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What Would It Take To Have Open CA Authorities?
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?"
The Marine's call that "stupid stubborn" and for your sake be glad your not in the Marines.
I'd say the fact you only make $200/year profit is your bigger concern. Learn to monetize your offering and buy a certificate, but don't refuse to recommend a superior browser because *you* are too cheap to operate like every other sensible website handling secure info. I'm shocked people buy anything from you without a proper signed cert.
This is not a new problem and never has a browser simply accepted self-signed certificates without displaying a warning - the problem is that assholes out there hijack domains and run CC phishing scams on and steal peoples info/identities - by not using proper security measures on your e-commerce site you are actually a big part of the problem. I'm amazed you have any customers at all... The fact you only make $200/year should give you a clue.
Wisest is he who knows he does not know.
The thing is they shouldn't have to swallow $50 a year for something that should be free. And $50 for a non-profit organization that already may be up against a tight budget, that $50 takes away from something else they could have done.