Slashdot Mirror
SSL Still Mostly Misunderstood, Even By the Pros
An anonymous reader writes "People still don't understand SSL. This isn't much of a surprise... no one expects that grandma and grandpa know what SSL is and what it does. What is surprising and downright scary is that most IT professionals don't understand SSL, and many consider it to be the be-all, end-all of security in their organization. With all the tools out there to manipulate SSL connections, and the browser vendors unable to settle on a single method of showing if a site is secured by SSL or not, is it any wonder that no one gets it?"
If you want to write a pretentious article about how people don't understand security of the interwebs, at least get the name right. That's right, SSL hasn't been considered "secure" for at least a decade.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The correct term is "HTTPS". HTTPS, which can use various versions of SSL or TLS, is still mostly understood. Even by the pros.
How would HTTPS help? You'll still probably do an unencrypted DNS lookup for idle.slashdot.org.
By the way I use cacert to generate my certificates; it should be inlcuded in the default Firefox certification authorities list. I suspect there is money involved in getting into that list though.
CAcert failed a DRC audit. Bug 215243 comment 158 has the details.
In general Java devs know ZIP about anything out side of a JAR file.
They may not even know that JAR files are ZIP format.