convergence is a proposed solution to the problem of securely authenticating the remote server you are communicating with. it was sparked by the comodo and diginotar CA crapfest, and the nutshell version is:

• trust should be agile
• users should be in control.

convergence was created by moxie marlinspike, and he does a much better job explaining it than we do. if you want more information about it, read his blog post on the subject.

dc585 supports the idea of putting users in control of whom they trust. some of us have been playing with convergence, and it seems to be a decent solution for most of the things we want to do online. accordingly, we put up a notary server, so that others can use it if they wish.

getting this working is a 3 step process:

• install and/or run the firefox browser.
• go to the convergence.io website, and install the firefox addon.
• install the dc585 notary server file, and start using it.

the plugin comes with 2 notaries installed by default (the thoughtcrime.org ones). if you happen to delete those, you'll find there's not a notary file available to allow you to easily re-add them. this was annoying to us, so we made our own files for their servers, using data from the firefox plugin source code. (Specifically, we used the SettingsManager.js file in the git repository).

Here are the resulting files:

• thoughtcrime.org notary 1
• thoughtcrime.org notary 2

a list of other notaries can be found at the github wiki for the project.