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.

> - 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.

I still don't understand why this is so terrible.

Public wifi networks were certainly a real problem, but that's not where the majority of internet usage happens, and they could have been fixed on a different layer.

If you're on a traditional home internet connection, who exactly can tamper with your traffic? Your ISP can, and that's not great, but it doesn't strike me as blaring siren levels of terrible, either. Even with HTTPS, the companies behind my OS and web browser can still see everything I do, so in exchange for all this work we've removed maybe 1 out of 3 parties from the equation. And, personally, I trust the OS and browser vendors less than I trust my ISP!

Some progress is better than none, and it's still nice that my ISP can't tamper with my connection any more. Unfortunate, TLS also took away my ability to inspect my own traffic! This makes it more difficult for me to monitor what my OS and browser vendor are doing, and as I've said previously, I trust these parties comparatively less than my ISP.

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

Sure, but it's also trivial to just throw up a website on Github Pages, or forgo the website completely and use Instagram. TLS is "trivial" if you rely the infrastructure of a specific external party.

Please help me understand what I'm missing because I find this really frustrating!

> Some progress is better than none, and it's still nice that my ISP can't snoop on me any more. Unfortunate, TLS also took away my ability to inspect my own traffic! This makes it more difficult for me to monitor what my OS and browser vendor are doing, and as I've said previously, i trust these parties comparatively less than my ISP.

It might be more correct to say that Certificate Pinning made it so you can't inspect your own traffic - for sites with TLS but without certificate pinning, you can just as easily create your own root certificate and force the browser and OS to trust the cert by installing it at the OS level. This is (part of, atleast) how tools like Fiddler and Charles Proxy allow you to inspect HTTPS traffic, the other part being a mitm proxy that replaces the server's actual cert with one the mitm proxy generates [0]

[0]: https://www.charlesproxy.com/documentation/proxying/ssl-prox...

I've used mitm proxies, the problem is I don't know whether the software is behaving the same way under a proxy as it would normally.

Edit: To be clear, I'm not even suggesting the software would be doing this maliciously! Apps do all sorts of weird things when you try to proxy them, I know this because I do run most of my traffic through a proxy (for non-privacy reasons). Just for example, QUIC gets disabled.

If you're that worried about software being that devious, then you probably shouldn't be using that software at all, regardless of your ability to monitor its traffic.