KITP Weblog

Posted on August 11, 2005 by woit

The KITP program on Mathematical Structures in String Theory has a new weblog associated with it where Andrew Neitzke has been posting summaries of the talks given there. The idea of having such weblogs attached to programs like the one at the KITP seems to be an excellent one, it will be interesting to see how it works out.

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4 Responses to KITP Weblog

  1. Chris W. says:
    August 11, 2005 at 7:32 pm

    FYI — I got a warning about an untrusted security certificate when accessing this site. (The URL’s protocol is https.) I guess it’s because the issuer is KITP, which is not a recognized certificate authority.

  2. Quantoken says:
    August 12, 2005 at 4:25 am

    Chris:

    No no no. What you said is not true. I happen to know all the intimate details of HTTPS and have actually worked on a HTTPS based product that’s being widely used. So let me explain what it is.

    The certificate your web broser received is not trusted because it is a root certificate (self signed certificate) sent over the wire. Which is WRONG way of implementation. Because any self signed certificate can pretty much be replaced by any machine in the middle, allowing easy man-in-the-middle attack and allow password etc be stolen.

    And it is not even a well formatted self-issued certificate!!! The certificate identity is not spelled correctly. The people who implemented this web site is a complete idiot. Even a dummy would know to buy a certificate from recognized RootCA, and do things in proper ways. This is the most bizzar HTTPS web site I ever see!!!

    Quantoken

  3. rof says:
    August 12, 2005 at 9:16 am

    It’s probably just because the site is new. A lot of sites use self-issued certificates during testing phases and only pay up to a third company later. I was at the KITP at the end of last year and their computer people seemed reasonably competent, although the wireless signal wasn’t great.

  4. Quantoken says:
    August 16, 2005 at 11:35 am

    Wrong again. See my latest comment on Lubos’s blog.

    Quantoken

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