How Contributing to Diversity in Technology Made Me a Better Engineer

Because my family couldn’t afford tuition, I couldn’t pursue my true interest Computer Science and, instead, studied Metallurgical Engineering — a field that I had absolutely no interest in.

As I waited in line for the interview with an Iron extraction company, millions of thoughts running through my mind:

“Will be able to work in a field with no interest for my entire life?”,

“Will I be happy and satisfied here?”

“Is this opportunity big enough for the ambitions I have?”, “Has fortune done justice to all the sleepless nights of mine?”.

There was a part of me that kept asking whether this is what I wanted to do.

The very next moment, I left the line and went back to my room, skipping my interview.

After doing a lot of research for the next two days, I came to know about Google Summer of Code (GSoC), a program run by Google where students make contributions to open source software in return for recognition in the technology industry. I had 6 months in hand, for the only chance of getting selected in GSoC and steering my career path into software engineering.

Let’s Encrypt Hits One Billion Certificate Milestone

Free HTTPS tool Let’s Encrypt yesterday announced it has issued its billionth certificate, in what it claims to be a milestone for user privacy and security.

Backed by the non-profit Internet Security Research Group (ISRG), the initiative has good reason to make such claims, having made what was once a complex and expensive process — registering and managing TLS certificates — free and easy.

In a blog post from executive director, Josh Aas, and VP of comms, Sarah Gran, the two revealed how HTTPS page loads have risen from 58% of the global total in 2017 to 81%, and even higher (91%) in the US.

“When you combine ease of use with incentives, that’s when adoption really takes off. Since 2017 browsers have started requiring HTTPS for more features, and they’ve greatly improved the ways in which they communicate to their users about the risks of not using HTTPS,” they explained.

Let’s Encrypt issues one billionth free certificate

Last week was a big one for non-profit digital certificate project Let’s Encrypt – it issued its billionth certificate. It’s a symbolic milestone that shows how important this free certificate service has become to web users.

Publicly announced in November 2014, Let’s Encrypt offers TLS certificates for free. These certificates are integral to the encryption used by HTTPS websites.

HTTPS is HTTP that uses the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol for privacy and authentication. Your browser uses it to be confident that you’re not visiting an evil website that’s impersonating your real destination using a DNS spoofing attack. It also encrypts the information passing between your browser and the web server so that someone who can snoop on your traffic still can’t tell what you’re doing.

Let’s Encrypt to Revoke Millions of TLS Certs

Popular free certificate authority Let’s Encrypt said it will revoke 3 million Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificates Wednesday, because of a Certificate Authority Authorization (CAA) bug. The move could mean that millions of websites and machine identities that rely on those certificates to protect sensitive data flow could be identified as insecure, or rendered unavailable.

Certificate users contacted by Threatpost said they were notified of the revocation Tuesday and given 24 hours to resolve the issue. Certificates will be revoked March 4, 9:00 p.m. EST.

“I manage 200 domains across 20 servers and have until the end of the day to fix the problem,” said Mark Engelhardt, IT consultant with Intuitive Engineering, in Montpelier, Vt. “Let’s Encrypt did not handle this in an ideal fashion at all.”

Let's Encrypt? Let's revoke 3 million HTTPS certificates on Wednesday, more like: Check code loop blunder strikes

On Wednesday, March 4, Let's Encrypt – the free, automated digital certificate authority – will briefly become Let's Revoke, to undo the issuance of more than three million flawed HTTPS certs.

In a post to the service's online forum on Saturday, Jacob Hoffman-Andrews, senior staff technologist at the EFF, said a bug had been found in the code for Boulder, Let's Encrypt's automated certificate management environment.

Boulder checks Certificate Authority Authorization (CAA) records to ensure that a Let's Encrypt subscriber controls the domain names for which they are requesting HTTPS certificates. The bug, introduced on July 25, 2019, was an error in the way the tool's Go code iterated over the domain names.

Let's Encrypt to revoke 3 million certificates on March 4 due to software bug

Millions of websites face 'insecure' warnings

Some well-known websites could stop functioning properly on Wednesday, 4 March, after a bug was found in the digital certificates used to secure them.
The organisation that issues the certificates revealed that three million need to be immediately revoked.
Visitors to affected sites will be greeted with an alert warning them the site is insecure.
One expert said the issue could result in a "loss of trust".
The internet security research group (ISRG) is the non-profit organisation behind the project, Let's Encrypt, and last month celebrated issuing its billionth certificate.
The project has some high-profile backers, including Cisco, Facebook and Google, and is widely credited as one of the driving forces behind businesses securing their websites.
In a notification email to its clients, the organisation said: "We recently discovered a bug in the Let's Encrypt certificate authority code.
"Unfortunately, this means we need to revoke the certificates that were affected by this bug, which includes one or more of your certificates. To avoid disruption, you'll need to renew and replace your affected certificate(s) by Wednesday, March 4, 2020. We sincerely apologise for the issue."

[...]

He said that while it had "responsibly" revealed the bug, its clients faced uncertainty.
"Nobody knows how they will deal with it. Businesses will have to apply for a new certificate so there could be an interruption to services which will result in a loss of trust. Users will experience websites that say they have a security problem."
While the organisation has issued a list of the certificate numbers, it has not made public the names behind them but Prof Woodward said it would probably affect "well-known" websites.

Letsencrypt is revoking certificates on March 4

Let’s Encrypt is a non-profit certificate authority that provides X.509 certificates for Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption free of cost. The TLS certificate is valid for 90 days only. However, Due to the bug, they need to revoke many (read as “certain”) Let’s Encrypt TLS/SSL certificates. Let us see how to find out if you are affected by this bug and how you can fix it to avoid any problems with your TLS/SSL certificates.

The revocations start on 04 March 2020, and you need to renew your certificate before that; otherwise, your visitors will get an error about Invalid and expired/revoked certificate error.