I have been a Thawte Notary since January 15th, 2002 with the ability to assign 35 trust points. In 2002 I had to go the hard way via the trusted third party program as there were no Thawte Notaries in or around Luxembourg. During over 7 years I didn’t get to assure the identity of a lot of persons, only 9 in fact.

Today Thawte will shutdown the Web of Trust Program. This is part of a process started after Thawte for acquired by Verisign.

I really loved the Community aspects of WoT, that’s why I joind CAcert sometime after joining Thawte. CAcert is a community driven Certificate Authority, which offers the ability to transfer your trusted status from Thawte to CAcert. As Thawte intends to shutdown the Freemail Certifacte service as well, it’s probably the only way to keep some kind of free email signing certificate.

CAcert, unfortunately, is not yet integrated into web browser like Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer. Therefor, you need to teach your browser to trust the certificates from CAcert, which you can do with 2 clicks on this page.

So hurry and get your Thawte points converted to CAcert before it’s too late.