G-Loaded Journal » Services http://www.g-loaded.eu An open-source software and technology related journal Fri, 11 May 2012 13:37:42 +0000 en hourly 1 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ Free Personal Email Certificates Program discontinued by Thawte http://www.g-loaded.eu/2009/10/12/free-personal-email-certificates-program-discontinued-by-thawte/ http://www.g-loaded.eu/2009/10/12/free-personal-email-certificates-program-discontinued-by-thawte/#comments Mon, 12 Oct 2009 16:07:34 +0000 George Notaras http://www.g-loaded.eu/?p=1298 I’ve been using Thawte‘s free personal email digital certificates for some years now. Unfortunately, Thawte discontinues the Personal E-mail Certificate and Web of Trust services. All issued certificates will be revoked on November 16th 2009 and the particular services will no longer be available after that date.

Read more information about this matter here.

All current certificate owners will be offered a free one-year digital certificate for email encryption/signing by Verisign. Renewals of those certificates will cost $19.95 per email address (at the time of writing), while using Thwate’s program you could just pay an initial fee in order to verify your identity and then get your name to appear on all your digital certificates that had been issued by that service for your email addresses.

Although I believe that taking back what you have given is usually either a sign of greed and irresponsibility or proof of bad planning, I do understand Thawte’s given reasons for such a decision:

[...] for the ever-expanding standards and technology requirements will outpace our ability to maintain these services at the high level of quality we require [...]

When it comes to secure authentication or digital identification, quality is not negotiable. On the other hand, what is questionable is the high price of the certificate renewals, which do not involve any kind of paperwork and could also require no human intervention at all, provided that the initial verification of the certificate owner’s identity and the renewal procedure itself are being done correctly.

I am quite certain that there are other Certificate Authorities that offer free email certificates or email certificate programs at reasonable prices, but I didn’t have the time to check. Perhaps, a reader who has done some research on this could contribute some info.

I’ll be posting about this topic again soon. Stay tuned!

Free Personal Email Certificates Program discontinued by Thawte, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

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]]> http://www.g-loaded.eu/2009/10/12/free-personal-email-certificates-program-discontinued-by-thawte/feed/ 4 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ Project CodeTRAX discontinued http://www.g-loaded.eu/2009/09/21/project-codetrax-discontinued/ http://www.g-loaded.eu/2009/09/21/project-codetrax-discontinued/#comments Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:10:24 +0000 George Notaras http://www.g-loaded.eu/?p=1179 I officially announce that Project CodeTRAX will not be developed any further. This project was an effort to create a hosting platform for multiple software projects using well-established open source software. Although there had been some silent progress in the development of small administrative utilities and software bridges between the various parts of the system, I finally realized that the base software, Trac, could not meet the requirements of a multi-project environment, at least in its current form. Although, there is an ongoing effort by some developers to add support for multiple projects, I think that it is very difficult for Trac to adapt to its new role without major core changes and I doubt that such changes will happen any time soon.

I have already found the project hosting platform which will host my software projects. This will soon be deployed on Codetrax.org. Stay tuned for more info…

Project CodeTRAX discontinued, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

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]]> http://www.g-loaded.eu/2009/09/21/project-codetrax-discontinued/feed/ 0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ Online analysis of a webpage’s loading time http://www.g-loaded.eu/2008/02/25/online-analysis-of-a-webpages-loading-time/ http://www.g-loaded.eu/2008/02/25/online-analysis-of-a-webpages-loading-time/#comments Mon, 25 Feb 2008 16:19:34 +0000 George Notaras http://www.g-loaded.eu/2008/02/25/online-analysis-of-a-webpages-loading-time/ Have you ever wondered how much time it takes a browser to load your web page across the internet or how this total webpage load time is distributed among the various HTTP requests that are sent to the web server in order to retrieve all the objects, including images, javascript, flash animations, et cetera your page contains? Recently, I’ve been wondering about such things, so I started searching for services that can provide both an estimation of a web page’s load time and also some analysis about how long the retrieval of each of its objects lasts. The one that caught my attention is Pingdom’s Full Page Test. The service can be used free of charge. I guess the visual representation of the web page load time and all the available features are quite satisfactory for a free service.

Online analysis of a webpage’s loading time, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

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