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Thawte Will End "Web of Trust" On November 16

Posted by kdawson on from the fencing-of-the-commons dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Thawte is ending their Web of Trust, including their free Personal Email Certificates, in less than 2 weeks' time. This hasn't been picked up by the media yet. Seems to me a lot of people, including myself, are hurt by this." Thawte is offering a 1-year free VeriSign cert to those holding valid Personal Email Certificates; after that you pay.

4 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. Sad by understandable by chamilto0516 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This saddens me but I understand it. Adoption of PKI for email in this multi-standard, multi-client fashion was just too difficult for the average email user. Yes, I usually have one or two accounts for secure messaging and I do use Thawte (I am a Notary) but it just doesn't work for most unless there is someone to walk them through. As much as I am aggravated by Lotus Notes, they self contained system (part of my aggravation) was able to pull this off 10 years ago and is still really the only app that I have seen do PKI well. Unfortunately it doesn't do a lot of other things very well.

    --
    Magic Eight Ball: Outlook not so good., Hmmm, how about Excel and Word?
  2. Should have stuck with PGP/GPG by argent · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Don't forget where the "web of trust" came from.

  3. You didn't expect this? Really want to help? by Uzik2 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What were you thinking?
    If you really want to do something worthwhile campaign the browser makers to change their browsers. The whole "encryption = authentication" idea is stupid and wrong. The scary warnings when someone wants to encrypt the traffic between you and their website using their own certificate is commercialism at it's worst.

    --
    -- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
    1. Re:You didn't expect this? Really want to help? by nedlohs · · Score: 4, Insightful

      No he means what he says, encryption.

      If I'm buying stuff then yes some authentication/certification that I'm actually giving my credit card details to the company I think I am is a good thing.

      If I am entering my password for a shitty forum web site, then having the session encrypted is nice to have. I don't really care about man-in-the-middle attacks since the alternative is no encryption at all.

      Sometimes partial coverage is good enough. But web browsers make it appear that an encrypted connection without authentication is worse than an unencrypted connection without authentication by throwing up scary warnings about evil hackers.