Slashdot Mirror
Thawte Will End "Web of Trust" On November 16
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.
Notary here too.
I didn't see any notification yet, so I'm not sure if this is true.
If it is, then I won't need to worry about those pesky " check ID" and "keep paperwork on file for 5 years" rules.
I wonder if I can get my notary fees back.. I paid them since I couldn't find any other Notaries in my area.
If this really is true, I might not be opposed to giving away 30 points to anyone that seems reasonable enough. If we get another few notaries on board, maybe we can register a couple thousand slashdotters in the next few weeks - so at least they all get free VeriSign email certs.
PS - in addition to Lotus Notes, I've done a fair job with Novell GroupWise and individual Eudora and T-Bird clients as far as certificate management for the masses. At one point, (obviously a while back with Eudora) I had nearly three dozen non-IT folks using this appropriately to sign and verify their inter-office email. That 'trial' lasted about two weeks, and many still ask me to renew their certificates annually.
I was a member of the WoT back in '99. It took several weeks (nearly a month) to find accessible notaries, and their method of meeting was suspect to say the least. For one I had to travel 30 miles to another town and meet in a supermarket car park. After I got my cert. no-one I sent signed messages to knew how to handle it - encryption was pointless. I let it lapse after about a year, and haven't bothered since.
Unfortunately, unless the govt. mandates personal electronic signatures, it ain't going to happen. And no-one will want to use it under govt. mandate anyway. This stuff is geek only territory.
Since people are quite adamant about adding each other as 'friends' on social networking sites like Facebook etc., why can't something like the Web-of-Trust be riding along somehow? Or at minimum a GPG key exchange requiring no further steps? There's gotta be a way! Firefox/Thunderbird Plugin that has access to all keys of your 'friends' and uses them automatically? Something like that.