This has been working for me https://lookscanned.io/en/scan
Which shares your personal data with over 200 “partners”… thanks, but no
Show HN: Make PDFs look scanned (CLI or in the browser via WASM)
61–70 of 71 posts
Re: Show HN: Make PDFs look scanned (CLI or in the browser via WASM)
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Charles Schwab, the brokerage, didn't like that my signed form retitling an account looked too perfect (I had scanned my signature and then inserted the JPEG into their PDF form, which is absolutely 100% legal as a signature). So I printed the form out and sent them a picture of the printout. They didn't like that, either. So I moved my money out of the account. That worked fine.
What were they expecting? A letter sent by mail?
I think they compared the first signature to the second and saw that they were too similar. They wanted the sequence 1. Download PDF 2. Print PDF, 3. Find pen, 4. Use pen to scribble name on paper, 5. Scan paper to PDF, 6. Upload PDF.
Without diving into too much minutiae, a legal signature can be any mark the signer intends to act as a signature. It could be a bird you've trained to poo on command onto signature lines.
In my case, this instance with Schwab was the first of a lot of similar paperwork I was going to have to do, so I pulled the ripcord when I saw how they were going to approach it.
Re: Show HN: Make PDFs look scanned (CLI or in the browser via WASM)
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
What were they expecting? A letter sent by mail?
Bunch of places want it to "look like" you've printed the page, then signed it, then scanned it. If it doesn't "look like" that, they won't accept it. Makes no sense, but I've also encountered it a bunch of times myself too.
That's right. This requirement makes a little sense if you don't actually know the signer and could conceivably end up in court with a forensic handwriting analyst testifying whether the signature was a forgery. Anything involving notarization, for example, should pass that analysis.
But for the other 99.99% of signatures in the world, any mark at all is fine, and insisting on more is wasteful bureaucracy.
Re: Show HN: Make PDFs look scanned (CLI or in the browser via WASM)
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hard disagree. Just because you don’t understand the rationale of a law doesn’t mean it is arbitrary and disconnected from your safety or best interest. I’ll give a concrete example. In law school I was hired to write a memo on a traffic circle. There was a very deliberate and effective approach to identifying where pedestrian crossings were the safest. And the cross walk itself is an attempt to encourage people to g…
You went to law school and you don't see any the difference between forging someone else's signature on a document and encoding one's own authentic signature into a digital document file in the manner needed by the recipient?
I do see a difference. I have said clearly there is a difference. You don’t see that the act of misrepresenting the origin and nature of a signature is deliberate deception?
I’ll give a more concrete example. If you bill the government for Medicaid home health services they required an ink signature. And in fact it had to be black ink, no other color was acceptable. When I was building software for electronic visit verification it was actually a formal legal block and required several states passing law to make digital signature images legally acceptable. If I had used a library like this to make the document digital signature look like they had been analog at some point it would have been a crime.
So just because you think it’s reasonable doesn’t mean the act of misrepresenting the origin and nature of the signature isn’t illegal.
Re: Show HN: Make PDFs look scanned (CLI or in the browser via WASM)
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never said that the act of making a digital doc look like it was scanned is fraud. I said that process would be used in other fraudulent acts.
>I never said that the act of making a digital doc look like it was scanned is fraud. Yes you did. Verbatim.
You’re dropping the important clause: to pass a document off as being of a different origin and nature specifically to make have a desired legal effect.
I think a library like this could be used for art or literature. For example, to make a document look like an old artifact in lord of the rings or a Sherlock Holmes mystery.
The fraud isn’t in the conversion or appearance. It’s in the intent behind it and how it’s used.
Re: Show HN: Make PDFs look scanned (CLI or in the browser via WASM)
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are plenty of examples of a single set of documents with no corroborating documents. In fact, when I was a lawyer for Lehman in 2008 most mortgage transfers were a line in a spreadsheet not a legal document. Many wills have only a single copy that was kept in a safe deposit box. I could go on and on.
The fact remains that altering a photocopied or faxed copy of a document has been trivially easy for decades and yet it's not really a problem in real life, because it's a criminal act to do so and present it as authentic.
Which is easier to do this 10,000 times a print and scan work flow or a python script that calls this library :).
I own home care agencies in 13 states and in the early years had to collect timesheets with physical signatures for medical billing. I know the work involved in printing, collecting, scanning, organizing and retaining/archiving physical signatures at scale. We lost real money when signatures weren’t collected or were lost because there were times we couldn’t collect a replacement for various reasons.
I then built the digital system to collect signatures and had to get legislation passed to make them legally valid. We were literally blocked for several years because digital signatures were not permitted. So this isn’t a hypothetical I am throwing out just to make an argument and be annoying.
Re: Show HN: Make PDFs look scanned (CLI or in the browser via WASM)
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
You went to law school and you don't see any the difference between forging someone else's signature on a document and encoding one's own authentic signature into a digital document file in the manner needed by the recipient?
I do see a difference. I have said clearly there is a difference. You don’t see that the act of misrepresenting the origin and nature of a signature is deliberate deception? I’ll give a more concrete example. If you bill the government for Medicaid home health services they required an ink signature. And in fact it had to be black ink, no other color was acceptable. When I was building software for electronic visit v…
It's just that such cases come down to technical advice that applies to a specific legal environment (certain states you mention), whereas I'm personally more interested in looking at such situations from the ethics, identity, and authenticity perspectives.
Re: Show HN: Make PDFs look scanned (CLI or in the browser via WASM)
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do see a difference. I have said clearly there is a difference. You don’t see that the act of misrepresenting the origin and nature of a signature is deliberate deception? I’ll give a more concrete example. If you bill the government for Medicaid home health services they required an ink signature. And in fact it had to be black ink, no other color was acceptable. When I was building software for electronic visit v…
It's just that such cases come down to technical advice that applies to a specific legal environment (certain states you mention), whereas I'm personally more interested in looking at such situations from the ethics, identity, and authenticity perspectives.
That’s fine. I studied philosophy in undergrad and happy to debate those perspectives but I was making a legal argument.
Re: Show HN: Make PDFs look scanned (CLI or in the browser via WASM)
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact remains that altering a photocopied or faxed copy of a document has been trivially easy for decades and yet it's not really a problem in real life, because it's a criminal act to do so and present it as authentic.
Which is easier to do this 10,000 times a print and scan work flow or a python script that calls this library :). I own home care agencies in 13 states and in the early years had to collect timesheets with physical signatures for medical billing. I know the work involved in printing, collecting, scanning, organizing and retaining/archiving physical signatures at scale. We lost real money when signatures weren’t colle…
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