Can you elaborate a bit about what you mean by "the blessing of a CA"?
I agree that it's true that you need a certificate to do TLS, but importantly Let's Encrypt isn't interested in what you do with your certificate, just that you actually control the domain name. See: https://letsencrypt.org/2015/10/29/phishing-and-malware.html
Their policy today is to grant certificates liberally. There is no technical guarantee that this remains the case indefinitely, only a political one. I don't doubt the sincerity of this guarantee, but I wish I didn't have to rely on it.
A big factor is that they are serving so many certs, with only a tiny amount of funding. Anything beyond the most basic pre-written list of blocked domain names is infeasible. Analyzing the content of every single domain would increase their resource needs by several orders of magnitude. That's reasonably close to a technical guarantee, if you ask me.
> That's reasonably close to a technical guarantee, if you ask me.
Until the feds show up like:
Okay, either you block these domains, or you're going to jail:
politician-x-did-something-bad.com
politician-y-is-corrupt.com
country-z-did-crimes-against-humanity.com
political-opposition-party-w-homepage.com
blog-that-mentions-any-of-the-above.com
... (rest of the list that works for 10 or 100'000 domains)
I complained about the centralization that reminds me of Cloudflare in another place, but in general the more distributed this sort of infra is, the better. Both for technical reasons, as well as political ones. In general, one can plan around potential risks like "Okay, what if I assume that this infra of mine is actually running in Russia and the govt hates me and I need to migrate."
VPSes and domains are pretty easy to move across country borders (e.g. moving from NameCheap to INWX and from something like AWS to Hetzner, at least for simple setups), less so when you don't control the CA.
Yes, but that's still a pre-defined list. They can't say "block every website mentioning politician x doing bad things from getting a cert", because that'd be impossible to validate.
The feds are left playing whack-a-mole, and getting the right paperwork to block each new domain popping up is probably going to take a few weeks. Besides, at that point they could also force the .com operator to do the same, could they not?
I do agree that it would be better if LE was more distributed, though. Having a legally-independent second nonprofit running the same software in Switzerland or something would prevent LE from turning into a massive target for the US government.
Why would the feds bother with let’s encrypt in this situation when it would make way more sense to just go to ICANN and get the domain names unregistered. They already do that all the time.
It's absolutely new. No HTML5 features were restricted to secure origins only pre-LE. Today, many are. Google was able to push these requirements in large part due to Let's Encrypt's success making secure origins ubiquitous.
This isn't to say that these two things are unrelated: Mozilla obviously knew about Let's Encrypt and we considered it an important complement for this kind of policy, and at least some people at Chrome knew about LE, though I'm not sure how it played into their thinking. However, it's not as simple as "LE happened and then people started pushing for secure origins for new features".
A lot of thd new APIs have to do with accessing hardware. Camera, Microphone, Serial ports (currently experimental) etc.
Given how easy a MITM attack to injection JavaScript or HTML into insecure pages is, a world where insecure pages had access to hardware makes that hardware very vulnerable.
Even though all you'd be doing is reading some random blog etc.
To those who still think serving HTTP is some sort of principled stand, just be aware that injecting malware onto your page at delivery time is pretty trivial. Quite honestly, and I mean this in a constructive way, it doesn't signal "principles" it signals "incompetence".
Kinda hear you, but DNS is a defacto requirement as well. Neither DNS (common TLDs) nor any of the major cert vendors I'm aware of ask you your site's business before issuing.
New de-facto requirement that you need to receive the blessing of a CA to make use of basic web platform features... not so good.