EFF and Mozilla join forces to encrypt the entire web by giving away free HTTPS certs

Starting in 2015, everyone will be able to get their hands on a free, officially sanctioned SSL/TLS certificate so that HTTPS can finally be enabled everywhere. The new service — a certificate authority (CA) called Let’s Encrypt — is led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Mozilla, and the University of Michigan, with Cisco and Akamai joining as major launch partners. If you don’t know much about SSL, TLS, and HTTPS, trust me when I say that this is a very big deal.

When you surf the web, you may have noticed that links (URLs) usually begin with HTTP or HTTPS. I won’t go into what HTTP actually is or how it works, but it’s enough to say that the extra “S” stands for “Secure.” Basically, when you use HTTP, everything that is sent or received by your browser is in plain text. If someone (a hacker, the NSA, Verizon) wants to see what you were doing on the internet, HTTP makes it very easy for them. HTTPS adds encryption and other protections so that you can be fairly sure that only two people can see your data: you, and the web server on the other end of the link.