Be­cause of var­ied rea­son­s, I have spent a lit­tle time in my life look­ing at SSL cer­tifi­cates. I have spent time cre­at­ing, sign­ing, con­fig­ur­ing, buy­ing, de­ploy­ing and val­i­dat­ing them. I have hard­ly ev­er seen some­thing like Val­icert, though.

So, a us­er has a SSL er­ror, and there ap­pears a cer­tifi­cate that has noth­ing to do with the site he's sup­posed to be ac­cess­ing. It's marked as in­valid (n­ev­er­mind) and is from a CA I have nev­er heard of, called Val­icert.

It seems to be a valid CA, its cer­tifi­cates most­ly val­i­date, etc, but some­thing is fishy (be­sides the fact that there is a freak­ing Val­icert cer­tifi­cate where there should not be one and I have no idea why).

It seems Val­icert is or was owned by Go­Dad­dy, which should al­ready be a prob­lem, but it gets worse. The URL for the CA? val­icert.­com which is not con­fig­ured as a site. Then I try www.­val­icert.­com which does ex­ist but is not about a CA but about AxWay, a "Busi­ness In­ter­ac­tion Net­works com­pa­ny".

It con­tains nuggets like "What can our cloud-based com­mu­ni­ty man­age­ment so­lu­tion do for your bot­tom line?" and "Is your file trans­fer sys­tem vis­i­bil­i­ty-im­paired?" and "Our award-win­ning prod­uct­s, so­lu­tions and ser­vices en­able the busi­ness-­crit­i­cal trans­ac­tions re­quired to ac­cel­er­ate per­for­mance with­in and among en­ter­pris­es – while pro­vid­ing man­age­men­t, se­cu­ri­ty and gov­er­nance on in­ter­ac­tions through­out busi­ness net­work­s."

And then I had the (bad) idea to try http­s://www.­val­icert.­com ... a pic­ture should be enough:

These bo­zos, this com­pa­ny that dares of­fer file trans­fer what­nots and has "award win­ning prod­uct­s"... has a self­-signed cer­tifi­cate, that ex­pired in 2010, for lo­cal­host freak­ing lo­cal­do­main in their pub­lic web­serv­er.

So, I am guess­ing Val­icert does­n't ex­ist any­more, go­dad­dy kept the CA alive un­til all certs ex­pire and for some rea­son AxWay is a bunch of in­com­pe­tents who bought the do­main (but why???) and re­al­ly, trust­ing CAs is get­ting hard­er each day.

I will be speak­ing at Py­Day Lu­ján next sat­ur­day May 5th.

The ti­tle is "Do­ing one thing and do­ing it well" and it's not even ful­ly haped in my head yet, which is usu­al­ly a good sign.

So, come join me and a bunch of smarter peo­ple talk­ing about pro­gram­ming for a whole day, for free. It will be fun!

Men­tion­ing this blog gets you can­dy. Just say­ing.

At Canon­i­cal's On­line Ser­vices we can do cool stuff on fri­days. We do cool stuff all week, ac­tu­al­ly, but on fri­days we can do cra­zier cool stuff.

So, to­day, I ripped off a great ser­vice of­fered by http://­calepin.­co and im­ple­ment­ed a pro­to­type blog-through-Ubun­tu-One web ap­pli­ca­tion. Of course, it's pow­ered by Niko­la,

The code is ab­so­lute non­sense, and it needs to be looked at by some­one who un­der­stands Djan­go, OAu­th, OpenID, and pro­gram­ming in gen­er­al bet­ter than I do, but hey, it does work (for a very loose def­i­ni­tion of "work").

It's called Shore­ham and no, you can't have it yet.

As a teaser, here's a video. With a pony.

In the near fu­ture I will do a bet­ter post about this ex­plain­ing the code, etc.

Al­va is al­most the op­po­site of Niko­la. If Niko­la is about mak­ing stat­ic sites, Al­va is a dy­nam­ic site. How­ev­er, as Hegel sug­gest­s, from the the­sis and the an­tithe­sis comes the syn­the­sis.

So, Al­va is about dy­nam­i­cal­ly cre­at­ing stat­ic sites. If you want to have Niko­la in your serv­er in­stead of in your own com­put­er, and have the con­ve­nience of an on­line tool, that's the niche Al­va tries to fil­l.

So, you would in­stall Al­va, and use it like any oth­er we­b-based blog­ging tool. Yet, be­hind the sce­nes, you would have Niko­la, and all the per­for­mance and se­cu­ri­ty ben­e­fits of stat­ic sites.

And maybe some­day, I (or some­one) will put up a mul­ti­-us­er ver­sion of Al­va, and you will be able to get host­ed blogs, know­ing all the da­ta is yours and you can leave any­time and do your own thing.

This is very very ear­ly stages. So ear­ly it does not work yet. But here's a teaser:

There is no firm time­frame for this, it de­pends on a ton of oth­er stuff and may not even hap­pen.