CAcert ist nun auch als Gruppe im vorrangig deutschsprachigen Portal XING (ehemals OpenBC) vertreten. XING – das Netzwerk für Business Professionals, ist die ideale Plattform für Fachgruppen und Gemeinschaften. XING fördert Geschäftsbeziehungen, die auf Vertrauen basieren. Die Theorie „Jeder kennt jeden über sechs Ecken“ findet auf XING ihre praktische Umsetzung: Die Plattform zeigt ihren Mitgliedern die Kontakte ihrer Kontakte an und ermöglicht ihnen so, ihr persönliches Netzwerk auszubauen.

Weitere Informationen: https://www.xing.com/net/cacert/

Man kann dieser Gruppe einfach über diesen Link http://www.xing.com/group-12721.f8ad2f beitreten.

Ede, Netherlands, 22st October 2007

Stichting Oophaga Foundation announces that the CAcert service provision of free digital certificates will now be hosted in the Netherlands.

The service is based on Open Source software technology under the name of CAcert. CAcert’s certificate service is an alternative to the commercial Certificate Authorities (CAs) for which users normally have to pay a yearly fee. A certificate can be used to apply digital signatures to secure a document, a file, a programm, a web site, or to authenticate the sender of an email.

CAcert’s certificate service, originally initiated in Australia, is now undergoing a comprehensive upgrade in services, professionalism and security. As part of this process, a major part of the service has moved to Ede, Netherlands, to the premises of internet services provider BIT.

Teus Hagen from the NLnet foundation, one of the founders of Stichting Oophaga Foundation: “Commercial CAs are used by many big companies nowadays, but there is huge interest in free and reliable digital certificate support. We should remember that software developers freely develop many plugins for commonly used applications such as Firefox, Thunderbird and Open Office, and consumers want to secure their private data. At this moment CAcert has about 100.000 users. We expect that this will be doubled in about six months“.

Sponsors

Stichting Oophaga Foundation is a fully independent organisation. Dutch companies and service providers have been approached by Oophaga to support the hosting provision with financial and hardware donations. The goal is to create a separate and secured location with brand new and reliable equipment in Netherlands. Companies such as SUN Netherlands, AMD, Cisco, Net.work Appliances and Tunix have provided the equipment and support for free. The industrial internet provider BIT is hosting the CAcert services and provides a very well secured environment.

Leo Willems of Tunix: “TUNIX always supports good Open Source projects. For example, for our own development of the Tunix firewall, we use FreeBSD. In this respect, we offer both free support to CAcert and Oophaga for securing their infrastructure and free consultation for the rehosting of these services to Netherlands.”

Michel van Osenbruggen of BIT: “I like this exceptional initiative, mainly because of the free certificates. With this free service provision, we stimulate the usage of digital certificates so the Internet becomes more secure. We are glad to host the CAcert services in our data centre, because we contribute in a very positive way to the Internet community. The decision of CAcert and Oophaga to choose our data centre underscores that BIT2 fulfils the highest requirements in the area of security and safeguarding.”

About CAcert
CAcert was founded in 2002 in Sydney Australia by Duane Groth. He was a young Australian photographer and programmer who was looking for a secure and costeffective authentication and identification system for the regional wireless access project across Sydney. Through his efforts, CAcert Inc. was created as nonprofit Australian-based association.

Initially, it was a local service WiFi access provider in New South Wales. Today it is better known as the free certificate authority at www.cacert.org. The free certificate service grew enormously and spread around the world very quickly. CAcert usage can also be found now in Germany, Austria, Netherlands, United States, Canada, and Brazil.

A registered user of CAcert can obtain digital certificates, which secure their identity and authenticity by means of a Web-of-Trust of assurances. Users can obtain free authenticated certificates from CAcert for client and server applications. The certificates are based on the X.509 standard, and often are used as a digital identification tool. Most email applications, internet browsers and document applications support the X.509 certificate standard and usage.

About Stichting Oophaga Foundation
The Dutch foundation has several goals: To stimulate the widespread usage and application of free digital certificates; to obtain and maintain secured privacy on the Internet, free use of secure and authenticated communication on the Internet, and development of Open Software for free use of certificates for this type of communication.

