[colug-lunch] Tuesday 11:45 Baja Fresh - Sawmill Rd S/o I-270

[R P Herrold]

(cross-posted, as it carries overtones of a special COLUG 
meeting)

We have a guest in town from CA Cert dot org -- the Open 
Certificate Authority.  Duane Groth is a current board member 
of CAcert, and thus able to issue up to 150 assurance points. 
Please review the site at:
      http://www.cacert.org/
for more extensive details.  This is exciting, because we 
should be able to attain a mass able to act as a 'seed yeast' 
for issuing full featured 'assurances' here in Columbus on an 
ongoing basis.

The lunch will start at 11:45, Tuesday, at the Baja Fresh 
Mexican Grill (614) 761-3560 6510 Sawmill Rd Columbus, OH

What his 'counter-signing' means is that you can start issuing 
35 points to others, and you will be able to have names on 
email certificates and server certificates are valid for 2 
years instead of 6 months.

Within our local community, we can attain a trust level to 
issue Assured client certificates, Assured server 
certificates, Certification of additional assurers in CAcert 
Web of Trust, and (the ultimate level certificate) Code 
Signing identity assurances, with three assurors validating 
paperwork, yielding in excess of the required 100 assurance 
points, at our monthly COLUG meetings.

The 'politics' of CA's are tricky - there is an embarrassing 
Bugzilla in the Mozilla Foundation tracker, documenting the 
Foundation's non-inclusion of this upstart CA into mainline 
Mozilla, but the pressure for to 'break the monopoly' of the 
commercial CA's by the FOSS community is clearly on.
      http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=276827

Duane from Australia is in town, on a road trip which includes 
the DC area, a trip to a large Penn State contingent, on his 
way to USENIX Technical Conference in Anaheim, CA, USA 10th to 
the 15th of April 2005.  We are hopeful of having him at this 
month's regular meeting as well.

Please review, and as possible pre-complete the form, in 
paper format, at:
      http://www.cacert.org/docs/CAP.pdf

Also remember to bring an appropriate photo ID -- driver's 
license, passport.

Please RSVP into the list, so I can get a rough idea of the 
table size to hold.

-- Russ Herrold

===========================================
Capsule summary:

Assured server certificates

Benefits: Enable encrypted data transfer for users accessing 
your web, email, or other SSL enabled service on your server; 
wildcard certificates are allowed.

Verification needed: You must confirm that you are the owner 
(or authorized administrator) of the domain by responding to a 
'ping' email sent to either the email address listed in the 
whois record, or one of the RFC-mandatory addresses 
(hostmaster/postmaster/etc), plus get 50 assurance points by 
meeting with assurer(s) from the CAcert Web of Trust, who 
verify your identity using your government issued photo 
identity documents.

=======================================

Become an assurer in CAcert Web of Trust

Benefits: The ability to assure other new CAcert users; 
contribute to the strengthening and broadening of the CAcert 
Web of Trust.

Limitations: The number of assurance point you have will limit 
the maximum assurance points you can issue for people you 
assure.

Verification needed: You will need to be issued 100 points by 
meeting with existing assurers from the CAcert Web of Trust, 
who verify your identity using your government issued photo 
identity document