I was happy to read the article Digital Certificates: Do They Work? which mentioned the excellent paper by Carl Ellison and Bruce Schneier titled Ten Risks of PKI: What You’re not Being Told about Public Key
Infrastructure. I have always found the certicate industry to be a racket because it strongly encourages websites to pay money to give their users what amounts to an illusion of security. The solution is to support efforts like CAcert.org which generates certificates for free.