It's like Trump and his followers are not aware how fragile this entire system is, and if they are aware, they don't seem to be aware of the risks, and that the most likely outcome is that the world is in a less good condition than before. A big child that got the wish granted to play president.
And up at the top right, left to "Latest" you can skip the time back and forth at 10 minute intervals. And then jump back like 10 images, what a beauty.
Not to be a buzzkill but I think those are planes. The stars show trails so these must be long exposures, and trails of similar length appear to be going in all different directions, eg: https://www.foto-webcam.eu/webcam/ederplan/2026/01/19/1820
I was thinking that the simpler the icons get, the easier it will be for the company to replace the designers by AI, then I started to guess the probability of it also being able to generate those "more elaborate" ones from the right. Sounds like they're in trouble. It will be so easy to automatically generate entire sets of icons.
You'll get used to it. I have 3 24 inch monitors side by side. Center one is usually the editor, right one documentation or more editors, left one browsers with info.
I have now implemented a 2 week renewal interval to test the change to the 45 days, and now they come with a 6-day certificate?
This is no criticism, I like what they do, but how am I supposed to do renewals? If something goes wrong, like the pipeline triggering certbot goes wrong, I won't have time to fix this. So I'd be at a two day renewal with a 4 day "debugging" window.
I'm certain there are some who need this, but it's not me. Also the rationale is a bit odd:
> IP address certificates must be short-lived certificates, a decision we made because IP addresses are more transient than domain names, so validating more frequently is important.
Are IP addresses more transient than a domain within a 45 day window? The static IPs you get when you rent a vps, they're not transient.
> Are IP addresses more transient than a domain within a 45 day window? The static IPs you get when you rent a vps, they're not transient.
They can be as transient as you want. For example, on AWS, you can release an elastic IP any time you want.
So imagine I reserve an elastic IP, then get a 45 day cert for it, then release it immediately. I could repeat this a bunch of times, only renting the IP for a few minutes before releasing it.
I would then have a bunch of 45 day certificates for IP addresses I don't own anymore. Those IP addresses will be assigned to other users, and you could have a cert for someone else's IP.
Of course, there isn't a trivial way to exploit this, but it could still be an issue and defeats the purpose of an IP cert.
The short-lived requirement seems pretty reasonable for IP certs as IP addresses are often rented and may bounce between users quickly. For example if you buy a VM on a cloud provider, as soon as you release that VM or IP it may be given to another customer. Now you have a valid certificate for that IP.
6 days actually seems like a long time for this situation!
The push for shorter and shorter cert lifetimes is a really poor idea, and indicates that the people working on these initiatives have no idea how things are done in the wider world.
These changes are coming from the CAB forum, which includes basically every entity that ships a popular web browser and every entity that ships certificates trusted in those browsers.
There are use cases for certificates that exist outside of that umbrella, but they are by definition niche.
The pitch here wasn't that only a few people get a vote, it was that the people making the decisions aren't aware of how "the wider world" works. And they are, clearly. The people making Chrome/Firefox and the people running the CAs every publicly-trusted site uses are aware of what their products do, and how they are used.
In another comment someone linked to a document from the Chrome team.
Here’s a quote that I found interesting:
“In Chrome Root Program Policy 1.5, we landed changes that set a maximum ‘term-limit’ (i.e., period of inclusion) for root CA certificates included in the Chrome Root Store to 15 years.
While we still prefer a more agile approach, and may again explore this in the future, we encourage CA Owners to explore how they can adopt more frequent root rotation.”
> So no one that actually has to renew these certificates.
I believe google, who maintain chrome and are on the CAB, are an entity well known for hosting various websites (iirc, it's their primary source of income), and those websites do use https
Which is why root certs are stored in HSMs, there’s a well defined total set of them, and if the owner violates any of the rules around handling of them, the CAB can put them out of business.
You're kidding, right? You've never seen a server completely inaccessible just because the owner had trouble renewing the cert? A lot of websites went down this way. And they served static content. Shortening that windows is just asking for trouble.
