Another (busier) discussion is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10619336 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10619336 As an ex-Dell support website

Another (busier) discussion is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10619336 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10619336 As an ex-Dell support website developer (in other words I've worked with the service tag lookup feature) I don't understand why a root CA certificate is required for this. I do remember that the previous incarnation needed Java/ActiveX support, which is admittedly now getting harder to run, so the new site now asks the user to download and run an executable. Assuming the EXE is an installed application (I didn't investigate any further), this would give Dell full access to the user's PC anyway. Hence, I don't understand why a CA root cert enables Dell to do anything extra in order to locate the service tag from the system. Whilst people do want to give Dell the benefit of the doubt, and think that the CA root was left on the build imaging system by accident, the real question is why it was there in the first place! What purposes would a CA root certificate give Dell (even on their own test builds)?