[nfb-talk] client certificate sign-on (was: captcha)

[John Heim]

Steve, I'm telling you, there's no downside from the NFB perspective. About 
the only possible downside is the possibility of wasting resources. Maybe 
the NFB's time could be spent more wisely on the Blind Driver Challenge. And 
there is some risk that we'd all get ourselves client certificates and never 
get any response from google or yahoo. But stuff like that is the only 
downside.

This is an established technology that is free to the web provider. In fact, 
this morning, I configured a portion of my own web server to use client 
certificate sign-on. You could go out today, find 2 other people who are 
already signed up with cacert.org,get yourself a cacert.org account, and use 
it to connect to my web server. I don't know where you live and I'm assuming 
that because you are blind, you might have a hard time arranging a 
face-to-face meeting with 2 other members of cacert.org. But once you got 
that done, you'd be all set. It wouldn't cost you a dime except maybe bus 
fare to meet up with the people to sign your papers.

Getting a client cert from cacert.org is free but its a lot of effort. But 
there are a lot of commercial certificate authorities and the web site 
doesn't have to accept certificates from just one certificate authority. 
They could accept client certs from Vcacert.org and from Verisign and 
Thought and Rapid SSL and as many other certificate authorities as they 
liked.  So even if cacert.org disappeared, us blind people would be no worse 
off than before. We could still go out and buy ourselves a cert.

I'm willing to help anybody who wants to give this a try. If you live in a 
large city or in a university town, there is a good chance you can locate 2 
current members of cacert.org to sign your assurance papers. Get started by 
going to http://www.cacert.org and click on "Join". Then you can ask it to 
show you people in your area who can sign your assurance papers.