Getting a digital certificate signed by a recognized Certificate Authority (CA) is typically very expensive, which has a direct impact on the end customer bill. It also seems quite natural to think of Certificate Authorities as heavy-weight, bureaucratic, and expensive, like getting a domain name (a field dominated by the same firm that dominates Certificate Authorities-) or wireless Internet services.
Well, what's natural turns out to shift like the sand on a Cape Cod bayside beach when the tide goes out. You can get wireless Internet free, if you happen to live near one of the many municipal hotspots being installed around the world. Competition in domain names is growing, and costs are correspondingly coming just a bit closer to the costs of maintaining the DNS infrastructure (which is quite small). Now, thanks to CAcert, everyone can get a free digital certificate signed by a global player.
There are discussions going on at Mozilla and others about including CAcert in their list of Certificate Authorities so that no extra steps are required to validate web sites that use CAcert certificates.
Uni-Q Systems has been using the CAcert services for several years now, and has been more than happy with the quick services that the CAcert provides - and especially that it helps us keep our costs down.
Lower costs for us means lower prices for you!
But, until the entire world (read: Microsoft) is ready to adopt CAcert into their ring of trust, there is one thing you need to do to make sure that you are not recieving any errors or trusting a certificate that is no longer valid.
Install the CAcert root certificates on your computer.
For more information on how to install on your platform, please visit their wiki - http://wiki.cacert.org/ImportRootCert
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
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