For better or worse the push down to 47-day certificates is an industry-wide thing, in a few years no provider will issue certificates for longer than that.
Nobody is being forced to use 6-day certs for domains though, when the time comes Let's Encrypt will default to 47 days just like everyone else.
And you don't think that years ago people would have said "of course you'll be able to keep your security cert for more than two months"?
The people who innovate in security are failing to actually create new ways to verify things, so all that everyone else in the security industry can do to make things more secure is shorten the cert expiration. It's only logical that they'll keep doing it.
In your answer (and excluding those using ACME): is this a good behavior (that should be kept) or a lame behavior (that we should aim to improve) ?
Shorter and shorter cert lifetime is a good idea because it is the only way to effectively handle a private key leak. Better idea might exist but nobody found one yet
Thing is, NOTHING, is stopping anyone from already getting short lived certs and being 'proactive' and rotating through. What it is saying is, well, we own the process so we'll make Chrome not play ball with your site anymore unless you do as we say...
The CA system has cracks, that short lived certs don't fix, so meanwhile we'll make everyone as uncomfortable as possible while we rearrange deck chairs.
What does attestation mean in this context? The point of the Web PKI is to provide consistent cryptographic identity for online resources, not necessarily trustworthy ones.
(The classic problem with self-signed certs being that TOFU doesn’t scale to millions of users, particularly ones who don’t know what a certificate fingerprint is or what it means when it changes.)
Though if I may put on my tinfoil hat for a moment, I wonder if current algorithms for certificate signing have been broken by some government agency or hacker group and now they're able to generate valid certificates.
But I guess if that were true, then shorter cert lives wouldn't save you.
My browser on my work laptop has 219 root certificates trusted. Some of those may be installed from my employer, but I suspect most of them come from MS as it's Edge on Windows 11. I see in that list things like "Swedish Government Root Authority" "Thailand National Root Certification Authority" "Staat der Nederlanden Root CA" and things like "MULTICERT Root Certification Authority" "ACCVRAUZ1". I don't think there is any reason to believe any certificate. If a government wants a cert for a given DNS they will get it, either because they directly control a trusted root CA, or because they will present a warrant to a company that wants to do business in their jurisdiction and said company will issue the cert.
TLS certs should be treated much more akin to SSH host keys in the known hosts file. Browsers should record the cert the first time they see it and then warn me if it changes before it's expiration date, or some time near the expiration date.
Certificate transparency effectively means that any government actually uses a false certificate on the wider web and their root cert will get revoked.
Obviously you might still be victim #1 of such a scheme... But in general the CA's now aren't really trusted anymore - the real root of trust is the CT logs.
> Certificate transparency effectively means that any government actually uses a false certificate on the wider web and their root cert will get revoked.
the ENTIRE reason the short lifetime is used for the LE certs is that they haven't figured out how to make revoking work at scale.
Now if you're on latest browser you might be fine but any and every embedded device have their root CAs updated only on software update, which means compromise of CA might easily get access to hundreds of thousands devices.
>> TLS certs should be treated much more akin to SSH host keys in the known hosts file. Browsers should record the cert the first time they see it and then warn me if it changes before it's expiration date, or some time near the expiration date.
This is great, and actually constructive!
I use, a hack i put together
http://www.jofla.net/php__/CertChecker/
to keep a list (in json) of a bunch of machines (both https and SSH) and the last fingerprints/date it sees.
Every time it runs i can see if any server has changed, just is a heads-up for any funny business.
Sure its got shortcommings, it doesnt mimmic headers and such but its a start.
It would be great if browsers could all, you know, have some type of distributed protocol, ie DHT where by at least some concensus about whether this cert has been seen by me or enough peers lately.
Having a ton of CAs and the ability to have any link in that chain sing for ANY site is crazy, and until you've seen examples of abuse you assume the foundations are sound.
> broken by some government agency or hacker group
Probably not. For browsers to accept this certificate it has to be logged in a certificate transparency log for anyone to see, and no such certificates have been seen to be logged.
