I talked to John Lettice today about digital certificates – my view is that certs are on “life support”, a quote which he used to head his piece. It seems to me that PKI has taken 30 years to get to where it is today – pretty much nowhere. It’s spent 20 of those years in the “plateau of discontent”, to use a Gartner phrase. We need to find a solution that works cross-platform and is portable between locations and devices – so the same “id” that I carry works on the ‘phone, on my digital TV, on my PC (both at home and at work). That seems a long way away. John wraps up with a position that we might take in the UK to force something like this to happen. We shall see. Might be right, might be wrong. But something has to change to make this technology work – otherwise we have another WAP, lots of hype, lots of excitement. Zero take-up, zero enthusiasm, zero future.
Digital Certificates – on life support?
