As of about 5 minutes ago I put the finishing touches on code to allow people to make changes to the location data.

This includes being able to move locations between regions, adding and deleting locations and adding and deleting regions.

If you delete a region it will also delete any locations hanging off it.

So those making changes should only use deletes as a last resort as this has implications for users that have selected a location for their location.

Moving a location between regions will not have any impact on users as the region will be updated for all users etc.

The plan is to also replace the current system of listing yourself, you will simply be able to type in your location and hopefully the system will be able to narrow it down so this should be a lot quicker and more efficient. Also finding assurers will gain the same ability to type in a location and the system will in turn the system will display the closest 100 assurers.

Currently people store their location against their user record, I’m planning to split this off into it’s own table so users can store multiple locations.

I’ve been asked for volunteers to attend the SoCal Linux Expo which is on between the 11th and 12th of Feburary 2006. We’ve been offered a booth and so we are looking for a couple of people to sit on it. We (CAcert Inc) can put funding toward this to cover flights, transfers to and from the airport and hotel accomodation during the Expo.

The conditions for funding is you must currently have 100 assurance points (ie be an assurer), you must be willing to sit on the booth for the majority of the time (10am till 4pm minimum), and preference will be given to those that already have assurances under their belts and/or manned a CAcert booth at other conferences even if it costs a little more for their flights.

Any questions or for further information please email me directly, but there needs to be a decision made on this as soon as possible to ensure people that fly in will have a place to stay etc close to the conference.

We’re currently looking for up to 2 people on the North American continent, close to San Diego would be an advantage to us, as we need people to man a CAcert booth for at Apache Con 2005 (10th to the 14th of December), we (CAcert Inc) can allocate some funding that can be used to cover flights/accommodation/other expenses (printing etc).

As always there is a couple of catches, firstly you must currently have 100 assurance points (ie be an assurer), you must be willing to sit on the booth for the majority of the time (10am till 4pm minimum), and preference will be given to those that already have assurances under their belts and/or manned a CAcert booth at other conferences even if it costs a little more for their flights.

Of course the benefit is that you end up getting to spend some time in warm and possibly sunny Southern California during the North American winter 🙂

Any questions or for further information please email me directly, but there needs to be a decision made on this as soon as possible to ensure people that fly in will have a place to stay etc close to the conference.

In part the reason CAcert exists is because very early on I realised how much a waste of time many of the security features that existed in the devices at the time (and even now still to a large extent).

Later on 802.1x came into the picture, but that has numerous complications with prerequisites with requiring you to setup RADIUS depending how you decide to go about configuring everything.

It’s worth noting that over the last few years the prices on access point routers have been dropping to the point that they can be now had in Australia for about the AU$100 price point (about US$50-70), the other interesting thing to note is that a number of companies making these devices ended up using linux on them rather then writing a custom OS which in turn lead to them being forced to release source code under provisions in the GPL.

This is where things start to get very interesting because on one hand we have cheap off the shelf small form factor devices and on the other we have th complete source code and tools to make customised firmware versions. These two events lead some smart cookies to take the sources and build up some amazing functionality along the way by taking software in the world of linux software.

So a long story short this is good news for people looking to better secure their wireless network and in such an easy and simplistic manner, via OpenVPN and these embedded devices, OpenVPN is a great choice because it seems as good as IPSec in terms of security, unless you happen to have state secrets to guard and I’m sure there are better options available from commercial vendors.

I’ve just spent the last couple of days experimenting with a Linksys WRT54G and managed to string together a guide on setting up a wireless access point router with OpenVPN and getting a linux laptop to talk to it as well.

“The Dutch government plans to open an electronic file on every child at birth as a tool to spot and protect the troubled kids of the future. All citizens will be tracked from cradle to grave in a single database – including health, education, family and police records.”

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050913/ap_on_re_eu/netherlands_child_files

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These kinds of articles always raise red flags with me when governments propose something that has the potential to be very unpopular as “benefiting” children.

This was posted to slashdot and the first few comments included:

– paedophiles wet dream
– WWII was fought to prevent this kind of overarching governmental reach and it’s occurring anyway
– several credit card gateways cracked recently leaking millions of records how would this be any better if it’s actually going to be useful across all govt agencies…

At this point if I were a citizen I’d firstly be very concerned, and then be very angry about this kind of thing, and if it goes through in the Netherlands it’s just as likely to be pushed in other countries.

Someone has posted a RFE (Request for enhancement) to the Novell/Sse bugzilla to include CAcert’s root in software distributed by Novell/Suse.

Long time systems administrators, they tend to either love or hate RBL lists depending what side of things you’re on (or have been on), in most cases people use information returned from these in conjunction with other metrics to more finely tune their spam response rather then using these lists as a be all and end all.

From time to time administrating you will end up on the wrong side of RBL lists more and more however this has less to do with blocking spam, but because of lazy users. Not to mention one of the biggest gripes administrators have to cope with in dealing with RBLs is they are often quite difficult to get off, supposedly to make it difficult on spammers, the jury is still out on that however. You can often find yourself listed even if you weren’t at fault because a large chunk of IP space you happen to be in the middle of is suddenly black listed!

To give some background here, I receive the majority of the bounced emails from the CAcert system and I keep an eye on why emails are being bounced, and it’s quite amusing to read some of the replies, such as people end up black listing their own mail relays.

Others also tend to report emails from us as spam either by accident or because they are simply too lazy to unsubscribe from our mailing lists, or for the emails automatically sent out to verify them on sign up! This almost almost ranks up there with my pet peeve with people black listing APNIC IP ranges (Asia Pacific NIC – which Australia happens to be part of but no where near the highest source of spam, even on a per captia basis!) because “most spam comes from Asia”, which is in fact false and they should black list ARIN instead because most spam comes from the US.

In any case the latest RBL (http://www.stop-spam.info/lookup.php?ip=202.87.16.201) that has come to my attention (they actually brag on their website about how many millions of IPs they have blocked!) basically takes the cake and they should be avoided like the plague. They have blacklisted the IPs CAcert sits on, the only information given is that it’s a country black list (you read right, it’s not a company black list, but an entire country), not to mention a country with a really low spam rate in any case!

This kind of thing is normally taken care of by sending in a report and asking to be removed or exempted from the black list, but I challenge anyone to find a method to contact them via their website within the first few minutes of looking, I’m still looking.

These guys are taking a sledge hammer to break open an egg and they should NOT be used as a RBL at all EVER, in fact this is the worst RBL list I’ve ever seen, and they point you to a page disclaiming all responsibility and that someone else has blocked the emails, but they are responsible for keeping an up to date lists otherwise this is a worst abuse then the spam they claim to be trying to prevent.

CAcert AGM has come and gone uneventfully this year. The meeting minutes are now online http://www.cacert.org/meetings/20050703.txt

Points of Interest:

New board for the 2005-06 financial year elected unapposed due to low amount of nominations:

Duane Groth – President
Mark Lipscombe – Vice President
Tina Kubota – Secretary
Ryan Verner – Ordinary Member
Matthew Asham – Ordinary Member

The meeting was ajourned for up to next 2 weeks to have the financial summary made available due to events beyond our control.