Seems like most websites I go to, including national banks and airlines and major chain stores, give me “certificate” warnings. They aren’t signed or not verified or some such wording.
Is there a registry? What’s it do? How come these errors keep coming up, don’t they care that large chunks of their user base are being warned away?
What you’re probably seeing are notices about SSL certificates. Breifly, they are designed as a way to verify that the site that is sending you encrypted information is who they say they are. Certificates are issued by various agencies (such as Verisign) or can be self-created (although self created ones should almost always cause a warning to come up). They are only good for a limited period of time, and must be renewed.
If you are getting warning messages about a site’s certificate, the cert could be expired, misnamed (ie, they set the cert for www.mybank.com but you came in to banking.mybank.com), or forged. If you are getting warnings from just about every site, you might have your computer’s security settings set incorrectly or your computer clock might be off.
No I don’t get them on every site.
Don’t you ever get them?
I can’t be the only one.
If you haven’t already done so, go to Windows Update and install the Root Certificates Update which is under Software, Optional. It may clear up some of the errors.
If you are using IE 7 that may be some of the issue. IE6 & 7 have the same basic certificate functionality, but the certificate checking defaults on IE7 are set to a pickier level.
So many sites that were set up almost right work OK on IE6 but trigger warnings on IE7. Corporate america is just starting to deploy IE7 in bulk & these issues are slowly coming to light.
As noted by others, if you are seeing this a lot it may be something on your machine.