And of course there's South Korea, where every financial transaction above a certain amount needs to be signed with an X.509 certificate. Back in the late 90s a

And of course there's South Korea, where every financial transaction above a certain amount needs to be signed with an X.509 certificate. Back in the late 90s and early 00s, Korea was a pioneer in the public use of PKI. But since no browser makes it easy to sign anything with a certificate stored on disk (or in a USB stick), this policy has led to serious dependence on ActiveX plugins (and therefore IE and Windows) that everyone has probably heard about. Now the Koreans are trying to fix that, but since the government is just as boneheaded as ever, the officially mandated "cross-browser" solution is just a Windows binary that installs NPAPI and PPAPI plugins into every browser. Some variants even work on Linux, but only because they're implemented as Java applets. PKI is cool in theory. In reality, it's hard to implement it in a way that is accessible to the general public.