One of the ideas behind short-lived certificates is to put certificate lifetimes within the envelope of CRL efficacy, since CRLs themselves don’t scale well and are a significant source of operational challenges for CAs.
This makes sense from a security perspective, insofar as you agree with the baseline position that revocations should always be honored in a timely manner.
I'm not sure it is about security. For security, CRLs and OCSP were a thing from the beginning. Short-lived certificates allow to cancel CRLs or at least reduce their size, so CA can save some expenses (I guess it's quite a bit of traffic for every client to download CRLs for entire letsencrypt).
It's less about IP address transience, and more about IP address control. Rarely does the operator of a website or service control the IP address. It's to limit the CA's risk.
> Are IP addresses more transient than a domain within a 45 day window?
If I don't assign an EIP to my EC2 instance and shut it down, I'm nearly guaranteed to get a different IP when I start it again, even if I start it within seconds of shutdown completing.
It'd be quite a challenge to use this behavior maliciously, though. You'd have to get assigned an IP that someone else was using recently, and the person using that IP would need to have also been using TLS with either an IP address certificate or with certificate verification disabled.
It's probably not a good solution if you're dealing with clients you control.
Otoh, if you're dealing with browsers, they really like WebPKI certs, and if you're directing load to specific servers in real time, why add DNS and/or a load balancer thing in the middle?
> If something goes wrong, like the pipeline triggering certbot goes wrong, I won't have time to fix this. So I'd be at a two day renewal with a 4 day "debugging" window.
I think a pattern like that is reasonable for a 6-day cert:
- renew every 2 days, and have a "4 day debugging window"
- renew every 1 day, and have a "5 day debugging window"
You should probably be running your renewal pipeline more frequently than that: if you had let your ACME client set itself up on a single server, it would probably run every 12h for a 90-day certificate. The ACME client won't actually give you a new certificate until the old one is old enough to be worth renewing, and you have many more opportunities to notice that the pipeline isn't doing what you expect than if you only run when you expect to receive a new certificate.
If you are doing this in a commercial context and the 4 day debugging window, or any downtime, would cause you more costs than say, buying a 1 year certificate from a commercial supplier, then that might be your answer there...
What worries me more about the push for shorter and shorter cert terms instead of making revoking that works is that if provider fails now you have very little time to switch to new one
Some ACME clients can failover to another provider automatically if the primary one doesn't work, so you wouldn't necessarily need manual intervention on short notice as long as you have the foresight to set up a secondary provider.
Yes, as expiration times get smaller people will increase automation and robustness to deal with it. One way to increase robustness is to automatically diagnose why something failed and try and repair it.
> invented pull-down refresh that literally every app and mobile OS uses now
I'm forced to use WhatsApp for a local group, and for some reason, when in the group chat, when I pull up to ensure that I see the latest message, that stupid app opens an audio-recording thingy at the bottom as if I wanted to send an audio note to the group.
Who designed that? Has that person been fired?
Also, I wish that on Windows "windows" weren't able to provide their own chrome and remove the title bar. Add some things to it yes, but fully replace it? No thank you.
You don't use an IM service, because a subset of its users are "wackos"? I've used Telegram for many years now, and aside from the occasional "hot singles in your area" type spam, I've never been bothered by anyone.
Well, the subset feels like the majority. Which does not mean that they are socially a majority, just on those platforms. Telegram and X has been taken over by them, IN GERMANY. I don't know how it is in other countries, maybe it's more civilized there.
The actual reason why I use an IM is the HOA, as I said. Else I do not have and do not need an IM, except for my ejabberd server + Conversations clients so that devices can send me status updates, like "backup completed successfully".
This is a somewhat recent new "feature" to force group calls, even if they're accidental. It's not what most people I know want, and there is no way to disable it for a group, just as there is no way to disable audio messages anywhere. WhatsApp is made to the lowest common denominator, UX is secondary to market share.
reply