Today we had a great WebEx presentation on the latest updates in Extended Validation SSL Certificates. It was attended by over 100 businesses and during Q&A inspired considerably more questions than we could answer.

The seminar already is posted, and you can watch it here.

When you sign up to check out the RSA keynote speeches, including VeriSign CEO Stratton Sclavos's presentation on security in the Any Era, make sure you check out the selection from Friday called "Phish or No Phish." Host Hugh Thompson shows us an interesting exercise where the security professionals in the room are trying to choose between phishing messages and real messages. Over a quarter of them pick the wrong message, which Hugh points out as very significant.

There's also some insightful discussion of marketing security online and the value of so doing. Both these points are relevent from the perspective of Extended Validation SSL and the VeriSign Secured Seal. If that's...

Tuesday's Microsoft keynote at RSA was interesting in the amount of attention that Bill Gates and Microsoft CTO Craig Mundi spent on the issue of authenticated identity. The format of the keynote was Bill and Craig talking about the future of secure computing initiatives, and a solid 80% of their discussion focused on the matter of reliably knowing the identity of a device, application, or person on a network.

Several times Bill stated his opinion that certificates are "a foundational piece" of the secure network of the future. He called identity "where the weakest link in the system has been" and went on to say, "We see certificates in general as the way these things should go."

Obviously recent intiatives like EV SSL and CardSpace are working toward this ambition. It's really cool that my job gives me the opportunity to contribute to something so...

I just blogged my own speech and a few other speeches at the RSA show next week. In addition to those scheduled speeches, here are a couple more scheduled speeches we have on Extended Validation SSL Certificates.