On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 1:57 AM, David Guntner <da...@guntner.com> wrote: > Maybe this discussion would best be taken to the Off Topic list? ;) >
Certificates are supposed to refer to policies. For example, This certificate is for checking that the website you've reached is really our website. This certificate is for customers to be sure that they are sending their credit card number to our processing servers and not phishing servers. This certificate is for exchanging with our business partners in ordinary money transactions. Etc. Certificates are not really appropriately named. Nor are policies. There aren't enough templates for specific classes of certificates. It's hard to believe and understand why greed so blinds the major players, but creating a proper certificate is protected by copyright and patent and trade secret law. A pox on the major players, for their greed, but I wander. This is not the most elegant way for users of an OS that is intended to be securable to discuss security policy, but we have to discuss security policy a lot more than we have. If we don't, we're stuck re-hashing trivial stuff like password length and salt constants and how to start and end an SSL/TLS session safely. It doesn't matter how good the tech is if we don't know how and when to apply it. I don't think this is off topic, much though some of the posts have been more than a little tongue-in-cheek and some of the posts have maybe straddled the border between appropriate and excessive paranoia. -- Joel Rees Be careful where you see conspiracy. Look first in your own heart. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/CAAr43iNC=mq_ktrpad0sy7-gfgrty+cqhherzfxko9_xup9...@mail.gmail.com