Interesting Web Site Certificate Warning ...

By Mark Gibbs on Thu, 12/07/06 - 1:15pm.

UPDATE: Turns out that if anyone is watching what I search for they aren't as obvious as I theorized. It looks like the reason for this curious certificate notification is something called pre-caching. See next week's Gearhead for a discussion. [mg]

I was just writing a column and I wanted to find an article I read some time ago about binary explosives. So, I went to Google and entered "binary explosives" as my search term. I was, to say the least, somewhat surprised when Firefox popped up a warning that a Web site certificate involved in the transaction couldn't be verified. Here's the warning:

So, it looks like the Department of Defense with Google's help is tracking me because I used a suspicious search term. It also looks like either the DoD aren't really good at stealth or they want me to know that they are watching. Definitely lame either way.