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Thawte Consulting is a certificate authority (CA) for X.509 certificates. Thawte was founded in 1995 by Mark Shuttleworth in South Africa.
Thawte was originally run from Shuttleworth's parents' garage. Shuttleworth's original project was to produce a secure server not fettered by the restrictions on the export of cryptography which had been imposed by the United States. The server, Sioux, was an adaptation of the Apache HTTP server; it was later integrated with the Stronghold web server as Thawte began to concentrate more on their certification activities.
In 1999 VeriSign acquired Thawte in a stock purchase from Shuttleworth for US$575 million. Both VeriSign and Thawte had certificates in the first Netscape browsers, and were thus "grandfathered" into all other web browsers. Before VeriSign's purchase, they each had about 50% of the market. VeriSign's certificate rollover was due to take place on 1 January 2000.
Proceeds from the sale enabled Shuttleworth to become the second space tourist and to found the Ubuntu project.
In August 2010, Symantec acquired VeriSign's security business, including Thawte.
Source: Wikipedia
Thawte was originally run from Shuttleworth's parents' garage. Shuttleworth's original project was to produce a secure server not fettered by the restrictions on the export of cryptography which had been imposed by the United States. The server, Sioux, was an adaptation of the Apache HTTP server; it was later integrated with the Stronghold web server as Thawte began to concentrate more on their certification activities.
In 1999 VeriSign acquired Thawte in a stock purchase from Shuttleworth for US$575 million. Both VeriSign and Thawte had certificates in the first Netscape browsers, and were thus "grandfathered" into all other web browsers. Before VeriSign's purchase, they each had about 50% of the market. VeriSign's certificate rollover was due to take place on 1 January 2000.
Proceeds from the sale enabled Shuttleworth to become the second space tourist and to found the Ubuntu project.
In August 2010, Symantec acquired VeriSign's security business, including Thawte.
Source: Wikipedia