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Show HN: FalsiScan – Make it look like a PDF has been hand signed and scanned

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Re: Show HN: FalsiScan – Make it look like a PDF has been hand signed and scanned

#91

Post by fastball »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #82
toomuchtodo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Digital signatures also have legal status in the US. Until society catches up and uses cryptographic primitives provided by a national ID smart card (such that Estonia has) for authorizing intents, this is a satisfactory method to make document execution less painful. This project is already doing the easy part (“place pretty signature picture here”). Depending on your jurisdiction and their tolerance, you could also…

> national ID smart card National ID systems are an incredibly bad idea. You can already get the entire authentication benefit from using decentralized ID systems (your bank authenticates you with your bank card, your employer authenticates you with your employee ID), so all a national ID adds is the ability for corporations to correlate all your different identities without your knowledge or consent, which is nothin…

I think you're forgetting the part where those existing so-called "decentralized" ID systems are by-and-large using a centralized system (your SSN) which is magntitudes worse than a cryptographic card.

Your bank knows that you are the same John Smith as your employer has on record, because you needed to use the same SSN for both. The status quo is that any service which requires identity validation is requiring you to provide your SSN, which in internet terms is like authenticating with only a username (no password) on all websites, AND you have to use the SAME username for every different site.

Now compare that to public-key encryption. Not only is it better assuming you only have access to a single private key (because you are still authenticating with the output of the key, not the key itself as with SSN), but also because a cryptographic card could store MULTIPLE private keys, allowing you to authenticate with a different "identity" to different providers, making it impossible for them to cross-reference you in that way.

Re: Show HN: FalsiScan – Make it look like a PDF has been hand signed and scanned

#92

Post by swixmix »

somehnguy wrote: post #88
dd36 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Faxes are considered secure.

I'm declaring myself as considered a Triceratops . Doesn't make it true.

It depends on the threat model. If I need to prove to a court in the US, then I'm signing paper and faxing it. To do it differently would be more expensive to prove.

Re: Show HN: FalsiScan – Make it look like a PDF has been hand signed and scanned

#93

Post by DeathArrow »

I could use a mobile app to do that.

In my country, to leave your home to do shopping in this period, you are required by military ordnance to fill a form stating the reason of leaving your home. You can show it on your mobile phone, but you have to print it, sign by hand and take a picture of it.

Re: Show HN: FalsiScan – Make it look like a PDF has been hand signed and scanned

#94

Post by fastball »

minikites wrote: post #72
zo1 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the more baffling why some countries are moving away from national identification and other digital signing initiatives to prove identity. E.g. the UK that introduced and then subsequently dismantled a national ID card and database (apparently it was a "privacy" issue for the government to have a record of citizens?). Imagine this, a first world country, living in the dark ages essentially when it comes to identi…

Many people in the USA believe a "national ID" card is the work of actual Satan: https://countdown.org/en/entries/features/national-id-cards-... >These ID cards are, however, preparing the way. The more people get used to some new government regulation, restriction, or provision, the more they tolerate it and eventually just learn to live with it. What may at first seem unthinkable and raise howls of protest, later b…

I think "many" might be overselling it a bit relative to a population of ~330M.

Re: Show HN: FalsiScan – Make it look like a PDF has been hand signed and scanned

#95

Post by jbverschoor »

mikehollinger wrote: post #9

Mac’s pdf viewer Preview has a signature capture feature built in that’s pretty slick. I use it all the time and haven’t encountered an objection. Tbh I’d wonder why you need to fuzz up and fake scan the image. If someone’s requiring that the doc be “signed in ink” or some such, more power to you!

Yeah. but the signature will simply be a new layer on the PDF. So you can: 1) replace it easily. 2) Extract the signature without any jpeg noise.

Also, I like rasterized contracts / text, instead of a small pdf + an image, as it's easier to tamper with

Re: Show HN: FalsiScan – Make it look like a PDF has been hand signed and scanned

#96

Post by anonymfus »

derefr wrote: post #86
Xylakant wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Germany, a fax is legally considered an original copy, a scan/print is not, despite a fax often being a scan that’s then transmitted via fax protocols. Law hasn’t caught up with technology yet in that area. You also get a confirmation from the recipient when using fax.

> despite a fax often being a scan that’s then transmitted via fax protocols ...what's the alternative to that "often"? What is a fax machine, if not a scanner attached to a modem?

Conventional fax machine transmits document while it scans it as it has (almost) no memory. Like analog TV camera, just much slower.

Re: Show HN: FalsiScan – Make it look like a PDF has been hand signed and scanned

#98

Post by mrighele »

derefr wrote: post #86
Xylakant wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Germany, a fax is legally considered an original copy, a scan/print is not, despite a fax often being a scan that’s then transmitted via fax protocols. Law hasn’t caught up with technology yet in that area. You also get a confirmation from the recipient when using fax.

> despite a fax often being a scan that’s then transmitted via fax protocols ...what's the alternative to that "often"? What is a fax machine, if not a scanner attached to a modem?

Dialup modems speak the protocol, or at least they used to, so it was possible to send or receive a fax without a physical copy of the document. Just by "printing" from word to the modem and entering a phone number. I remember writing an excel macro to iterate over a list of customers and send a personalized word document to them. (This was 20 years ago I think and not all of our customers had an email)

Re: Show HN: FalsiScan – Make it look like a PDF has been hand signed and scanned

#100

Post by davchana »

SamBam wrote: post #61
kawsper wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if you can use "print to PDF" after the signature has been attached to the PDF.

This is what I do. However, my bank has occasionally rejected PDFs because all the signatures were identical, indicating the use of a digital stamp.

This is why,overtime, I have scanned few more versions of my signatures & converted them to a font.
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