alt Hacker NewsHonestly that last paragraph I totally agree. I did edit to “never trust” these clowns’ root CAs in Keychain Access on my Mac, and this is the first I’m hearing that there was any possibility of that being flipped back. Will have to look into that.
If I can speculate though on why these bundles come from the browser or OS and aren’t fully in the user’s responsibility. You’d have to start from scratch for it to not have a bunch of stuff the user had ‘no need for’ to be present, and the user would need to see a cert window semi-frequently that gives the possibility to start trusting a CA, and the bottom 99.99% of users in sophistication has no idea whether they should say yes or no. I mean, without being signed by a root CA you already trust, even the name on the new CA could be completely made up. “Do you want to trust the ‘Apple Root Certificate Authority’?”
Yet they ask you what keyboard type to use, what Wifi network and password to use. Is it too much to ask, do you want to trust "key authorities" from outside your country? Users used to see computers as inherently technical devices and expect to get asked technical questions.
But even if not, you get asked whether to turn on Siri, whether to send telemetry, whether to sign away your rights, etc., all of which are consequential but prompts are massaged in a way where it's nice and easy for the user to answer a certain way without having a clue. Makes me think user comprehension isn't even a problem.
Where I suspect the problem lies is that it will not fly to make it seem like US-based CA's are more trustworthy just because the majority of sites roll up to them. Then you'll need to do some non-country-specific human tiering, and who's the judge of that?