[Cialug] I Don't Hate Tikly--a Thoughtful Side-Topic Opinion

[Matt Stanton]

Wow, I was suffering from Old Person's Memory Disease when I was writing about said disease and forgot what the beginning of that sentence read like when I was writing the end of the sentence.

Should read:  ...if a person is suffering from "Old Person's Memory Disease", such as I do, and they forget that they have already signed up, it is possible to remind them that they have already signed up (so long as they don't forget how to spell their name when registering one of these times).

Also the steps used would read better delimited by semicolons/newlines:

Collect the name for the purpose of RSVP;
convert the alphabetic data to lower-case;
run that data through your secure-ish hash cipher of choice to get a mangled, but testable, anonymous token;
save token to database table thisLUGevent for the length of time required to facilitate the count of RSVPs;
spit out a final tally of RSVPs;
drop table thisLUGevent;

Sorry for the list spam via typo correction. :P

-- Matt (N0BOX)

Sent from my ASUS Transformer

-----Original Message-----
From: Matt Stanton <matt at itwannabe.com>
To: Central Iowa Linux Users Group <cialug at cialug.org>
Sent: Sun, 03 Nov 2013 2:07 PM
Subject: Re: [Cialug] I Don't Hate Tikly--a Thoughtful Side-Topic Opinion

As to implementation of such an anonymous service:

Collect the name for the purpose of RSVP,  convert the alphabetic data to lower-case, run that data through your secure-ish hash cipher of choice to get a mangled, but testable anonymous token, save token to database for the length of time required to facilitate the count of RSVPs, drop table thisLUGevent;

This way the data isn't traceable back to any particular purpose without an original list of LUG members to which to correlate the hashes, and at the same time if a person suffering from "Old Person's Memory Disease" such as I do and they forget they already signed up, it is possible to remind them that they have already signed up (so long as they don't forget how to spell their name when registering one of these times).  If you have a good memory and you want to avoid being able to be correlated to an RSVP, you can then use a different name for the purpose of RSVPing so long as you always remember to use that name for the purpose of RSVPing and you never actually reveal to anyone that you use that name.

If anyone decides they want to write the code for such a service, I would be happy to host it on either my Linode or my DigitalOcean VPS for the group, though the group also has its own server sitting somewhere that should be able to fulfill that purpose.

-- Matt (N0BOX)