[ Thanks to Eddy
Nigg for this link. ]
“Many corporations rely on digital certificates issued
by the public certification authorities to secure the
point-to-point connections of their network. Unfortunately most
public authorities are willing to sell “snake-oil” to those
enterprise establishments instead of real security, mainly because
the corporate managements request and ask for it. How come, the
dear reader might ask, and what is this snake-oil made of?“It’s today common practice to assign non-qualified domain names
or so-called host names to the various servers and work-stations at
the corporate Intranet. Those are typically named server1.local or
simply server1, whereas .local represents a non-qualified top level
domain which is not assigned by the IANA/ICANN clan for public
consumption. Those of you which maintain such networks or perhaps
manage a small home network are probably familiar with it.”