Martin Geisler Online

I was to my first keysigning party today, arranged by Diana Senn in the System Security course at [ETH][]. The results so far can be seen in the graph on the right, click for a full-sized image.

The keysigning itself was quite amusing. First we each got a list with the fingerprints of all the keys involved. The list was checked by having each of us read aloud the fingerprint we had brought along. For a random guy it must have been a strange thing to witness: ten geeks each reading their string of forty hexadecimal digits aloud one after another… :-)

The fun continued with the identity check. We lined up in a row and the first guy went past us and checked our IDs along the way. That was it — everybody had proper ID and everything matched.

Coming home I signed peoples keys — if a key had multiple User IDs, then I signed each ID separately. I then sent the signatures on each User ID to the corresponding email address in encrypted mails. This ensures that my signatures wont end up on User IDs which the owner of the private key doesn’t control.

The problem is that anybody can make a user ID with, say, “Martin Geisler — mgeisler@mgeisler.net” as the user information. But if they don’t control that address, then they wont get the signatures sent to it. And if the recipient doesn’t control the secret key, then the encrypted signature is useless to him. So this step binds the email addresses to the key, and should be done if one feels paranoid — or if one want to try and be a crypto-nerd :-)

When I say “I” I’m talking about my GnuPG key, which has now been included in the set of strongly connected keys. See for yourself!

My key has a mean shortest distance (MSD) of 4.9, which means that on average you have a path of length 4.9 from your key to my key, provided that your key is also part of the strongly connected set. The path is made up by signatures from key to key.

My friends Thomas and Janus are now also part of the set because of the cross-signatures we’ve made.

I hope to become even more integrated after tomorrow, for there’s going to be held a keysigning party after the System Security exercises. I think that’s a really cool idea to hold such a party in relation to such a class for it helps getting people involved with cryptography so that it’s not just something they’ve heard about — they might end up using it every day like I do.

I just found these two wonderful stories about how it is to date geeks, nerds, techies or whatever you like to call them:

• Dating an Apple Developer and
• Why Geeks and Nerds Are Worth It….

I especially loved the point about “low-maintenance”:

8) They’re relatively low-maintenance. Most can be fueled on pizza, Twinkies and Mt Dew. No complicated dinners needed here, so if you’re not the best cook, eh. Can you order a pizza?

Check them out and see if you are missing out on something… and no, don’t ask — I’m already taken! :-)

In an attempt to make money out of my website, I’ve added advertisements from Google. Now go click on them and make me rich! Bwuhahahaaa! :-)

No really — I’ve always been wondering what would happen if I put banners on my site, so consider this an experiment of sorts. Please tell me what you think of this…

I’ve been doing much too much lately, but better late than never: here’s a report from my visit at the Orbit-iEX trade fair in Basel two weeks ago.

The fair opened at nine and by taking the train at eight from Aarau I could be there exactly on time. The first thing one sees is the magnificent Messeturm Basel — it’s the tallest building in Switzerland with it’s 105 metres. I’ve been to Basel before, but this was the first time I saw it in daylight.

Since I’m a student I could get in at the fair for only 10 CHF, a nice touch! Inside there were lots to look at, it took me a long time just to explore the two floors for they were so huge! I kept loosing track of where I had been, and where I was heading.

The fair was clearly not aimed at developers like me — it was more aimed at the people who like wearing suits. So I heard some presentations about various pieces of software which should enable your business to ⟨insert favorite buzzword here⟩ by utilizing the fantastic powers coming from ⟨insert favorite technology buzzword here⟩… it was a bit amusing to see what it actually is those people go around and spend their days doing :-)

I also got to meet a talking robot there — I saw it coming towards me so I took at picture of it.

It came closer and asked me if it was a digital camera I had used, and if it could see the photo? I was totally surprised to hear it talking to me, and at first I thought that it was just some standard greeting. But it insisted and it was only after I showed it the photo that it rolled on its way. Very funny incident!

Some other highlights were some guys from a Hong Kong company called RiTech (sorry, they will try and maximize your browser… I have no idea why people think they should control the size of my browser?). They had a cool USB flashdrive with a built in fingerprint reader. So the drive would only activate after having seen the right fingerprint — and when it did so, then it would just act like any other USB storage device, and thus be compatible with anything from Linux to Windows.

I tried to get them to tell me the price of such a thingy, but they were not so terribly good salesmen for they seemed to kind of lose interest in me. Oh well, maybe they could tell that probably wouldn’t have bought one on the spot anyway.

There were also one booth that sported half a Formula 1 racing car. I cannot remember why anymore, but it was a funny “gadget” to show.

Before going home I went to booth L62 in hall 2.1 to get my key signed. I had checked Biglumber beforehand, and had discovered that Andre Dierker would like to exchange key fingerprints. I first had to circle the booth a couple of times, trying to read the name tags on peoples shirts, and finally I found him. We then exchanged key fingerprints on little paper slips — it was good to see that I’m not the only one who carry those things around in my wallet! :-)

I then took the train home, or rather directly to Zürich for my lecture in OOSC.