Does CloudFlare provide free certs for anyone, or do you have to actually use their CDN?
Also, it's not end-to-end encryption, but from client to CloudFlare - so "your" certificate may have 20+ other CloudFlare clients' domains included.
If you are using CloudFlare it makes it easy to set up, and +1 to them for making it available on all their plans. However, they're not a CA (they use Comodo?) nor a place to get free DV SSL certs (on its own).
On a personal note, I'm not surprised at all by this news. I received and installed a LetsEncrypt DV over the weekend on my Ubuntu/nginx/node DigitalOcean Droplet. So easy - no way a CA can justify selling DVs anymore.
And indeed, no surprise. Competition causes companies to compete! Shocking. But good to see just the same.
How was your experience with LetsEncrypt?
1. not implemented the auto client yet for nginx (which meant stopping the service)
2. the opaque-ness of when my domains would be whitelisted
Both of which will be fixed for public beta/release (I believe).
[1]: https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/using-the-webroot-domain...
Regarding #2, do I understand correctly that domain whitelisting is just about which domains can be used with the current closed beta?
There may be some regulation (or suggested guidelines) about high-trust sites (like banks) that are vulnerable to phishing requiring EVs. Otherwise using the Google Safe Browsing API (as they plan on doing[1]) will probably work and is automated.
[0]https://letsencrypt.org/2015/10/29/phishing-and-malware.html
Just to clarify here, "your" certificate will definitely have around 90 or so other domains listed in it as SANs.