Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] SSL certificates

[Noah Slater]

On Fri, Sep 12, 2008 at 10:55:10PM +0200, Sylvain Beucler wrote:
> > I've put in the order for both savannah.gnu.org and savannah.nongnu.org.
> > So I hope we'll get them soon.
>
> OK, there's a plan to use CAcert.org. I'd rather do instead of wasting
> money on "trust".

I agree that the whole SSL certificate industry is a farce, but unfortunately
there doesn't seem to be any other option for improving the user experience.

>From the Wikipedia article on CAcert:

  As of 2005, certificates issued by CAcert are not as useful in web browsers as
  certificates issued by commercial CAs such as VeriSign, because most installed
  web browsers do not distribute CAcert's root certificate. Thus, for most web
  users, a certificate signed by CAcert behaves like a self-signed
  certificate. There was discussion for inclusion of CAcert's root certificate 
in
  Mozilla and derivatives (such as Mozilla Firefox) but it was closed without
  including it, at the end of April 2007.

Given the low price of a "trusted" certificate, I would be interested to know
how it could be considered an improvement on the current state of affairs.

Best,

-- 
Noah Slater, http://bytesexual.org/nslater