Friday evening (20 December) those who keep an eye on the browser UI would have observed a small but significant change take effect at Vivaldi.net: The browser turned on the Extended Validation “Green Bar” for us, indicating that the identity of our website was now better assured than it has been, though the encryption is just as good as before.
Previously, while we were developing the site and during the first days of it being live, we used a Domain Validated SSL/TLS certificate for our sites that indicated that we had control over the domain, but not who we are. This is a useful level of web site identity verification for smaller sites that only need to present information securely and without any major collection of personal information.
For users of a web site that collects or manages personal and payment information, it is not just important to know that the people managing the web site are in control of the domain. It is even more important to know, or be able find out, who they are, legally speaking, in case there is a problem.
This need for verifiable identity information was why a group of Certificate Authorities, such as Verisign and Entrust, and Browsers, such as Microsoft, Mozilla and Opera (including yours truly), gathered to found the CA/Browser Forum so that we could define what eventually became the Extended Validation (EV) Guidelines for CAs, and the associated “Green Bar” in browsers.
When Jon decided to start the Vivaldi.net social web site project, one of my suggestions was to have an encrypted site. Given recent revelations (e.g., NSA) it is now, or should be, unthinkable to have a social web site that is unencrypted. While many sites have been using a hybrid approach where the login, account management, and sometimes authoring, is encrypted, there are just too many ways to sniff information that way, so the whole site needs to be encrypted. Another of my suggestions was to use EV certificates on the sites, to provide better identity information and assurances to our users.
While I would have wished to have unveiled Vivaldi.net on Wednesday with an EV certificate, the process of obtaining one was intentionally designed to include a lot of paperwork that has to be completed before the certificate can be issued, and that paperwork was not completed by our CA, GlobalSign, until early evening Friday.
So, go ahead and enjoy Vivaldi.net, assured that it is Jon’s company, Vivaldi Technologies AS, that is operating it.
