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@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@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@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