Toby Atkin-Wright

When the Thawte Web of Trust and personal email certificates were discontinued last month, they offered me a free SSL certificate to “express their gratitude and sincere appreciation” of an “elite” member of the community. Who am I to say no to a freebie?

I applied for a two-year SSL EV certificate for my company web site. The certificate allows the use of an https: URL, and displays the company name in green in modern web browsers’ address bars. I learned a little about setting up Apache with SSL (surprisingly easy), and was amused at how straightforward the extended validation (EV) procedure was — a bit of form filling, signing and returning a contract, adding the company to scoot.co.uk so they could look up my mobile number, and then a short telephone call which consisted of me saying “yes” repeatedly to confirm details.

So now I have an expensive certificate on a website that is devoid of content. Go me.

(After writing this post, I recalled that for Mac gamers of a certain generation ‘EV’ means Escape Velocity. I spent too long in the late ’90s playing that.)

This entry was originally posted at http://tobyaw.dreamwidth.org/167522.html.

When the Thawte Web of Trust and personal email certificates were discontinued last month, they offered me a free SSL certificate to “express their gratitude and sincere appreciation” of an “elite” member of the community. Who am I to say no to a freebie?

I applied for a two-year SSL EV certificate for my company web site. The certificate allows the use of an https: URL, and displays the company name in green in modern web browsers’ address bars. I learned a little about setting up Apache with SSL (surprisingly easy), and was amused at how straightforward the extended validation (EV) procedure was — a bit of form filling, signing and returning a contract, adding the company to scoot.co.uk so they could look up my mobile number, and then a short telephone call which consisted of me saying “yes” repeatedly to confirm details.

So now I have an expensive certificate on a website that is devoid of content. Go me.

(After writing this post, I recalled that for Mac gamers of a certain generation ‘EV’ means Escape Velocity. I spent too long in the late ’90s playing that.)