Where my bitchat

Not sure what putz downvoted this, it's absolutely true. All it takes is one compromised device joining your lan and setting up a packet sniffer and any unencrypted services are vulnerable.

I left work as a CTO, after 7 years, to become a coder again. Pay plummeted, but I'm happier and I feel like I actually contribute with something valuable. Mostly, I love learning new tech things, which I was too distanced from as a manager. If I were to leave the high paced tech life, my choice would not be to become a technical socialist/idealist, which is my take on the article; I would probably try something else, like gardener or electrician.

I fundamentally love tech, particularly scientific computing. However, most products in that space are basically languishing since the 90s. Incremental improvements are well and good, but 3-4 decades without any meaningful paradigm shifts seems like laziness.

I left my big corporate tech job last year, working for a small company now and I'm 100x happier with life.

I left early, only 4.5 years in tech. I still make less than my first job but boy am I happier. I work in a nature preserve now.

I run multiple services on intranet, still use SSL. Why? because should my network ever become compromised it's one more layer of security that will secure my data before I know what's going on.

This is for short-lived cloud-allocated (virtual) machines which have an IPv4 address but not necessarily a DNS presence. When there are more than a handful of machines, name management becomes its own unique pain; often, the domain names of such a machine are an opaque string of numbers under some subdomain, and managing the name is not different from managing the raw IP address instead. Similarly, for the case of many machines all serving a wildcard (e.g. a parking page) allocating a single IP-address certificate might be preferable to copying the wildcard certificate to each machine.

As you point out, though, SSH exists and has accumulated several decades of key-management theory. Using HTTPS instead of SSH for two machines with one owner is definitely not what I would do. I've worked at all scales from homelabs to Google and I can't imagine using IP-address certificates for any of it.

Now, with all of that said, if Let's Encrypt were available over e.g. Yggdrasil then there would be a use-case for giving certificates directly to IPv6 addresses and extending PKI to the entire Yggdrasil VPN. That seems like a stretch though.

I think literally just the "nominal fee" for the domain name. Sometimes you host a microservice or something on a laptop on your lan and don't feel like throwing it on a domain or even subdomain, but you want/need https . The applications seem limited indeed

I understand all the tech, except why I, as a home user, might want this. For that matter, what's in it for a business user?

I've hosted a dozen different servers from home. FTP, HTTPS, SSH, the usual. What's the advantage of giving up the flexibility of my DNS name? I might save a few bucks a year with Namecheap?

Not saying this is dumb or completely useless, just not seeing much application.

https://letsencrypt.org/2025/07/01/issuing-our-first-ip-address-certificate/

I didn't catch the typos or incorrect information -- what were they?

This is a garbage article full of typos and incorrect information.

Like a CVS file.

No, you had it. It's J, as is in "jiraffe".

I was also very confused, wtf is a ping file. I do a ping, its not a file, it's an IMCP request. A P-N-G is a file, am I just doing some boomer shit?

Seems like "who cares" if PNG can't keep up with formats like webp and webm in terms of size

I always have

Jit? Wait, thats something else

gif, pronounced like git

Nobody pronounces it ping lol

Like g in gif.

pnj?

it’s pronounced “png”

Because it bears repeating: if this dumbass is worried, he can pay his staff more.