For those of you that have not jumped on the S/MIME bandwagon yet or don't know what S/MIME is all about, now is the time for your edification.

So what is S/MIME? Well S/MIME stands for "Secure Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions". S/MIME allows you to add Public Key signatures(digital signing) and/or data encryption to the contents of e-mail messages. Note: Encryption is only possible if you have the public key for the recipient of the email. In a nutshell, S/MIME allows you to prove you are who you say you are and to prove that your email has not been tampered with along the way to it's recipient. It might be the email equivalent to the United States Postal Service's Certified Mail. I just made that up and I'm not an expert using certified mail so I may be way off, who knows :) If you are wondering why this is significant, think of all the SPAMM that comes to your inbox today. If S/MIME became the standard it would be much easier to track down SPAMM'ers and hold them accountable for unsolicited email traffic. This is a big deal to me as I get thousands of SPAMM messages a month.

In order to participate, you will need a key pair and certificate for yourself. Fortunately, you can get this free of charge from Thawte. Thawte will provide you a free certificate containing your email address only, after all this is the only identifying criteria that they can verify to be true. To add additional information to your cert, like your name, you will need to be verified in person by a Thawte Notary. This is the web of trust part since Thawte is trusting 3rd parties to do verification. A Notary is someone that participates in the Web of trust and has been verified and assigned 100 points.

Here is how this works. The notary will ask you to bring several pieces of identification(one government issued picture id required) along with photocopies of each that s/he will keep. You will sign a document stating that you are who you say your are and that your identification isn't fake. At the discretion of the notary, he will assign you between 10-35 points depending on your documentation. Once you have 50 points, Thawte will allow you to put your name in your digital cert.

Notaries can be found on the Thawte website where they are listed by location(.i.e St. Louis city, St. Louis county). Most will offer verification for free. All you have to do is email them and set up a place to meet. Prior to last week, the St. Louis area had only a few notaries. That number has since doubled due to an effort by Hans Gerwitz, where he got 3 seasoned notaries together for an assertion party last week. 5 of us went from 0 - 105 points overnight and effectively doubled the number of notaries in St. Louis. Now I just need to find some interested individuals so I can practice my assertion power!

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Posted by Mike Shoemaker on February 26, 2005 10:19:03 AM CST #

Well it's that time of year again. Time for me to beg everyone that I know to donate a few bucks to the American Diabetes Association. Last summer Hans asked me to join his cycling team, Velocity, for the Tour De Cure ride. I did and it was a fantastic experience. Besides great weather, I was able to help make a small difference in the fight against Diabetes.

Last year I ended up doing the 50 mile ride and that pretty much kicked my ass. I have been jogging quite a bit over the winter so hopefully it isn't such a challenge this year. I have toyed with the idea of joining the century club, but I think I would need to dump my hybrid bike for a road bike. Not sure this will happen by this years ride or by June or not. I will do at least the 50 mile ride though.

Any donations in my name or my team members names would be greatly appreciated. I lead our team last year with donations just shy of $800. I hope to surpass that figure this year.

Also, if you are interested in participating in the ride yourself, shoot me an email.

So I'm standing in line this morning at the local Starbucks on Manchester rd, just east of 141, to get my morning fix of coffee. While standing in line I notice a gentleman sitting in a booth with his Dell laptop reading Yahoo Finance. My first thought was poor fellow, what a shitty laptop. My second thought was about Starbucks finally having WiFi in St. Louis. About 3 years ago, I used to write Starbucks on a monthly basis pleading that they needed to try out WiFi here in St. Louis. At this time, hotspots were few and far between. Also at this time, I would have paid a nominal fee for WiFi while drinking coffee. Shortly thereafter, Panera bread trumped Starbucks and offered free WiFi to customers in virtually every store in St Louis. So not only did they beat them to the punch, they pushed the envelope further by making it free. Thank you Panera for being the ambassador of free wifi. You have received hundreds of dollars of patronage from me because of this. Anyway, back to my point. After I left Starbucks, I was curious what the fee was to use their Wifi(provided by T-Mobile). After surfing to the website, I was blown away by the cost. Here is the breakdown.

• $29.99 per month for Unlimited National - Annual(1yr contract)
• $39.99 per month for Unlimited National - Month to Month
• Pay as you go - $6.00 minimum charge for 60 minutes plus $.10 for each additional minute
• DayPass - $9.99 for 24hrs of service

Is it just me or is this a complete rip off? I'm thinking something along the lines of free would be appropriate. After all you are paying for a pricey cup of joe while you are there.

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Posted by Mike Shoemaker on February 15, 2005 12:52:43 PM CST #