I would never trust a ssl certificate for that purpose. It does
provide a reasonable effort to keep information between me and the server
confidential. That's worth something, I guess.
I agree with you, I just don't think this is reasonable. If the
CA's aren't going to keep tabs on your stuff (and I'm not just picking
on thawte here) and the browsers both don't differentiate between
CA's, and make it easy for the user to accept random certificates or
bypass the certification mechanism entirely, I don't think it is a
reasonable effort. The whole process is flawed.
-Bob