2004-11-09 - 4:55 p.m.

Hm. I keep wondering what is the big deal with thawte certificate? I'm sorry but it sucks. It does not add anything as a functionality for a single user. It gives nothing I would not be able to do with gnupg. And yet it is unbelievably popular, including some tech people .. which now makes me have to consider them being some sort of terminal or command line impaired people, and that's good. I like creating and managing my keys GPG key, even proxying keyservers to use port 80 because I need to - instead of doing stuff in the thawte way.

So, I go to thawte webpage to start with. Yes yes, start with telling them your name, nationality and social security number. I wanted to test thawte before, but I plain don't want to give out my ssn and other details to a site I don't personally have control over. Ok, I did today, only to test. Using a name of mine, a nationality and a ssn of mine. Fine. Still not trusting on their database management, yet I don't care if they or someone hijacks the ssn I used in it. Ok ... creating keys .. wait. Right. Creating keys. I can't import keys. I have to create keys they choose. No. I don't want that. I want to import my own keys, made as I wanted and just use them. Nope, can't do that.

I made a certificate of theirs to use with my mail. I could not choose my mail client .. I could not use the one showing entourage as an option either, since they were browser racistic, ie didn't like entourage key being created using Safari. Gnnh. I got some sort of general key, which they emailed. With the link to get it ... I got an .exe file from that link with the smart instructions they gave; "Remember, you will need your Thawte ID and password to access
the Personal Certification System. You also need to be running
the same browser, on the same machine, logged in as the same
user, as you were when you made the request.
"

Heh, yea right. Tell me how do I do that on a mac? Not going to install VPC to do that.

Sorry Dan, thawte suxxx. I'm back to gnupg and staying there untill something better comes out. >:)

And ps for general public .. fingerprints are the key to some people's weird online/away statuses. ;)