Today's good news is superficially pretty technical: "Core KDE developer George Staikos recently hosted a meeting of the security developers from the leading web browsers. The aim was to come up with future plans to combat the security risks posed by phishing, ageing encryption ciphers and inconsistent SSL Certificate practise." But this is interesting not just because it may help improve internet security, and not just because it is a bit of much-needed cooperation between competitors, but also because of how open the process is becoming. You can even read a narrative of the event from the Microsoft developer's perspective.

I know that Frank and Gerv from Mozilla, George from Konqueror and Yngve and Carsten from Opera have their own thoughts for an improved certificate standard and how they would handle that in the user experience.

I wish we could promise you that you will see this experience in IE7 and its equivalent in other browsers but there are a lot of details to work out before browsers can differentiate SSL sites based on how well vetted they are. For this to work, Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera and Konqueror, amongst others, think there should be some common validation guidelines for rigorous website identification. There is a lot of preliminary agreement but also a lot of work to do. The American Bar Association Information Security Committee is providing a forum to pursue this. You can check back with us and other browsers to see how the process moves along.

—Microsoft developer Rob Franco

It's easy for me to take this in stride, especially since I wasn't paying much attention to commercial software development processes in the seventies and eighties, but the openness and access that the internet is providing is really something out of science fiction.