If we admit only CAs to the list who are worthy of your grandmother's trust, then I'm not so sure it's a disaster waiting to happen. OTOH, if we admit CAs that necessitate tools, and do not supply them, then yes, disaster waiting to happen.
We already have CAs that necessitate tools, in that we have CAs who issue certs with enough checking to make them fairly safe for CC numbers, and CAs who issue certs without such checks.
With respect to the tool users vs. Grandmothers debate, it seems that
the mozilla developer community is heavy on tool users, but the mozilla
user community is heavy on mothers and grandmothers. A single product
with only a single mode of security operation cannot satisfy both groups,
IMO. IMO, mozilla products need "grandmother" mode, and "advanced mode"
(or maybe "geek mode"), and out-of-the-box should run in "grandmother" mode.
The approach Firefox has been taking has been to make Firefox itself grandmother mode, and to provide an extension architecture for geeks to add an advanced mode of their choice. This reasoning has worked well in other areas of the UI.
My target audience in my thinking is certainly grandmother (or would be if either were still alive ;-). She's not stupid, but she just wants to use the computer as as tool, and so has limited brain space for learning things.
Gerv _______________________________________________ mozilla-crypto mailing list mozilla-crypto@mozilla.org http://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/mozilla-crypto
