Acme Corp!

Wile E Coyote and Roadrunner, via Wikipedia.org

Wile E Coyote is one of my favourite Looney Tunes characters. I love the wonderfully absurd plans he comes up with in order to catch the Roadrunner. These range from such simple things as pulling the pin from a hand grenade, then throwing the pin, to ridiculously complicated, Rube Goldberg-like plans (often with blueprints) that fail spectacularly.

A common element of many of these plans is some product from Acme Corporation. Interestingly, though there is a common belief that the Coyote is injured because of problems with the products, they often perform exactly as indicated, and the plan fails because the Coyote uses them in some silly way, or some external factor is involved.

As an example, the Coyote buys an “Acme Giant Kite Kit”, with the intent of using it to fly so that he can drop a bomb. There’s no reason to expect that such a kite would carry his body weight, is there? And can Acme Corporation be blamed if the Coyote thinks that the “Acme Super Outfit” will allow him to fly? It’s also important to read the instructions fully – as he obviously did not do when he attempted to feed Acme “Earthquake Pills” to the Roadrunner, even though the bottle included the caption: “Caution: Not effective on road-runners.”

That said, there are cases where some degree of liability might be warranted. For example, when the Coyote used the Acme Brand “Giant Rubber Band (for tripping road-runners)”, he loops the ends around two very large boulders, then gets crushed between them when they snap together. In this case, were there appropriate warnings given regarding how to anchor the ends, or how far apart they should be? If not, then the Coyote might possibly have a case.

Or consider the case where he uses the Acme “Do-it Yourself Tornado Kit”, disguises the “Tornado Seeds” as road-runner food, then attempts to use an Acme water pistol to trigger a tornado. While sensible people could argue that holding the water pistol over the remaining tornado seeds is ill-advised, you would not expect the water pistol to dump it’s contents when the trigger is pulled.

Still, for the most part, the Acme products used by the Coyote seem to work just fine, so I think they get a bad rap, and the Coyote should stop blaming them and come up with better plans if he wants to finally catch the Roadrunner.

Interestingly, according to an article in Forbes listing the 25 Largest Fictional Companies, Acme Corp was listed as #2 at $348.7 billion in 2007 revenue, oddly close to Walmart’s revenue for the same year, but I did not pursue that any further, as they listed CHOAM (Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles) at $1.7 trillion. For anyone familiar with the Dune universe, the idea that the most powerful economic entity in a galaxy-spanning empire generates an annual revenue of such an amount boggles the mind. (Certainly not definitive, and I don’t think it’s ever spelled out in the books, but one Reddit thread mentions a reference to 61 billion people dying in the wars of Paul Muad’Dib, and 10,000 planets in the Imperium, and estimates a population of approximately 3 trillion people, so...)

At any rate, this all brings us to certificates.

In the early days of the web, there were no encrypted connections, which meant that “secure” communication was not possible. Then, in 1994, Netscape introduced HTTPS, which allowed encryption. For an introduction to cryptography, please check here.

While HTTPS made secure communication possible, adoption was very slow, but this started to change about ten years ago. Even now, the percentage coverage varies geographically, from over 95% in North America and Europe, to under 60% for the least developed countries.

So, what happened?

Let’s Encrypt happened. It is a non-profit certificate authority run by the ISRG (Internet Security Research Group), which focuses on internet security.

For HTTPS to work, services require a public key certificate (also known as a “digital certificate”, or “SSL/TLS certificate”, even though SSL is obsolete). While it is possible to generate a “self-signed” certificate, such certificates will not be “trusted” by modern browsers, so most certificates are provided by a certificate authority (CA), using guidelines defined by the CA/Browser Forum. In 2012, the maximum lifetime of a certificate was set to 60 months (ie, 5 years), but has been decreasing steadily, with a target of only 47 days in 2029.

In the past, certificates needed to be purchased from a CA, received, then installed manually. These processes were fragmented, manual, and often poorly managed. And, with more and more certificates which need to be installed and reinstalled, you’d think that some degree of automation would be helpful, right?

One way that Let’s Encrypt changed the world is in providing free certificates, with a ninety-day validation period. This virtually eliminated the cost-barrier caused by needing to buy certificates and put pressure on other certificate authorities to either improve their services or reduce their costs.

That helped, but a general increase in awareness of the need for better security was likely the key driver, as can be seen in the fact that Let’s Encrypt held under 1% of the certificate “market”, until 2021. Similarly, Let’s Encrypt did not cause the drive to reduce certificate lifetimes, but was well-placed to take advantage of it.

And then there’s ACME.

The “Automatic Certificate Management Environment” is a communications protocol, designed by ISRG for use by – you guessed it! - Let’s Encrypt.

ACME is a free and open-source communications protocol for automating interactions between a server and a CA. It was published as an Internet Standard under RFC 8555 in 2019, and it should be noted that major changes in technology infrastructure take time, particularly when you are waiting for existing certificates to expire.

Since ACME could be used to automate certificate management for anyone, being published as an Internet Standard led to both an increase in the popularity of Let’s Encrypt and the adoption of the ACME protocol by other certificate authorities. This can be seen by the rather sudden increase in use of Let’s Encrypt certificates. Between 2019 and 2026, their market share increased from 0.2% to 64.2%, which seems like a lot, huh?

So, considering free certificates, decreasing certificate lifetimes, and increasing automation opportunities, what would we expect for the future?

ACME will continue to grow, which is good for everyone.

Even coyotes and roadrunners!

Cheers!