Talk:Thawte
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[edit] Discussion of how to encourage digitally signing emails
I think it's fair to say that digitally signing emails is currently the domain of the extremely early adopter. It certainly hasn't hit the mainstream yet. I'd like to lay out a plan (based in the UK) to kickstart interest. The ultimate goal would be that large companies would digitally sign their emails when sending them to their customers. We hear so much about phishing scams these days, at least with a digitally signed email customers could be confident about where the email came from. I'd like to see digitally signed email become as ubiquitous as https certificates for online retailers.
Anyway, the advantage to consumers is clear. Here's my plan on how to kickstart mainstream adoption of email digital signatures, to be carried out by a company such as Thawte or Verisign:
Step 1 - Give Tesco (biggest supermarket in the UK) and Amazon.co.uk (very big e-retailer in the UK) a free email signing certificate. That's not enough, though. Provide a free consultant for however long it takes to get the email signing working on all the bulk emails sent by these companies. This is the expensive part of the plan!
Step 2 - The problem is that webmail providers don't support digital signatures, and that most users use webmail. Now that many reputable bulk emails are being sent out by Tesco and Amazon, apply pressure to hotmail.com, gmail.com, Yahoo Mail and other mainstream email providers to support digital signatures on received messages only (we'll deal with the more difficult problem of supporting sending digitally signed messages later). The aim is to get a lock icon to appear on an email from Tesco when the user views it from Hotmail. The driving force is that this is in the interest of public Internet security, as such you will receive media attention. Phishing scams are hitting the headlines regularly.
Step 3 - Repeat step 1 to increase the pressure on email providers describe in step 2. Continue until email providers support digital signatures on incoming messages.
Step 4 - Once Tesco is sending secure emails, wait until the news gets to Sainsburys, ASDA (other supermarket chains in the UK).
- It could happen with webmail providers if there was a firefox addon (and one for the ie [l]users)
It would be outside the standards (because it would have to be within the body, eg:
subject: xxxx <begin signed tag or mimetype> <digital signature for text after this tag> message body </digital signature for text after this tag> </begin signed tag or mimetype>
Also this may interest you: Message Level Authentication for WebMail https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3203/
75.131.225.96 18:11, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Web of Trust (WoT)
I think a discussion of Thawte's web of trust would be appropriate. Would someone more familiar with the system like to write it (or at least peer-review what I write?). Web of Trust Info Page
Tvh2k 17:34, 1 March 2006 (UTC)
[edit] "Secure server" redirect okay?
"Shuttleworth's original project was to produce a secure server ..." --- I wanted to make secure server a wikilink. Secure server currently redirects to Https. (1) Is this redirect correct overall? (2) Would it be an appropriate redirect for secure server in the Thawte article? Thanks. ---- 201.51.211.130 21:50, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
It's not totally wrong but it's not quite right either. You might want to see if there's something more appropriate along the lines of "SSL Protocol"? Https is just the prefix for a secure site, it doesn't have any real meaning on its own. Meldh 22:27, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
