Let's Encrypt Wins Levchin Prize

An interesting perspective on LetsEncrypt:

While doing some research on Slackware, I was surprised to learn that in the bad old days, people actually did generally roll their own cert authorities or build their own webs of trust. LetsEncrypt, though came along as an offering from BigTech, and captured the mindshare of everyone else, and by doing so, seems to coincide with a spike (at least in my career) in OPS groups who don't onow how to manage key material, or even the docs to reach for.

I hardly ever hear about these circles of trust organized by end users anymore, which I find fascinating, because technically speaking, it should in theory be an end user activity in a generalized sense. I mean, Dunbar's number kinda damps things a lot, but with the chaos we're still seeing from people not having updated their certs in light of the expired letsEncrypt rootcert, I still think we've got a long way to go to make cryptography approachable.

An engineer is someone who can do with $1 what anyone else can do with $10. That’s very much Let’s Encrypt versus a regulatory or corporate attempt.