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What Would It Take To Have Open CA Authorities?

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the sounds-like-vc-pitch-time dept.

trainman writes "With the release of Firefox 3, those who have been using self-signed certificates for SSL now face a huge issue — the big, scary warning FF3 issues which is very unintuitive for non-technical users. It seems Firefox is pushing more websites in to the monopolistic arms of companies such as Verisign. For smaller, especially non-profit groups, which will never have issues with domain typo scammers, this adds an extra and difficult-to-swallow cost. Does a service such as this need the same level of scrutiny and cost since all that is being done is verifying domain and certificate match? This extra hand holding adds a tremendous cost and allows monopolistic companies such as Verisign to thrive. Can organizations such as Mozilla not move towards a model that helps break this monopoly, helping establish a CA root authority that's cheap (free?) and only links the certificate to the domain, not actual verification of who owns the domain?"

4 of 529 comments (clear)

  1. Yeeeeaah! Cheap mothers. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Fr1s7 P507

  2. mwod 3own by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    who seel ano7her

  3. In related news... by LM741N · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    12 Al Qaeda operatives caught trying to buy SSL certificates. Film at 11.

  4. Re:CACert by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    No