Frequently Asked Questions
Here you can find answers to commonly asked questions
Q: My browser tells me that the website is certified by an Unknown Authority and advices me to notify the webmaster. What should I do?
A: FSFE decided to trust a community-run Certification Authority called
CACert that seems to be the best available choice right now. In fact most CAs are not worth much, some of the common root certificates already were reportedly compromised. Besides this, they are usually unreasonably expensive.
Unfortunately not all distributions have the root certificate for CACert installed. So you might want to go to CACert website, get the root certificate and install it (Firefox is pretty good at doing this semi-automatically). That should solve the problem.
Probably next versions of Firefox will include CACert root certificate, but Windows Explorer users probably will have to live with the fake security warning. Check the status of inclusion of certificates in various browsers on CACert's wiki.
Q: I have installed the root certificate of CACert, but I still get a warning saying "Domain name mismatch" when connecting to https://fsfe.org
A: The problem arise because there is no clear standard on how to deal with multiple domain certificates. Different browsers have different reactions to qildcard certificates. It is perfectly safe to accept the connection. If you want to avoid this error, connect to https://www.fsfe.org/ instead.
To read more about this topic go to CACert's wiki.
