When browsing this website, there is one ability that gets overlooked often but can be very handy sometimes.  Immediately below the header (top) area of the website are two small images located on each side of the page.  These images are:         and    .

If these images are clicked on they will hide / unhide that column from view.  Likewise if these images are clicked on in the top of each block, then it will hide / unhide that information within the block.  In this manner you may view only what you want on the page.

Certificates are used to verify the identity of people or computers. In particular, certificates are needed to establish secure connections. Without certificates, you would be able to ensure that no one else was listening, but you might be talking to the wrong computer without realizing it!

All transhost.org sensitive data will require the use of secure connections.  It can sometimes be tricky to coax a particular program to play nice and recognize the transhost.org certificates. We hope that this page will help you through the process.

If you don't follow these steps, your computer will likely complain or fail every time you attempt to create a secure connection with transhost.org.

Certificates are the digital equivalent of a government issued identification card. Certificates, however, are issued by private corporations called certificate authorities (CA). Transhost.org has chosen not to pay the exorbitant fees charged by commercial CAs.  Instead, we use CA Cert (cacert.org), a free and non-profit certificate authority.

Unfortunately, you need to do a little work to get your software to recognize CA Cert as a certificate authority. Every CA has a 'root certificate' which identifies a particular organization as a certificate authority. Corporate CAs have their root certificates distributed with most major computer programs and operating systems. For cacert.org, however, you need to manually install the cacert.org root certificate.

There is no universal way to install a root certificate for certificate authorities. In most web browsers, it is as easy as clicking this link:

Internet Explorer on the Mac is messed up, and requires that you use this link instead:

For most mail clients, however, you will need to download the link as a file to your computer and then import the certificate from within the mail client:

Alternately, you may wish to download the root certificate directly from cacert.org. You can also find more tutorials on the cacert.org wiki.

Without the root certificate, you will receive a security warning when you attempt to establish a secure connection. You can usually choose to ignore this warning and accept the server's certificate on a temporary or permanent basis.

"That doesn't sound so bad," you might say. In the past, this is exactly what many users have done in order to use secure connections. But there are major problems with this:

1. If people get in the habit of approving new server certificates every time they get a security warning, it completely defeats the purpose of having certificates in the first place.

2. Transhost.org has many servers and generates many certificates. It is easier for users to install CA Cert as a certificate authority once, rather than approving each transhost.org certificate one at a time.

3. Transhost.org actively wants to spread the adoption of CA Cert as a certificate authority, because it is also being used (or will be) by the indymedia network and other tech collectives.