Honest Ahmed (2011)

Achmed, not Ahmed ...

(2011)

I get the sense it's not serious, but is there any more context?

Am I the only one that understands 10% of what's going on? Obviously they won't add his CA, and there seems to be some other links to joke requests, but what am I missing?

From the thread it seems like they’re poking fun at browser vendors adding untrustworthy CAs to their trust store and not removing them even for egregious violations.

Their point is that Honest Achmed is at least as honest as some of the other CAs they’ve allowed in. This issue was closed a few times because Honest Achmed hadn’t completed an external audit. It was reopened each time by users who pointed out that audits were redundant if Achmed quickly issued a tonne of certificates and became too big to remove.

In other words, this issue is an implicit critique of browsers certificate policies.