Third Party certificates a weak link?

"While browsing through articles that I have before or found uninteresting I ended up on the New York Times website. I decided to look at their technology area and found this article called "Experts Warn of a Weak Link in the Security of Web Sites"." ~ Miguel Helft

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/14/technology/14encrypt.html?_r=1&ref=technology

Now I have been told by my professors that most companies like to have their own certificate authority. Which means this is yet another third party company making certs. So it would seem that our weak link is in the area in which we just pass the buck to someone else. This happens in all industries, not just technology. Hopefully we can trust these third parties and that they are making secure certificates.