[GTALUG-Announce] GTALUG Membership In These COVID-19 Times

[Christopher Browne]

In most years, membership has been handled via comparatively informal
in-person processes, and those that wish to support GTALUG via
membership would (broadly) follow the following steps:

- Grab a membership form (that Chris passed out)
- Try to pass Chris a $20 bill, whereupon Chris would say "take it
  back, and give it to me once you fill in the form"
- Fill in the form, and hand it to Chris along with payment
- Chris returns a few minutes later with a membership card

As GTALUG is meeting virtually, these days, this process cannot occur
as described.

For those wishing to support GTALUG via membership, two routes are
suggested:

 - The Cheque is In The Mail :: Send a payment via Canada Post.
 - Interac eTransfer :: Send funds from your bank to ours

To ensure that membership has been addressed for voting at the 2020
AGM on October 13th, it is imperative to handle this earlier than
that, as mail can take several days for delivery.  Alas, either way,
this imposes more bureaucracy and some more cost than we have been
accustomed to.

 - Payment via check using Canada Post :: In this case, please send a
      cheque, made out to "GTALUG", in the amount of $20, along with
      the identification information indicated below, and please send
      to the following address:

   GTALUG
   914-10 Carabob Court
   Toronto, ON M1T 3N5

 - Interac eTransfer :: In this case, three pieces of information are
      critical, and must be shared both with your bank as well as with
      GTALUG.
   - Recipient :: The recipient email address is membership at gtalug.org
   - Security Question :: The content of this is not too important;
        "Random Value" or "Sooper Sekrut Data" are fine values.
   - Security Answer :: It is suggested that a random value be used.
        For instance, 215db45eb7f54e1e5907de3b50ac50ee is a value I
        got from passing 1K of data from /dev/random through md5sum,
        and that is a decent mechanism to get a relatively unguessable
        password.  (Of course, since many people have seen that
        specific value, 215db45eb7f54e1e5907de3b50ac50ee, it would not
        be a good choice.)  This security answer also needs to be
        emailed to the membership at gtalug.org address in order for us
        to receive the payment.
 - Common information :: Whichever of the above mechanisms is used for
      payment, please email the following membership information to
      membership at gtalug.org.  Note that by longstanding policy, we do
      not pass your information on to outside organizations.
      - Name :: Your preferred name
      - Email :: Your preferred email address (if using Interac
                 eTransfer, it's best to use the same address, so we
                 know which email address to associate each security
                 answer with)
      - Address :: If you are comfortable providing such
      - Security Answer :: If eTransfer is used, we need the Security
           Answer in order to actually receive funds

*** Generating a random value, the Linux way
    Here is a script that repeatedly takes 1K of random data from
    /dev/random, and turns it into an md5 checksum to ensure that the
    value is human readable and not too long.
#+BEGIN_EXAMPLE
for i in 1 2 3 4 5; do dd if=/dev/random bs=1k count=2 status=none |
md5sum; done
215db45eb7f54e1e5907de3b50ac50ee  -
4f8f0e3a2944c857ebc3a7a776659134  -
1a52010a29ef3b2446d532ba389f65cb  -
84e6b072e2661fc88b3a7b1ed1ce5873  -
ef3f10a8b634760691e2ae53a0952707  -
#+END_EXAMPLE
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