It’s May; it’s coming to that time of the year where I have to update my SSL certificate again. As I did last year I had a good look round for an official SSL option. Since I only use it for accessing my own web-mail and a few other toys, I loath the thought of having to pay for it. Even the cheapest I find are still more than $100, which is absolutely ludicrous considering you have to renew it annually. There may be hope yet though; Startcom.org began a project making themselves a free SSL Certification Authority. Provided you pass their verification tests they will issue you a SSL certificate endorsed by themselves free of charge. Unfortunately, they are not widely known enough to be taken seriously; they haven’t made it into the CA bundle of any major browsers yet. Their project does look very promising though; they have already issued more than 3,000 server certificates and had more than 14,000 browsers install their CA certificate as a trusted Certification Authority. My current solution is Do It Yourself SSL. I am my own Certification Authority, meaning I can issue my own server & client certificates. I do however get the annoying SSL nag-screen’s until I manually install my Lobstertech CA certificate into the browser I am using. For the moment this is all I need. I can sit comfortably reading my web-mail knowing its encrypted using 256-bit AES and it didn’t cost me a penny. [to be continued]