In many university departments, there's a constant tension betweenworking on the computing infrastructure that is used by the entiredepartment, and working on things for individual professors and researchgroups. To put it more concretely, do you work on upgrading thedepartmental mailserver or do you set up Professor X's new cluster thatjust got dropped off at the loading dock?

(This tension is increased when Professor X's grant funding is helpingpay for computing support, as it often is. Professor X may well feel

As part of the ipsCA failure , a number of people are noticing that most browsers keep their own list of CA roots, instead ofdeferring to whatever system-wide list your operating system keeps.There are at least three ways to explain this, depending on how cynicalor optimistic you are.

The first is that it is the natural outcome of a ruthless but completelyuneven Darwinian struggle for influence (and the benefits it brings)between SSL CA vendors, browser vendors, and OS vendors. Since browservendors ultimately hold