market?
  Okay okay, that is a lot. But what does a CA need funding for anyway? It doesn’t take much bandwidth to send out new certs.
  The only thing that could be expensive is if they had to rapidly invalidate thousands of certs to protect the security of the entire internet.
  But haha, that’s a pretty outlandish scenario that would never happen.
- I'm gonna have to donate then.
  
  Same. I've been thinking about who to donate to this year, and it looks like they're making the cut. I'll probably also throw some money at my Lemmy instance and a handful of projects I use, including Tor, because apparently they got caught in the dragnet too.
  
  Well donating is good it's not going to replace the government funding.
  
  Which other projects caught your attention? I was going to donate to Graphene, EFF and some TOR operators
  
  Far more than I can reasonably support:
  self hosted things I use - caddy, the document foundation, Jellyfin, Forgejo, etc
  Android apps - F-Droid, NewPipe, Signal, RethinkDNS, etc
  desktop apps - flatpak, For, Godot, etc
  infrastructure stuff - let's encrypt, openssh, Linux distros (mine doesn't accept donations unfortunately), etc
  But the short list for now is:
  Let's Encrypt
  Signal
  F-Droid
  And I'll probably run a Tor relay or something as well.
  
  If only there was a decentralised tracker which would track project funding and give us metrics like which project is dangerously close to shutting down
  
  Man, ReThink is such a lifesaver. It's so good people at Graphene recommend it. I might give Qubes some bucks too, they are awesome
- Every day just gets worse doesn't it.

45 comments