Collaboration Technology 2.0

Bah.

This one is a money making scheme at best. The cost of SSL certificates is too low for these people who manage suck a hundred bucks a year from every mom and pop online store out there already. Now, they'll have more legitimate reasons to charge more for the "REALLY" good ssl certificate, without which people's address bar wont turn green. Any bets on this cost at least twice as much for the average consumer?

The next level of SSL certificate, if we're going to get serious, will need to come from the government in which the site owner pays taxes, with other governments potentially offering cross validation. That way, in almost every country, forgery of the certificate or mis-use becomes a criminal offense. In the U.S., for example, these certificates could by issued by the post office. They could be available to people and to businesses for use on web sites and on personal authentication ids. Mis-use of these, forgery of them, etc. would be postal fraud.

This half-measure is little more than greed. That green address bar doesn't stand for "GO" it stands for "Money".

LOL. Postal fraud.

I don't beleive that EV SSL Certificates are just a money-making scheme. It is trivial for anyone to get a normal SSL certificate for a phishing website even if they want to claim that they are Microsoft, Inc. The EV standards make sure every certificate authority is playing by the same rules and ensuring that they issue a certificate to the right company and people with the right authority. If they don't, then they will fail the EV Audit and won't be able to issue EV certificates anymore.