More information is available from www.oophaga.org, www.cacert.org, and wiki.cacert.org.

The CAcert board, Advisory Team, and Officers met in Pirmasens, Germany during the week of 17-21 September 2007. This meeting was kindly funded by NLnet, and is part of an on-going programme of professionalisation of CAcert and the CA, designed to meet and exceed future challenges in delivery of free certficate services to our Community. The Audit process is underway, a new User Agreement for the Community has been approved, and several formal policies (dispute resolution, disclaimer and licence, policy making) have also moved into effect for the Community. The CAcert servers are being moved to the Netherlands and more security measures are being taken, thanks to sponsorship from major companies.

Stay tuned for more news.  To help with the CAcert community effort, to have your say in the policy work, or just to get in touch, join the policy and support email lists. Even deeper, consider joining the the CAcert Inc. Association as a member, and help the Association to create the basic rules by which the Community works.  Or, you can get involved with the administration of the systems and processes, or managing the assurance events. For this get in touch with the CAcert Management Team member Teus Hagen via teus at theunis dot org or support of CAcert.org.

For more Infos: http://wiki.cacert.org/wiki/TopMinutes-20070917

T-DOSE is a yearly event held in the
Netherlands to promote use and development of Open Source Software.
The conference is free for all to attend (no registration or admittance
fee required) and will this year be held on 13 and 14 October 2007 at
the Fontys College of Applied Science in Eindhoven.
http://www.t-dose.org/ holds all the useful information.

The conference talks schedule is online at http://www.t-dose.org/node/27
A wiki with some additional details (not official, but better updated)
can be found at http://linuxwiki.de/T-DOSE2007 .

There will be a CAcert stand (see http://www.t-dose.org/t-dose/node/3)
and assurers will be present for certification throughout the
conference.

The Subversion migration is done. The repository on the old server (www2.futureware.at) is frozen. The new server (svn.cacert.org) is up and running.

You can migrate your local repository with the following command now:

svn switch –relocate http://www2.futureware.at/svn/sourcerer/CAcert
http://svn.cacert.org/CAcert/ .

Die FrOSCon ist eine zweitägige Konferenz rund um die Themen Freie Software und Open Source, die am 25. und 26. August 2007 bereits zum zweiten mal an der Fachhochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in Sankt Augustin bei Bonn stattfindet.

Im Vordergrund der Konferenz steht ein reichhaltiges Vortragsprogramm, das aktuelle Themen aus dem Bereich Freie Software und Open Source beleuchtet. Darüberhinaus wird Entwicklern großer Freier Software- oder Open Source-Projekte Raum geboten, um eigene Treffen, aber auch ein eigenes Programm zu organisieren.

Link: http://www.froscon.de/

CAcert wird hier wieder einen Stand haben (siehe http://www.froscon.de/Aussteller.26.0.html).

Es werden gerne noch Helfer am Stand gesucht, die als Assurer tätig sein wollen.
Weitere Infos hierzu unter http://wiki.cacert.org/wiki/FrOSCon2007 (Interressierte einfach im Wiki eintragen).

Hi there. I’m Greg Rose, currently President of CAcert Inc. I wanted to tell the membership that the new board of directors is in place and doing things. We had our first board meeting a few weeks ago. We have since assumed control of the domain names, and are in the process of getting bank accounts moved over too. Most of our activity in the near future will be oriented toward getting the association on a sound management footing, so that we can make further progress on the audit, being included in more browsers, and promotion of our services.

We are planning an AGM around November. Look out for more information about that.

Don’t hesitate to ask questions or send suggestions to me/us.

Greg.

der Linuxtag 2007 vom 30.Mai bis 02.Juni steht vor der Tür.
CAcert wird hier auch mit einem Stand vertreten sein an dem sich Interressierte Besucher informieren und assuren lassen können.

Assurer, die gerne helfen wollen sollten sich bitte schnellstmöglich unter http://wiki.cacert.org/wiki/LinuxTag2007 erintragen, damit der Stand geplant werden kann. Geplant sind unter anderem Assurer Schulungen am Stand und weitere Neuerungen.