“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.

Ralf sent in this report about his recent results from LinuxTag 2005…

LinuxTag 2005 was again a great success for CAcert. We, Philipp ‘Sourcerer’ and I, supported by Eric ‘Nox’, Michael ‘MiGri’ and some others assured approx. 700 people. First time, we wore (self-made V0.1) T-shirts to represent the CI of CAcert.

As a direct result of LT assurance the 3000 assurer barrier has been broken!

As super-assurers, Phillipp and I ‘only’ usually issued 120 points and encouraged the applicants to get to the full points by doing cross-assurances near by our booth so we could answer upcoming questions.

For applicants in ‘underdeveloped areas’ 😉 we issued full 150 and aske to bring some friends around to be assured so they can spin the web of trust in their region.

Usually the identity was pre-checked and the form was marked by an assurer’s aid (Eric, Migri, Steffen, …) and the assured by one of the super assurers.

Now and then, Philipp vanished for hours to the other (.com-)conference hall and built contacts to ‘Them’.

To applicant’s with an existing account the points were issued right at the booth (I had an OpenVPN tunnel to my home based network, of course secured by CAcert certificates) and all the others were asked to create their account as soon as possible.

By today, the pile of unprocessed forms is reduced to approx. 40, all of these got more than 3 reminder emails. Maybe thos mails get lost as false positives in a spam filter or thos applicants changed their mind.

So this is the end of my first entry to the blog. Please excuse typos or strange phrases. This is NOT my native language and school was ages ago 😉

Cheers,

Ralf.

P.S. Good news! For Europe, I mangaged to persuade Petra from www.kernelconcepts.de to offer high-quality CAcert T-shirts at a good price ( evend reduced if you order by CAcert-cert signed mail 😉 plus shipping. See details at http://wiki.cacert.org/wiki/t-shirts

Things are slowly coming out about what happened a month ago in New York city, and my initial questions still go unanswered, many excuses are being spun but very few answers are given freely, and this is really disappointing coming from the Mozilla guys.

Mozilla touts, like many open source projects that being open and free is a major benefit to society, yet they then have the hide to turn round and conspire with commercial interests behind close door for what we’re being told will be the benefit of the internet.

I’m not sure about anyone else but my memory isn’t that bad that I’ve forgotten how US commercial interests don’t do anything unless it will effect their bottom line, either for increased profits, or due to regulatory disputes planning to inflict fines or other restrictions that will hurt their bottom line. This is highlighted only too well in the current SPF vs Sender ID debate, Microsoft as usual came in late to the game thinking, “we’ve missed another boat, what the hell do we do now?”. What they came up with, was a small variation of SPF then turned round and requested a patent on their “innovation”!

Microsoft then did what Microsoft always does, turned round and tried to inflict their “invention” on us, but it was no olive branch, it was a thorny stem with no rose on the end, basically they have and are still trying to take control of email via a patented invention that does very little more then what SPF does, in fact they are still trying to push through their “invention” by brute force. Since the MADRID task force collapsed due to lack of consensus, Microsoft has a solution lacking mass adoption, so they are planning to mark any email being sent to their domains as junk that don’t support (or properly support) Sender ID.

So anyway back to the current story, basically Mozilla hasn’t learnt from history and they actually think they will be able to do more good then harm from closed door talks then what happened with MADRID. I doubt anyone will claim the internet could be where it is without open standards, and open discussions preceding before that, hell CAcert thrives based on open discussions, there are a lot of smart people out there with a lot of good ideas and we’d be mad to simply ignore them.

However this is exactly what the Mozilla guys have done, and in the process alienated a lot of smart specialists in the area they are trying to define, the end result will be that we all suffer, and a very good example of where this has happened in the past is with Wifi security (this is after all how CAcert begun, bad Wifi security needing something else to protect information), basically cryptography experts weren’t consulted openly and we ended up with something basically a waste of time that can be cracked in minutes, so tell me how those closed door talks helped society exactly.

Ian from FinancialCryptography has some more information on the topic on his blog as well, which is well worth the read. https://www.financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/000514.html

For anyone in the San Francisco area I’ll be stuck at the San Francisco airport from when I clear customs on the 8th of July (some time about 8pm or 9 depending on how late/early the flight is), until I need to board/clear security for the connecting flight at about 11:30pm (flight isn’t till 12:30am), so if anyone wants to be assured/have coffee/whatever I’m guessing I’ll be pretty bored by that point and welcome anyone wanting a chat, as I’ll have been on planes/in airports for about 24 hours prior… Feel free to Contact Me

In June 1-4, 2005 we had FISL 6.0 happening in Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil, which had more than 5000 participants (the count on the site is not accurate it seems).
We had a stand there, for CAcert and the Brazilian CAcert user group, in which we were doing assurances during the whole event.

We had assurance count way below our expectations, a little above 100, but we made very good contacts there, and many people got interested in the project but not confident enough to start using it yet. Many of those asked several times if there was really no cost, because commercial CAs are really unaffordable here, and the government-owned CA (ICP-Brasil) charges a good deal (R$ 400, about US$ 170) for a client certificate.

More pictures of FISL can be found here

I’ve touched on this before, but I recently stumbled upon a link again to an early example in the real world which makes the point very obvious.

The biggest benefit about biometrics and RFID tags is also the biggest problem. Biometrics and RFID are designed to not change, and make use of things such as your finger print, and in the case of RFID tags a fixed hexadecimal number. While you can never “loose” your fingerprint like you can your password, people can’t easily duplicate your fingerprints on the spot either so they start taking body parts instead.

Of course RFID tags only become a similar problem when it’s actually embedded under your skin, but already a lot of people are doing this, or contemplating doing it for more “convenience”, and while they think they only have limited range they haven’t played with highly directional antenna, people thought blue tooth problems weren’t an issue because you had to be within 10m of the person you’re targeting, that is of course until someone started playing with high gain antennas and manged to get between 100 to 1000m range to a normal mobile phone.

The US and other governments around the world are currently pushing for contact-less RFIDs in passports, as a security measure, but time and time again these “feel good” security measures don’t do much for security and simply give the community at large a warm fuzzy feeling about how their governments are protecting them with better security measures at border crossings. Quite frankly if current estimates of 10 million illegal immigrants in the US is correct what’s to stop the big bad enemy (I refuse to say the “T” word because it’s really a pot calling the kettle black) from sneaking in the same way, oh sorry forgot that they were actually buddies with guys in power and were let in the front door!

Also this little sound bite from the CAcert Support mailing list today:

Here in Nebraska we implemented a 3D bar coding system on the drivers license, and all sorts of new security features on our licenses in 2003, making them extremely hard to duplicate. Within months the machines used to manufacture them was stolen, enabling the thieves to make perfect forgeries.

At the end of the day all these new security measures do is make it easier for governments to track and control their citizens, the bad guys will still do bad things!

Continuing on with photos of PKI kit, I was sent this photo by Ralf of his Aladdin e-Token, apparently it can be submerged and survive 5m of water and 95 deg C temperatures.