Re: [CA cert] Re: An apology and an announcement

[Duane <duane AT cacert.org>]

John A. Martin wrote:

> Circa 1991-1993, when the Jolitzes were doing 386BSD and Linus was on
> the MINIX newsgroup, and even later, a lot of folk became worried about
> the prospect of Operating Systems produced outside of responsible
> Corporations or Academic Institutions becoming widely available and
> used on inexpensive hardware.

Little bit different of a situation, a PKI CA by it's very nature is 
centralised, while efforts have been under taken to decentralise this 
process as much as possible, it simply isn't possible to a large extent, 
now computers running operating systems is a very decentralised thing. 
As I stated, in this particular instance, not in general, I can see how 
trying to decentralise things at this point in time isn't the best move 
politically as it could cause everyone to become untrusted. We're very 
much in a political environment, and lobbying vendors for inclusion, if 
100 other groups suddenly popped up tomorrow all doing the same, the 
vendors would tell them to go get webtrust certified and ignore any 
efforts they were applying to get included because the signal to noise 
ration would be high...

> My concerns lie in the fact that if 100 CAs were to suddenly exist tomorrow all using similar documents and the same code base nobody would know who to trust and nobody would be able to say with any certainty which were adhering to the CPS' presented on their websites, and the end result is none of them would be trusted. So while competition can be healthy in some cases I can see how it could also be destructive as well in this particular instance. 

--

Best regards,
 Duane

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