My concern is basically that this forces people to use very expensive cert providers, since it is infeasible to setup and connect and secure an HSM that can do this yourself. And Microsoft and Amazon have tricked the browser forums that their online ones are good enough.

It essentially puts yet another monopoly into the “open” Web. The CA browser forum is a joke at this point and I don’t respect any of the decision in the last 10 years. They all serve to further centralize and close off the web.

People keep bringing up LetsEncrypt, but it very much cannot issue EV carts. It costs THOUSANDS of dollars to use a service that can auto renew “trusted certs”.

I have something that looks like that. Mine is a bone mounted hearing aid. Usually there’s a little device plugged into it.

At which point if I’m expected to give a dollar to each of them, then I’m basically screwed. I’ve seen some licenses trying to claim “1% of your revenue if you use my package”… But if I use 1000 of them I now owe 10x my revenue to a bunch of “leftpad” libraries?

Or am I somehow supposed to give like… 10000 3 penny donations? How would that even work? The costs to “donate” a dollar to someone with modern banking (once the CC and whatever donation site takes their cut) almost makes it not worth it.

Especially once indirect dependencies get pulled in (which is a large part of the FOSS ecosystem… tons of people use ffmpeg without ever realizing they are) how does that work? If I use a library, and that library suddenly adds 20 more dependencies, do I need to shell out $20? Or am I as a maintainer supposed to divvy up any donations I get to every library I used (I bet you used a compiler to build whatever your tool is).

It’s rough, and I don’t see it really working for anything but a few special snowflake projects. It’s just not workable at the scale FOSS has turned into. A blessing a curse I suppose.

I think this article makes a pretty big leap in the middle. There’s really no reason that the operating system needs to be involved in the “Private” solution. It could just as easily be a website or a browser plugin. All you need is your government of choice to have some way to provide a token with whatever important bits necessary in it (“Yes this person is over 18 and a resident of WA”). You could even have third party sites/libraries that could read that token and verify what it contains.

The last third of the article is all based on that giant leap.

I would say absolutely. The 2004 series one of my favorite series, even if I find the end tapers of in quality in my opinion. Otherwise it’s great. Give it a watch.