F-Droid site certificate expired

Because those ephemeral LE certificates are such a great idea...

It is, if your objective is to closely centralize the web. If you make https mandatory, via scare tactics, only people with certificates will have websites. If you make ephemeral certificates mandatory by taking advantage of a monopoly, then only big SSL providers who can afford it will survive.

Then, when you have only two or three big SSL providers, it's way easier to shut someone off by denying them a certificate, and see their site vanish in mere weeks.

Meanwhile, in the real world:

- We went from the vast majority of traffic being unencrypted, allowing any passive attacker (from nation state to script kiddie sitting in the coffee shop) to snoop and any active attacker to trivially tamper with it, to all but a vanishing minority of connections being strongly encrypted. The scare tactics used to sell VPNs in YouTube ads used to all be true, and no longer are, due to this.

- We went from TLS certificates being unaffordable to hobbyists to TLS certificates being not only free, but trivial to automatically obtain.

- We went from a CA ecosystem where only commercial alternatives exist to one where the main CA is a nonprofit run by a foundation consisting mostly of strong proponents of Internet freedom.

- Even if you count ZeroSSL and Let's Encrypt as US-controlled, there is at least one free non-US alternative using the same protocol, i.e. suitable as a drop-in replacement (https://www.actalis.com/subscription).

- Plenty of other paid but affordable alternatives exist from countless countries, and the ecosystem seems to be getting better, not worse.

- While many other paths have been used to attempt to censor web sites, I haven't seen the certificate system used for this frequently (I'm sure there are individual court orders somewhere).

- If the US wanted to put its full weight behind getting a site off the Internet, it would have other levers that would be equally or more effective.

- Most Internet freedom advocates recognize that the migration to HTTPS was a really, really good thing.

Meanwhile, in the real world:

- We now provide a completely free certs for a malicious web-sites

- Degraded encryption value so much it's not even indicated anymore (remember the green bar for EV?)

- Pavlov-trained everyone to dumb-click through 'this page is not secure' warnings

- SNI exists and even without it anything not on CDN is blocked very easily

The only one of those things that is the fault of ACME is the first one, and are you really suggesting between that and your second bullet point that we should charge money for encryption so that people value it more? Encryption is free so people do it more. Paying money doesn't actually make people trustworthy. (Though you can totally charge people to prove they aren't malicious, but if you want to do that, why tie it to encryption? Encrypt regardless.)

> Paying money doesn't actually make people trustworthy.

This is fundamentally a naive understanding of both security and certificates. Paying money absolutely makes people trustworthy because it's prohibitive to do it at scale. You might have one paid malicious certificate but you can have thousands of free ones. The one malicious domain gets banned, the thousands are whack-a-mole forever.

Further, certificates used to indicate identity in more than a "the domain you are connected to" sense. There was a big PR campaign to wreck EV certs but EV certs generally were extremely secure. And even Google, who most loudly complained about EV, has reintroduced the Verified Mark Certificate (VMC) to replace it and use for new things like BIMI.