The dubiousness of digitized signature services

The problem isn't (only) the technical issues. As TFA points out, this is easy, and even the most naive and simplistic implementation beats physical signatures hands-down.

There's two main problems:

1. Legality. Getting a court to recognise a digital signature probably isn't that hard. It's a bit like scanned images - if you can prove that this is the best evidence, then it'll probably be accepted. However, getting lawyers to accept digital signatures is difficult. One of those awkward situations where there's no consequences for them if they insist on a physical signature but lots of potential downside should they accept a digital signature.

2. File formats, or "the standards problem". To include a digitial signature in a document, we need a file format that includes digital signatures. Every document file format has a different version of this, and every digital signature service provides a different "wrapper" format with a different signature.

This needs to be solved top-down. The SCOTUS, or the EU Court, or some organisation of similar standing, needs to say "this wrapper format is the only type of signature legally accepted, and if a document is wrapped in this format, it is legally signed". Both problems vanish and we can have nice things again.

For those in the US who don't want a national ID: it wouldn't have to be one if the states issued their own. Yes, this would mean they'd all need the technical capability to operate a CA securely. Fund them enough to do that.

My response was, "Please login to your bank's website and do the transfer."

That was the time I learnt that some (or maybe more) Japanese Banks still need the individual's personal Stamp/Seal to send money from their Banks.

I learnt an interesting thing.

Also send me an email (in profile), I can issue you a short lived trustworthy certificate to try out the service :)

The purpose of a signature is to inform the signer that they are entering a binding contract. It is simply the modern equivalent to a handshake.

Sadly, precedent around Eula’s mean that signatures are no longer necessary to execute contracts.

If anything, society would be better served by making it more difficult to enter into binding agreements than to make it less difficult.

Imagine if, by law, for a EULA to be binding, the end user had to scroll through the entire document, and initial each separate section. Eula’s would be much shorter, and much less common.

In a digital equivalent of “no trespassing” or “cameras in use signs” a few standard clauses could be made enforceable by displaying them prominently on each page. For instance, there could be a clauses such as “you are purchasing a transferrable non-exclusive license to this software”, or “your subscription to this service is at-will with a fixed rate of $N/time-unit.”