Public Key Cryptography (by alaric)

Last night, I somehow managed to pull off the first ORG key signing event successfully!

We exchanged proofs of identity - the ostensible purpose of the event. And the ORG people spread the word about ORG to everyone who attended (and even at least one random person who came up and asked what we were doing), and we all had good discussions about digital rights and crypto.

One topic that came up was the one us cryptogeeks rarely worry about too much:

Why bother?

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More on n2n (by alaric)

I've been discussing n2n with my friends, and one of them raised an interesting point.

He pointed out that since n2n offers access control only at the network level - you need to know the network key to join a network - it works like the Internet of old: once you're in, you're in and fully trusted, and people can't get rid of you; they can just ignore you.

If that's a problem, then you have to do what the Internet had to do - set up local firewalling and access control.

This struck me as an interesting point about the trust model you're using.

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Keysigning party – South Kensington, London, 2nd of June 2008 (by alaric)

I now have a venue for the keysigning party...

If you're interested in building a web of cryptographic trust (or just want to meet some interesting people), come along to Da Vinci's Cafe Bar, Imperial College Union, Beit Quad, Prince Consort Road, South Kensington, London. More detailled directions are available on the web site

Turn up around 7pm - but be there before 8pm, since that's when we'll actually authenticate ourselves to each other and swap key data.

Then an evening of socialising!

Keysigning party – London, 2nd June (by alaric)

I've somehow ended up organising a keysigning party in London on the 2nd of June.

See the page for directions to the venue (it's in South Kensington).

So if you have a PGP keypair (or take part in CACert.org or Thawte's web of trust), come along. If you don't, but are interested in being able to exchange military-grade encrypted or signed messages, then set up GNU Privacy Guard - see their manuals for more details - and create yourself a keypair (your own digital identity) - or several - and bring along your key IDs and fingerprints to have them vouched for and vouch for everyone else's.

I've made myself some MOO cards to hand out my key details on:

Interoperability and Demesnes (by alaric)

There are two main kinds of standards involved in interoperability between computers: formats and protocols. Formats range from "file formats" such as JPEG and PNG for images, HTML and CSS for web pages, PDFs, Word documents, and so on, through to much simpler things such as how an integer is represented. Formats specify how information is represented as strings of 1s and 0s, the basic model of information that computers agree on.

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