X-Day Verisign Coincidence

So some fuckwad at VeriSign, one of the big browser encryption key companies in the US, decided that the current root certificate should expire at Midnight, January 1, 2000. This is when any version of Netscape 4.05 or earlier will start complaining every time a web site uses a VeriSign certificate to encrypt data--credit cards, say, or passwords, or other sensitive information. This means that there will be dumbass web users who will say their website is broken because they're using an out-of-date browser that can be upgraded by just replacing the damn root certificate.

And worse, this isn't a so-called "Y2K" problem, because the date doesn't even enter into the matter. Root certificates are expired by design, to make it harder to hack. They could've expired it six months ago or six months from now and it wouldn't matter. They chose the date--to be fair, well before "Y2K" problems were discovered--without considering that some primates freak out when they see a lot of zeros in a year.

Meanwhile, his colleage at Thawte, VeriSign's main competitor and currently the bigger of the two, chose a different date for the root certificate expiry:

July 1998.
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