Thawte Protects The World From Crypto (was Re: [ Slashdot Message ] Daily Stories)

[Peter Gutmann]

"R. A. Hettinga" <rah at shipwright.com> forwarded:
>+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
>| Thawte Protects The World From Crypto                              |
>|   from the strange-goings-on dept.                                 |
>|   posted by timothy on Monday October 29, @06:28 (privacy)         |
>|   http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/29/0028250              |
>+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
>
>nutsaq writes: "Thawte.com, a South African Certificate Authority, in a
>move of astonishing wrong-headedness, has inexplicably changed it's
>developer certificate policy. To quote [0]from the site: 'Due to current
>world circumstances developer certificates can no longer be issued to
>individuals.'Sucks to be working with crypto these days. Apparently I'll
>get no help from Thawte to encrypt stuff, oh wait, I didn't need it, the
>browsers did."

As was mentioned on the Slashdot debate, this has nothing to do with crypto but
is for AuthentiCode signing certs.  Blaming this move in terrorists therefore
makes it even more bizarre.  According to Thawte (via Slashdot), they were just
following orders from Verisign.  The only explanation I can think of is that
it's some attempt by MS to further lock small developers out of XP/.NET
(alongside charging $1K/year for developers and similar things), but that's
pretty far-fetched.  On the whole this move makes no sense, is anyone from
Verisign able to exlain it?  (Is anyone from *anywhere* able to explain it?).

Peter.



---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at wasabisystems.com