Over the past year, JR and I have discussed how we can help communities directly, giving back in our own unique way. At Upic Solutions we help United Ways accomplish their mission every day. The work we do helps impact communities across the country indirectly. When we have our company all-hands meeting this summer, we’re going to help pack lunches for the hungry. This is great, but doesn’t utilize our skills in a broad way to directly impact communities around the world. Today this changes!
One necessary component of donor interaction is security. That green lock in the browser that gives donors confidence has historically been expensive and required manual interaction to maintain. The green lock is not optional, and is displayed in the browser due to the presence of a SSL/TLS certificate. The non-profit Internet Security Research Group recognized that security is necessary, and should be freely available. With their support of the Let’s Encrypt project, SSL/TLS certificates are now freely available.
Piggybacking on that project, and the work of others, Rob Biddle has written a piece of software to automate the creation of SSL/TLS certificates. For those using Amazon’s Route53 for DNS hosting, and PowerShell, SSL/TLS certificates are able to be automatically generated and updated. Upic has sponsored this development, and this software has been released to the world as Free Software. Today we make our first step in changing lives not just in one community or country, but across the globe.