PC Security and what can affect it

The security and safety of your PC depends on many things, all of which should be directed at closing the window of opportunity through which your PC might be compromised. Your web browser provides one of the most important of these opportunities, which is why the AllIncontext web site does not use scripting and only outputs HTML text which your browser uses to lay out the web page.

Since AllIncontext software is digitally signed by AllIncontext digital certificates, you need to install the Root and Intermediate Certificate Authority certificates which allow your PC operating system to evaluate the safety of AllIncontext software. The links below provide information about why AllIncontext provides its own certificates in addition to using a commercially available code signing certificate:

• Did you know that some 650 organizations world-wide can install certificates on your PC?
• Notable breaches of security at commercial Certificate Authorities from 2001 to 2011.
• Quality of digital certificates and why you might want to install AllIncontext certificates.
• See the list of certificates that Microsoft considers necessary for safe PC operation (Hint: There is only one non-Microsoft certificate, it is valid to 2021 and uses md5 as its hash [which is no longer recommended] and only has a key length of 1024 bits [also not recommended]).
• Verify any File Checksum if it is provided on a web site.

A digital certificate is bound to an identity (just like a driving licence or a passport) but it does not follow that a given digital certificate can be trusted. That is why the phrase trusted third party might be considered a contradiction in terms (although not strictly an oxymoron). If you don't know anyone in the third party it cannot be trusted and if you do know someone and trust them, then it isn't a third party. So why would anyone expect software produced by company A and digitally signed by Company B to be any more (or less) trusted than Company A doing both. For more on trust see the link above.