You're thinking of the Thawte Web of Trust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thawte https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thawte which was run by Mark Shuttleworth (now of

You're thinking of the Thawte Web of Trust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thawte https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thawte which was run by Mark Shuttleworth (now of Canonical). The certificates were used for email, not for SSL. I lost track of what happened to it after CACert took over.