• grue@lemmy.worldOP
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    92
    ·
    5 hours ago

    Relevant to !selfhosted because one of the projects getting funding cut is Let’s Encrypt.

    • renegadespork@lemmy.jelliefrontier.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      66
      ·
      5 hours ago

      Let’s Encrypt has done so much for encouraging the spread of HTTPS and good certificate practices. If they went away, I honestly think a good chunk of the internet would start breaking after ~6 months.

      • gray@pawb.social
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        25
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        4 hours ago

        Less HTTPS = easier government & advertiser data collection

      • dan@upvote.au
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        8
        ·
        edit-2
        4 hours ago

        At least there’s some competitors now, which could be used as drop-in replacements if Let’s Encrypt were to disappear.

        I suspect the vast majority of certificate authorities will implement the ACME protocol eventually, since the industry as a whole is moving towards certificates with shorter expiry times, meaning that automation will essentially be mandatory unless you like manually updating certs every 90-180 days.

    • kibiz0r@midwest.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      41
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      5 hours ago

      It’s okay, Let’s Encrypt only provides SSL certs for… 63.7% of the market?

      Okay okay, that is a lot. But what does a CA need funding for anyway? It doesn’t take much bandwidth to send out new certs.

      The only thing that could be expensive is if they had to rapidly invalidate thousands of certs to protect the security of the entire internet.

      But haha, that’s a pretty outlandish scenario that would never happen.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        11
        ·
        4 hours ago

        Same. I’ve been thinking about who to donate to this year, and it looks like they’re making the cut. I’ll probably also throw some money at my Lemmy instance and a handful of projects I use, including Tor, because apparently they got caught in the dragnet too.

  • renegadespork@lemmy.jelliefrontier.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    42
    ·
    edit-2
    5 hours ago

    This really sucks. I honestly didn’t know the Feds gave so much money to FOSS, but I looked up the USAGM and that makes sense.

    It tracks with current trends. Basically anything that could be interpreted as benefiting any county other than the United States or any demographic other than rich white men is getting funding cut. What an embarrassment.

    At a time when decentralizing information is critical, our tools to do so are also threatened.

  • Moonrise2473@feddit.it
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    3 hours ago

    That 4 miles long military parade for his 79th birthday doesn’t pay by itself, unfortunately 😢

  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    11
    ·
    4 hours ago

    Let’s put some numbers on all of this. The OTF’s total budget slowly raised from ~$10M in 2019 to a grand total of $40M in 2023, almost half of all allocated funds by Congress to promote Internet freedom globally.

    That’s an incredibly tiny amount of money.

    More recently, Congress had directed that - for both the fiscal years of 2024 and 2025 - the funding should be “not less than $43,500,000”, which guaranteed an income stream for 2025 too.

    Looks like some spicy legal action will suck up a lot of those cuts…

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            4
            ·
            3 hours ago

            No, current salary for all representatives outside of a handful of leadership positions is $174,000. This is the cumulative cost for everything else (staff, expenses, etc).

            I personally think $174k is a bit low for salary, especially given the COL for the area and the importance of the role. I’d like to see that increase, while also increasing our expectations from our reps (i.e. jail time for bought politicians).

  • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    3 hours ago

    I know it’s only vaguely related, since they’re not US-funded, but at some point I think it would be hilarious (in a particularly poignant way) if the Lemmy developers’ funding got cut off by the process of the explicitly rabid governments they are fans of finally succeeding at destabilizing the friendly Western countries where they live to the point that NLNet wasn’t funded anymore. As I understand it, NLNet is already facing some headwinds because the friendly liberal elements in EU politics are getting replaced by the same kind of “fuck everyone just give money to rich people and also anyone who disagrees with me dies” elements that Russia likes to give money and social-media-shilling campaigns to support.

    Surely Russia and China will jump to the front and fund basic infrastructure work for the good of everyone, if that happened. They could count on it happening, instead of having to get jobs.

    Surely.

  • heavydust@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    11
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    5 hours ago

    Why would he fund communism in the first place? (/s before you try to hit me with that downvote button).

  • foggy@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    edit-2
    4 hours ago

    Im not saying Zuck is good or a savior of choice, but now would be a good time for facebook investors to pressure him to eat that difference.

    Not that he should, but hes been all in on Open Source* lately

    *Massive stipulations apply.