Recently yet another debacle has unfolded with Citigroup sending out letters to customers and former customers informing them that their data was lost in transit, all up an estimated 3.9 million records. This is about the 4th such incident in as many weeks to come to light, and the worst to date.

Surely the US banking industry should be loosing money over this as karmic retribution for such poor standards in handling private and confidential information, yet this just doesn’t seem to be the case.

So why are we being punished (by not being included) because we might cause harm, when these banks are doing everything they can to look like a fly by night operation?

CNN has the full story.

Interesting run down on the trojan horse doing the rounds in Israel and how the whole kit and caboodle was brought down by simply targeting the wrong person, and then that person finding their information leaked on the internet.

Read on for more details

For a long time now I’ve realised one of the biggest problems with PKI, especially in organisations, is distribution and management of the keys/certificates. So now that I actually have some hardware to play with it’s enabled me to start working on some solutions to this problem.

My first solution to this problem was also my first attempt at coding a PHP-GTK application as well, one of the benefits of PHP-GTK is it’s ability to be run across many platforms similar to java and .net, the down side was a major lack of decent examples and documentation. I came across numerous applications in the “Hello World”, and some very very advanced applications such as the novap2p app, but there was very little in the way of what I was attempting, so hopefully it will serve as a good demo for others as well as a useful tool for people with hardware crypto devices. The other down side is poor GUI design tools, I ended up using glade, but it is by far the worst GUI design tool I’ve ever used, although I don’t know that the full blame lies with glade, but it could have been made so much better, all the elements are there just some of the defaults are brain dead.

In any case, and a number of other non-php/gtk related issue later, I’ve posted the app online as well as some screen shots to the wiki, it’s a very basic app to make things easier in getting certificates signed and onto PKI cards, but it does work pretty well even if I do say so myself.

Some of you may be unaware, however we’ve pencilled the 3rd of July (for most time zones) in as the date of the next AGM. By law we are required to hold an AGM every 12 months.

If you would like to vote on, or be nominated for any of the board positions you must either become a member, or renew your membership by the 1st of July (so we can process things in time for the meeting).

If you would like to become a member it’s encouraged that you read our rules, as this has information covering most/all questions about memberships and board roles, it also has the membership form on the 2nd last page that needs to be filled out and signed.

Adobe’s PDF editor can digitally sign documents, or you can print it out and scan it. Once you have a signed document (either digital or written signatures) you need to email this to secretary at CAcert org. Once received all new membership requests will be dealt with as the first order of business at the next AGM.

It’s encouraged that everyone that wants to vote or be nominated for a role also get their membership paid for before the AGM as this will ensure your vote is valid and able to be counted.

Membership is only US$10/year, and if you don’t want to become a member, but just want to donate some money to CAcert that is also welcome.