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Comment by crote

18 hours ago

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.

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crote

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KronisLV  8 hours ago

> 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.

  • crote  2 minutes ago

    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.