There has been a certain amount of uproar about how Firefox 3handles self-signed SSL certificates ,and a certain amount of attempts to justify it . I disagreeviolently with the attempts to excuse the behavior, because whatit comes down to for me is that Firefox 3 has made it more attractive to have no SSL certificate at all than to have a self-signedone. This is both insane and inane; it does nothing to furthersecurity on the Internet, and it has basically nothing to do withthe sorts

One of the periodically proposed spam solutions is that someone willissue certificates to people and if they misbehave, the certificateswill be revoked. One of the many problems with this idea is what I willcall the corporate identity problem .

The problem with corporate identities is twofold, or perhapsthreefold. First, corporate identities are much like Internetidentities : they provide only positiveidentity, that person A is associated with corporation B, not negativeidentities, that corporation B is not associated with person A. In factthere are a

To summarize my earlier entry , the problem withinitrds is that they are both fragile and opaque. To improve them,one needs to tackle both issues.

The easy way to tackle the fragility is to make initrds both morecomprehensive and more dynamic. Since one way initrds break is by notincluding necessary kernel modules, simply include nearly everythingby default (you can exclude modules that are clearly not needed forbooting, like sound drivers); the extra disk space and boot-time memoryspace needed is likely to be