The first time I saw one of these windows I had no idea what to do. What heck is a security certificate? And whatever it is, why is browser asking me about it? I mean, I had enough questions about ActiveX controls, now I was being asked about security certificates?

Let's look at security certificates from perspective of dating. Let's say you are a woman looking for a date. How do you know you can trust a person?

Well, you can just decide for yourself or you can ask a trusted friend about potential date. So you call up "Sally" and ask "can I trust Bill on a date?" Sally will tell you yes or no, and since you trust her if she says "no" poor guy will not be going out with you.

That's way a security certificate works. The certificate is an electronic document which is highly secure (encrypted) and stamped with an identifier. That identifier says web site with certificate is whom it claims to be.

The way it works is straightforward. Let's say I want to sell something on my web site. I might purchase a security certificate from Verisign (or any number of other companies) to prove to people visiting my web site that I am who I say I am.

What would you think about allowing someone to have unlimited access to your computer system without your knowledge or permission? Now, how do you feel about letting that person rent out your CPU, spare disk space and extra memory? Do you like idea of these strangers downloading programs, data and lord knows what else to your machine and using your bandwidth?

A company called Brilliant Digital Entertainment has been quietly preparing to do just this. They have been distributing their "free" 3D advertising technology since last fall, and along with that software they have quietly been installing file-swapping software called Kazaa.

Brilliant Digital Entertainment has stated as a part of their SEC filing that they will soon be turning on a vast, multi-million machine P2P (point-to-point) network. This network consists of machines belonging to those people who have downloaded and installed their software. The network is known as Altnet.

What does Brilliant want to do with this vast network? They have some very grand plans, but one major task is using these personally owned computers to store and serve ads (banners and other things). Their logic is described in an excerpt from their SEC filing:

"An example of Network Services is ad serving. When a user opens a new Web page, and banner ad which appears on that page is delivered by a third party ad serving company, such as DoubleClick, third party ad serving company incurs infrastructure, management, bandwidth and processing costs for every single banner ad which gets served. Often times, same ad gets "served" millions of times each month. Using Altnet's proposed solutions, all of those ads could be delivered to users via Altnet network, thereby saving costs for third party ad serving companies."

Brilliant does have some vague plans in place to compensate people involved in network, at least some of them. Here's what their SEC filing says about that: