[HN Gopher] FalsiScan: Make it look like a PDF has been hand sig...
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FalsiScan: Make it look like a PDF has been hand signed and scanned
Author : tercio
Score : 676 points
Date : 2022-01-21 14:46 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gitlab.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (gitlab.com)
| lelandfe wrote:
| Hey Gitlab, could you consider adding the following CSS so that
| README images don't break out of their containers? Having to
| horizontally scroll to see this image is brutal.
| .md img { max-width: 100%; height: auto;
| }
|
| I think that goes here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
| org/gitlab/-/blob/55a4cc5a53903250...
| m4tthumphrey wrote:
| I bet this change will be live in the next few hours.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| You'd want to pair that with `height: auto`, or else it'll
| damage the aspect ratio of images that specify width and height
| attributes (which you _always_ should).
| lelandfe wrote:
| Yep, will add.
|
| Image in question is missing those values. I personally think
| README images should be be lazyloaded (making those inlined
| aspect ratios important) but I guess that's down to the
| maintainer.
| TIPSIO wrote:
| With the way people write CSS today, is there an argument today
| to not just have it be part of a reset, e.g.:
| img { max-width: 100%; }
| lelandfe wrote:
| That they are not already doing that made me believe it was
| intentional. Principle of least astonishment to start.
|
| Anyway I agree, and have that present on all projects.
| [deleted]
| factorialboy wrote:
| I bet someone with the right skills could just make a PR / MR
| for this fix.
| junon wrote:
| Just zoom out of course. Silly users!
| cpitman wrote:
| I had another version of this at the DMV. They needed to see
| bills that offered proof of my residence (ie power/water/etc).
| Turns out they wanted them to be _mailed_ to you, which wasn 't
| going to work because I do paperless billing for everything. So I
| printed them out and tri-folded them as if it had been in an
| envelope.
|
| People in front of me in line got turned away for using printed
| bills, but mine worked just fine.
| dheera wrote:
| Love this.
|
| Also why does the DMV need a proof of residence? What if you
| live in a van?
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| In many places in the US it's de-facto illegal to live in a
| van, in some places it's explicitly illegal. Even if the van
| is parked on private property it'd still be illegal to be
| your primary residence due to zoning. There are exceptions
| for RVs and boats because they have sleeping, cooking and
| toilet facilities (which are required to be built a certain
| way).
| driverdan wrote:
| If you live in a vehicle/RV it can be hard to prove
| residence. I've used UPS Store boxes but most places have
| caught on to that and don't allow it anymore. I've been told
| you can use a homeless shelter as the residence and a box as
| a mailing address but haven't tried it myself.
| dheera wrote:
| What about other lesser-known private mail boxes?
| driverdan wrote:
| They are all required to register as a personal mailbox
| company (PMB). States have DBs of these addresses and use
| them to filter out boxes.
| sillystuff wrote:
| If you do not have a physical address (e.g., live on a boat /
| in an RV), our local DMV will tell you to use the street
| address of a local homeless shelter.
|
| This probably won't get you past the requirement of utility
| bills in your name at that address to get a "Real ID" that
| allows domestic flights without a passport, though.
|
| Same thing for getting a PO box, you need a physical address
| first. The post office will tell you the same thing, to use
| the address of a homeless shelter.
|
| The folks writing these laws do not live in vans, and do not
| care, nor even think about the impact of their actions on
| folks with alternative living arrangements / folks poorer
| than they are.
| dheera wrote:
| What if you're living in a van because #vanlife and you
| want to drive around the country nomadically for a couple
| years and not because you are actually financially
| qualified to be homeless?
|
| Like, what if you are a millionaire living in a fancy RV
| driving around national parks for a couple years?
| retzkek wrote:
| Then you get a mail forwarding service, which gives you a
| proper "permanent" mailing address. DDG for "rv mail
| forwarding" for many options.
| sneak wrote:
| Which doesn't fulfill the utility bill requirement.
| dheera wrote:
| Just get the utilities bills sent to your mailbox.
|
| At the very least you can definitely get your bank
| statements sent there ...
| sneak wrote:
| Then you rent a $500/mo bedroom somewhere, sleep in it
| once so it's not fraud to call it your residence, and
| have the roommates put the utilities in your name.
|
| Now you have a residence address and utility bills in
| your name to your residence address, and you can get a
| driver's license there, just like a real boy.
| dheera wrote:
| Fair, but do people actually do this?
|
| Is there a $100/mo closet I can rent for that purpose or
| does it have to be $500/mo bedroom? What's the smallest
| one can go?
| sneak wrote:
| People actually do this.
|
| Do you really think wealthy people (who are naturally at
| risk of kidnapping, extortion, blackmail, threats against
| family, etc) have their driver's license address pointing
| to the place where their children sleep at night?
|
| The DMV gives those records in bulk to third parties.
| It's as good as public. Additionally, every dumbfuck
| services vendor from a gym to a daycare to a doctor's
| office will demand to photocopy your ID card to provide
| service, and you can be damn well sure that they aren't
| doing a good job protecting that information. They're
| storing it on their malware-ridden front desk Windows
| computer along with everyone else's.
|
| As far as $100/mo vs $500/mo: what's the difference? It's
| all under $10k/year. Who cares?
| mdavis6890 wrote:
| In many places your driver license is used as authoritative
| identification for many other things, and the assumption is
| that those things require this additional verification. I
| don't know, but I think registering to vote might be one of
| these things in some places (it's been a while since I
| registered).
| Shared404 wrote:
| Side note: Why don't we have national ID in the US?
|
| I know many people don't want us to risk becoming a "show
| your papers" country, but A) We already kinda are (ever
| been pulled over?), and B) It just makes more sense to have
| something like ID be centralized, preferably with a _much_
| better model then SSN 's.
| showerst wrote:
| There's a long weird history of this; the bottom line is
| that interest groups on all political sides hate it:
|
| 1. The ACLU-style left fear it will lead to more
| pervasive, easier surveillance, and more "papers please"
| style checks on poor people and immigrants.
|
| 2. The right hates it because it's an extension of
| government power, arguably a 10th amendment violation,
| and it would greatly simplify voting for people who
| traditionally vote democrat.
|
| 3. A nontrivial number of people believe (no-joke) that
| it would be a portent of the apocalypse, relating to the
| number of the beast in the book of revelation. This
| actually came up in a number of state legislatures as
| they standardized drivers licenses after 9/11.
|
| The few polls I've ever seen actually say it's fairly
| popular with people, but those interest groups are non
| trivial.
| ipaddr wrote:
| But SSN numbers already exist
| Shared404 wrote:
| Except knowing them is used as not just authentication,
| but authorization so you have to be careful using them as
| ID.
|
| Also, there are collisions.
| kube-system wrote:
| There are federal IDs in the US, of several varieties.
| But people are not required to have one.
|
| People mainly rely on their state drivers licenses
| because states regulate driving. (And most other day-to-
| day government interactions that require ID)
|
| If you're the authority asking for ID, you get to decide
| which one to ask for.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| The DMV typically needs a proof of residency because you're
| only allowed to have one state license - the one for the
| state of which you're a resident.
| GoOnThenDoTell wrote:
| What's inherently wrong with being licensed in multiple
| states?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > What's inherently wrong with being licensed in multiple
| states?
|
| Presenting, and having infraction points assigned to,
| different licenses for traffic offenses.
|
| Using nonresident states to avoid license restrictions in
| the state of residency.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| In the states I've lived in, licenses and ids required proof
| of residency. If you can't prove you live in the state,
| you're not getting one.
| igitur wrote:
| Similar issue at our version of the DMV, the Traffic
| Department.
|
| Had to provide proof of address and the only thing I had was
| the rental agreement with my landlord. But the copy I had was
| signed by me, but not countersigned by my landlord.
|
| The clerk didn't want to accept it. I told him I could just
| walk out and fake a signature. He said that's OK and that he
| isn't a policeman. So I countersigned it in front of him. He
| paused and then accepted it.
| nedrylandJP wrote:
| "That's a note, right? You should fold it."[1]
|
| [1]https://youtu.be/ppunAo8ckBc?t=174
| staticassertion wrote:
| It's so insane that this is the state of things. For some
| documents I have to sign they have to be _printed out and
| signed with ink_ , and then _scanned_ and _not_ taken a picture
| of.
|
| Why?
|
| This is obviously way _less_ safe than using digital
| signatures, which are bound to me by SSO. Anyone could sign any
| document with a fake signature that looks just like mine, it
| would be very hard for them to do a digital signature
| associated with my account.
|
| I get so much paper mail it's insane. Paper mail that I'm
| supposed to respond to with more paper mail.
|
| Fuck that.
| Phileosopher wrote:
| It's intellectual laziness. Bureaucrats presume that paper,
| feeling more "solid" than a digital copy of something, is
| somehow more secure.
|
| I've run across this many times when people use the word
| "best practices". The most safe thing is often breaking
| convention, so "best practices" becomes the unsafe thing
| everyone has done for years, even when it's _not_ industry
| standard or a good idea.
| function_seven wrote:
| That's brilliant. Like a wholesome version of "mail fraud" ;)
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > They needed to see bills that offered proof of my residence
| (ie power/water/etc). Turns out they wanted them to be mailed
| to you,
|
| What state? Certainly, that's neither in the Federal REAL ID
| requirements (more stringent than most preexisting state
| requirements) nor most states implementation of REAL ID (which
| can be narrower than what REAL ID allows.)
|
| E.g., California, for REAL ID, requires documents (not
| necessarily bills, though those are among the things explicitly
| on the list of acceptable documents) that are printed (not
| necessarily mailed) and _show_ the physical address.
| SamBam wrote:
| Which is crazy, because those would be trivially easy to
| fake.
|
| And then REAL ID is considered as reliable as a passport
| (except to fly internationally, of course), so you've bumped
| up the level of trust a huge amount with one simple edited
| printout of a bill.
| powersnail wrote:
| When I was applying for driver's license, I could use a
| printed webpage of my bank report. Which is trivial to
| fake, because you can just edit the address in the HTML to
| whatever you like and print it. I could also use a renting
| agreement, which of course, is also trivial to fake since
| they don't verify with the landlord.
|
| I think they just don't actually care where you live that
| much. And since they'll mail your card to that address,
| that place has to be associated with you somehow.
| Zak wrote:
| I've made a couple attempts in the past to learn why proof of
| one's address was considered important in the REAL ID spec
| yet proof that is (and was in 2001) often easier to fake than
| obtain honestly is accepted. Each time I've come up short.
| Previous state IDs I got in two states did not demand any
| proof of my address that I can recall.
|
| Is there a good explanation of the reasoning behind this
| requirement documented somewhere?
| TameAntelope wrote:
| I would bet entire dollars it was some local person's
| interpretation of the requirements, rather than anything
| intentional at the legislative level.
| devwastaken wrote:
| Yes, they also do this for ID's, and for voter ID's. It's
| specifically created to prevent people whom don't have only 1
| permanent address,with paper billing, being able to live their
| daily lives. I had to go to a local county courthouse 4 times
| to get a "realid" and to renew a driver's license. I had to
| call all sorts of people to get printed statements sent to me.
| It's incredibly ridiculous, I would call it completely contrary
| to the ethos of the United States, even. That as a citizen with
| all these forms of ID I still cannot readily operate as a
| citizen in my own country.
| kube-system wrote:
| The point is to authenticate residency, and while it's not a
| great system, there also isn't any better alternatives.
| ginko wrote:
| >there also isn't any better alternatives.
|
| Of course there is. It's having a central resident registry
| like is common in most countries other than the US.
| kube-system wrote:
| That is not an alternative for the DMV. There is no
| central registry and they can't create one.
| queuebert wrote:
| They could pay Google and Apple to tell them where you
| sleep, based on your phone GPS anyway.
| yason wrote:
| When you move to a new state, I suppose you don't fill in a
| bunch of forms to register yourself as a resident in the
| state then? So that when DMV and other institutions ask for
| residency they could just check back in the states records
| (or have you bring a copy of the state's residency
| certificate) ?
|
| The state surely must know how to tax you, and thus they
| need to know who you are and that you're a resident in the
| state... It seems the information inevitably must be there
| already so why try to imitate that with a bunch of random
| tokens such as bills sent to an address where they could go
| straight to the source?
|
| Just curious.
| cdcarter wrote:
| In the US, no, you don't need to fill out any forms to
| register yourself as a resident. The closest is probably
| moving your drivers license registration, which many
| people wait years to do after moving. Other than that,
| you generally prove residency by showing (as GP
| mentioned) bills mailed to you, or a copy of your lease.
|
| You're responsible for filing your own state taxes based
| on when/how/where you worked.
| kube-system wrote:
| > The closest is probably moving your drivers license
| registration, which many people wait years to do after
| moving.
|
| Most states do require by law that you do this in a very
| short period of time after moving. (Although yes, it is
| not uncommon for people to violate this)
| SamBam wrote:
| Only if you have a driving license and plan on driving.
|
| I agree, it's quite odd that you never officially
| register as a resident of the state, but I guess it's
| part of the US's aversion to "papers please."
| loeg wrote:
| Or voting. You typically register with the secretary of
| state to vote.
| monocasa wrote:
| There's also the state v. federal political issue of the
| interstate commerce clause. Some municipalities in the
| pretty far past have tried to restrict people moving
| there by creating onerous registration barriers that were
| then struck down by the feds. They're allowed some leeway
| there, but there's a limit that they don't want to push
| and the feds are more than happy to enforce their power.
|
| My state (CO) semi recently hit a morph of this concern
| because they had "pioneer" license plates that cost an
| extra $100 or so and were only available to people who
| could prove N generations of ancestry in CO. The feds
| struck that down as .gov services provided being
| dependent on state origin and therefore against the
| interstate commerce clause.
| kube-system wrote:
| It's also that there are different standards of
| requirements across the thousands of different government
| entities that care about residency. And there's not much
| chance they'd agree.
|
| My municipal tax authority and the US State department
| may have very different standards for validating
| "residency" and very different reasons for doing so.
| davchana wrote:
| > check back in the state
|
| I wish, but I don't think each of many departments talk
| or share individual's personal data between them, unless
| its collections or something. Like, DMV would not have
| access to one's tax status or details, and tax one's
| might not know one's driving license details. I wish the
| willpower & technology increases to make it happen.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| But given how easy it is to foil, I don't understand what
| it "authenticates".
|
| If you wanted to truly authenticate residency or at the
| very least prove that someone has access to the mailbox,
| sending them a one-time auth code per mail would be a
| better idea rather than relying on third-party services
| where people may use paperless billing for convenience.
| kube-system wrote:
| I explicitly said it was not good authentication. :)
|
| Mailing someone a code would be more secure but, to the
| parents point, would be even _more_ onerous of a process
| for people to comply with.
|
| Some comments above suggested above that this is an
| intentionally burdensome process, but to the contrary,
| bringing in a bill is one of the least burdensome ways to
| authenticate residency.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > bringing in a bill is one of the least burdensome ways
| to authenticate residency
|
| My problem with this is how is the recipient supposed to
| authenticate said bill. Now we're talking about bringing
| a paper bill vs a printed one (or "faking" a paper bill
| by creasing/folding the printed one), but the real threat
| is fraudsters completely making up a fake bill to begin
| with. Unless the recipient has a relationship with the
| company that issues the bills, there is no way for them
| to verify whether the bill is real in the first place,
| making the whole endeavor pointless and only
| inconveniencing legitimate users.
| kube-system wrote:
| Yes. There's no question that a bill is a weak piece of
| evidence for residency. I am sure it only prevents low-
| effort or low-skill fraudsters, or casual fibs.
|
| The latter is probably where they get the most utility
| out of these requirements.
| sneak wrote:
| That's false. Many other countries have implemented
| simpler, more accurate, and less discriminatory systems.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Why do you need to authenticate it in the first place? If
| people are discovered lying somehow, send them to jail.
| Otherwise, trust that people will be honest.
|
| Fraud is not nearly the problem people think it is...
| devwastaken wrote:
| If all this was for is to ensure you live at an address
| then the local government can offer a number of solutions
| to that. If they want mail, they can simply mail you a
| unique qr code which you could then scan and complete the
| process entirely online. Or at a minimum bring physically
| to an office.
|
| A utility bill doesn't require proof of residency to get.
| Neither does a credit card statement. Infact if I were
| creative I could say I live anywhere and provide false
| documents of that. It is the _legitimate_ use of this
| system that is difficult, not illigitimate use.
|
| The system is not designed to be secure or to ensure
| residency, that's not it's purpose. Its purpose is to
| create further government control to suppress citizens
| rights to operate freeley in their own country.
| Specifically, to target low income individuals. These
| people creating the policies are not the same people whom
| are affected by them.
|
| If I am U.S. born I have a right to operate in certain
| capacities as a citizen. Voting, owning land, and working
| are all rights unalienable. The fact this is not currently
| true is proof of the federal fascism we live in.
| passivate wrote:
| >they can simply mail you a unique qr code which you
| could then scan and complete the process entirely online.
| Or at a minimum bring physically to an office.
|
| How is that any different than bringing any other piece
| of official mail that you receive at your home address?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Because it actually validates your address. Plenty of
| "official mail that you receive at your home address" can
| be accessed (or produced) without access to the listed
| address, but you can't spoof knowing information that you
| never received.
| maxerickson wrote:
| It would be reasonably easy to check my mail before I do
| every day.
|
| Or maybe I conspire with someone that doesn't live here
| but wants to appear to live here (which can obviously
| also be done with utility bills).
|
| I'm all for making it as easy as possible to vote, I'm
| analyzing the properties of the piece of mail that the
| government sends.
| dsr_ wrote:
| If you go to my local library and tell them you want a
| library card, but you don't have any ID, they ask you to
| give them your address. They send you a postcard, and
| when you bring it in, they'll give you a library card. No
| QR code necessary.
|
| The USPS could function quite successfully as an ID
| system and a bank, were they allowed.
| mleo wrote:
| This is what California did for RealID when they made a
| mistake early on. Federal government didn't recognize one
| of two forms of verification California used and
| California mailed a post card to those affected. Was able
| to just go online with the code and verify receipt of the
| card.
| solveit wrote:
| In fact postal services in many countries _do_ function
| as banks. When I was a primary school student in South
| Korea, we all made a savings account at the local post
| office and learned about how banks work and the
| importance of saving money.
| letouj wrote:
| And indeed the United States Postal Service itself
| operated a savings bank system from 1911 until 1967: http
| s://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Savings_S.
| ..
| dahfizz wrote:
| I've never understood this. There doesn't seem to be a
| natural synergy between delivering mail and storing
| money. Is it just because post offices are everywhere?
| Why not make court houses banks? At least they would have
| security. Or town halls?
|
| It just feels kinda random.
| syshum wrote:
| Few reasons (US Centric)
|
| 1. Court Houses are not everywhere like Postal offices
|
| 2. Court houses are not part of the Executive Branch,
| where as a Service like the Postal Service or banking
| would need to be part of the Executive Branch, not
| Judicial. A Better counter would be DMV or some other
| government service.
|
| 3. Court Houses are not nearly as accessible and are much
| harder to get in and out of due to their nature. Not
| consumer friendly
|
| 4. Court Houses by the nature have alot of criminals
| going in and out of them all the time, probably a bad
| idea to put money services in the same place....
|
| for the record I do not support the idea of USPS being a
| bank either.
| everslick wrote:
| Because in some countries it is/was rather common to
| receive payments (most often pension payments) in cash
| that where delivered by the postman. That's why it makes
| sense in a way.
| jbaber wrote:
| I agree with everything you're saying, but disagree with
| the reason.
|
| The US federal government has to be too loose about
| keeping track of citizens specifically to avoid looking
| too fascist. One of your many American rights is to have
| no ID at all. Protecting that right for two dozen people
| makes everything extremely complicated for the rest of
| us.
| andrewxdiamond wrote:
| > One of your many American rights is to have no ID at
| all.
|
| Ha, if only. Everyone from FB to the NSA is keeping tabs
| on individuals in all aspects of life. There is no hiding
| in the US
| devwastaken wrote:
| The federal government is not too loose in tracking
| citizens, and you cannot effectively operate in the U.S.
| without I.D of some form. Birth certificates and tax ID's
| are necessary for everything from school to work. Infact
| those that forgo it originally struggle as adults heavily
| to get those documents later, if at all.
| Jolter wrote:
| It's probably true that you can't operate properly
| without an ID, and yet the US government is specifically
| avoiding the one necessary prerequisite to having
| reliable and convenient IDs: a complete list of its
| citizens, with place of residence and a mandatory
| assigned unique identifier.
|
| It fuck people coming and going. You can't get an ID if
| you don't have a place of residence, and yet you can't
| just go about your business without an ID.
| kube-system wrote:
| The point isn't to prevent a skilled attacker. The point
| is to prevent casual lying and low-skill fraud. Most
| people who lie/cheat/steal do so because it's easy or
| because they're dumb. Your QR code idea will cost more
| money to implement and won't block skilled attackers
| either, as it doesn't take a genius to figure out a way
| to get mail from a mailbox you don't own.
|
| Utility bills are the DMV's equivalent of a cheap lock. A
| smart attacker can pick the lock, and a determined
| attacker can cut it off. But the majority of thieves are
| walking around looking for unlocked car doors instead.
|
| Do you really think DMV asks for a copy of a utility bill
| because it's a good way to suppress your rights? I would
| think that there are plenty of more effective ways to do
| so, if that were actually their goal.
| devwastaken wrote:
| Do you think low skilled fraud doesn't have access to a
| printer? If it cannot be implemented properly, then it
| shouldn't be done at all. It doesn't matter what good
| intent it may have had, in effect it is a suppression of
| individual rights. This entire process would be grounds
| for a civil war in the 1800's. Yet today we think being a
| citizen isn't enough to have rights. You have to be apart
| of a socioeconomics nomic class of people to have those
| rights.
|
| The DMV complies with whatever regulations are imposed on
| them. Those rules are created by legislators whom are
| entirely disconnected from their constituents and are
| paid for their votes.
| kube-system wrote:
| Yes, there are absolutely people who do not have the
| equipment or ability to fake a document.
|
| > If it cannot be implemented properly, then it shouldn't
| be done at all.
|
| Perfectionist fallacy. I can't think of any civic
| requirements that are perfect. We always compromise on
| perfection because our civic processes also have to be
| reasonable.
| devwastaken wrote:
| Implimenting it reasonably _is_ properly. I did not say
| perfect.
| 3825 wrote:
| > it doesn't take a genius to figure out a way to get
| mail from a mailbox you don't own
|
| iirc stealing other people's mail by tampering with a
| mailbox is a ~~felony~~ federal crime. If they threw out
| the mail and you went through their trash it might be
| different. I anal though.
| kube-system wrote:
| You can also rent mailboxes, or use a friends. Neither of
| those are crimes.
| Jolter wrote:
| And do you suppose nobody keeps track of who is renting
| that PO Box?
| tracker1 wrote:
| And election fraud isn't a crime or even a felony? If one
| is going to commit one of those things, would the threat
| of another charge _REALLY_ stop them?
| JadeNB wrote:
| > The point is to authenticate residency, and while it's
| not a great system, there also isn't any better
| alternatives.
|
| "No-one important enough is bothered, so we haven't had to
| try to fix it" is a far cry from "there [aren't] any better
| alternatives". We're HN; that's not the hacker ethos.
| kube-system wrote:
| RealID requirements were written in the past and exist in
| the present. While it would be great to have another
| solution, one doesn't exist. Happy to hear a proposal,
| however. I, personally, haven't been able to come up with
| a more equitable idea.
| yhd8i3q7686i wrote:
| Requiring people to print out a paper and fold it as if it
| had been in an envelope doesn't authenticate anything but
| access to a printer and some imagination. Just removing the
| requirement would be a better alternative.
| kube-system wrote:
| I am referring to the requirement to produce a utility
| bill. Not the silly front-line bureaucratic
| interpretative variations thereof.
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| It's also designed to make sure that poorer people who don't
| have stable, permanent housing have a tough time
| DaltonCoffee wrote:
| The poor man pays twice.
| lemax wrote:
| I wouldn't say it's intentionally designed to do this, but
| that it's a consequence. There's no good reason anyone
| would intentionally want to keep the poor poor, it's just
| bad design.
| VictorPath wrote:
| > There's no good reason anyone would intentionally want
| to keep the poor poor
|
| That's not what Karl Marx said
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour
| idiotsecant wrote:
| There is, on the other hand, a _strong_ incentive to keep
| poor people from getting ID. If you don 't have ID you
| can still mostly do the peasant work that is required for
| those in power to stay in power but you can't remove them
| from power by voting because those in power are
| increasingly linking the ability to vote with the ability
| to get documentation which they are continuously working
| to make it more difficult for poor people to get.
|
| Reap all the benefits of the slaves doing their work,
| avoid any of the downsides of having to actually listen
| to their needs.
| ctoth wrote:
| Is this your true belief? Do you really 1: conceive of
| anyone without an ID as a "slave," and 2: believe that
| things like Real ID laws, which are broadly supported by
| 80% of citizens[0] are here just to keep the poor down?
|
| This seems utterly inflammatory, and somewhat divorced
| from reality. I absolutely understand systems thinking,
| and specifically can see the argument for posiwid here,
| but even then... This sort of conspiracy thinking strikes
| me as profoundly not useful.
|
| Before attributing laws requiring IDs to the evil evil
| overlords, first ask yourself why 80% of citizens approve
| of these laws? Is everybody just all working to keep a
| tiny group of people down? Might it instead be that
| complex systems have edge cases and people who are
| already on the margins of society hit these edge cases
| more? The reason I ask is because we can fix bugs, but
| obviously we can't fix a global conspiracy, so I'd really
| like to know which I'm dealing with. If it is a
| conspiracy this makes it seem like there's nothing I can
| do to solve the problem.
|
| [0]: https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-
| institute/reports/monmouthp...
| Griffinsauce wrote:
| Some people do not believe in "rising tides", if you
| believe it's a zero-sum game you will want to keep people
| poor to keep yourself wealthy.
| kingkawn wrote:
| The reason the poor are discriminated against is to keep
| them poor. It's pretty straightforward and often so
| reflexively implemented that it leaves room for someone
| to falsely claim it's an unintended consequence.
| galdosdi wrote:
| > There's no good reason anyone would intentionally want
| to keep the poor poor,
|
| This seems naive to the point of being bizarre. Employers
| of lower skill and lower margin labor can get it cheaper
| if their prospective employees are more desperate and
| thus have less bargaining power. Low wages are the gift
| that keeps on giving because it keeps your prospective
| workers from saving enough to weather the risk of
| negotiating harder, quitting to look for better pay, etc.
|
| If you look at places that have policies that seem to
| keep the poor down vs places less so, there's at least
| some clear correlation in terms of who the major
| employers with more influence in the state are -- those
| who rely more heavily on cheaper labor with lower profit
| margins, vs those who are much less exposed to that due
| to having higher profit margins or less of their costs
| come from commodity labor.
|
| Just think about what the biggest businesses might be in
| say, Oklahoma versus New Jersey.
|
| Another way to bring this point home, compare a middle
| class family in say, Mexico or India, to say, California
| or New York. Inequality is higher so the cost of basic
| labor is cheaper, which translates to people with the
| same middle class job in a place like Mexico or India
| being able to easily afford a lot more of the sorts of
| labor intensive services only wealthier people would have
| in much of the US, like a live in maid/cook, taking a
| long taxi trip to and from work 5 days a week, etc, stuff
| that a middle class person in the US would need to ration
| a lot more even if they do take some ubers here and there
| and eat out here and then.
| scarby2 wrote:
| > There's no good reason anyone would intentionally want
| to keep the poor poor, it's just bad design.
|
| We need people to feel pressured into doing shitty jobs,
| if the poor get less poor maybe they won't flip burgers
| for minimum wage.
| danhorner wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
| ctoth wrote:
| Wouldn't it be cheaper to just push forward with the
| robot thing rather than some decades-long (Real ID
| started in 2005 or 6) super-complicated social
| engineering project? If the goal is find a way to ensure
| burgers are flipped and toilets cleaned, wouldn't the
| rational idea be to invest in robotics and involuntary
| birth control technology, not try to ride herd on a giant
| mob of poor people who might turn on their "masters" at
| any point?
|
| For that matter, if you are one of the masters of the
| Universe, why do you even need the poor people who only
| interact with other poor people? If you were optimizing
| the world and were actually evil, wouldn't the world look
| a whole lot different than the uncoordinated mess we have
| today?
|
| Why do "we" need people to feel pressured to do anything
| when frankly it's just easier to rule without a giant
| underclass you have to constantly fear?
|
| It actively feels like everybody is looking for someone
| to blame for the state of the world when really the world
| is just the result of a whole bunch of people with a
| whole bunch of different hopes, plans, and dreams, many
| of which you might possibly disagree with.
| solveit wrote:
| Who is "We" and how do they coordinate this? Poverty
| traps are emergent phenomena, not a conspiracy (Usually.
| Occasionally governments intentionally wage "war" on a
| group of people, but this is not the typical case.).
| roughly wrote:
| > Poverty traps are emergent phenomena, not a conspiracy
|
| Except that when everyone knows what a poverty trap is,
| how they form, how to spot them, and what to do about
| them, and none of that gets done, we start to fall on the
| opposite side of Hanlon's razor. It's not like that
| scholarship is new or controversial, so why is this still
| a problem?
| sjtindell wrote:
| What's happening with voter suppression in the US today
| is contrary to that. Many people are petty and callous.
| It's reality. They literally want everyone they don't
| like to leave.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Yes they've been using the phrase "ensuring voter
| quality" to justify measures which essentially restrict
| access to voting for the poor.
| dijonman2 wrote:
| I can't help but see this as some sort of propaganda.
| Where's the evidence this is a concerted effort against
| poor people?
|
| You can't do much in life without ID.
| bobthechef wrote:
| dillondoyle wrote:
| I would say in certain - often southern R states - this
| is done on purpose to make it harder to vote.
| zainhoda wrote:
| I think the mechanism is indirect. After 9/11, Congress
| wanted to make it difficult to falsify IDs. The
| optimization was to maximize the probability that an ID is
| real and correct if an ID is presented to board a plane.
| Unfortunately there's was no constraint that the process
| shouldn't prevent people from getting IDs or make it easy.
| Poor people don't have enough of a voice for Congress to
| care.
|
| Poor people are excluded via apathy not malice
| toss1 wrote:
| I also know directly from people running state DMV
| offices (and also coincidentally or not, in the official
| GOP power structure) that there was a serious effort for
| drivers licenses from all states to be more standardized
| and validated by the process that became RealID.
|
| This was around 1995-7, so 9/11 had zero infuence on the
| origin of this idea, although it likely helped provide
| justification for it.
|
| That said, I find it mildly interesting that it took at
| least two decades to even begin to roll out from serious
| discussions in the corridors of power to actual changes
| affecting the drivers and voters.
| varenc wrote:
| As a counterpoint, I had no problem using a printed cell
| phone bill as evidence of residency at a California DMV.
| djrogers wrote:
| I and my son both got RealIDs in California this year with
| printed bills after submitting the PDF versions online
| without any problem.
| SamBam wrote:
| Clever. Also remember to remove the printer headers and
| footers.
| andrew_ wrote:
| The command line methods outlined in the comments here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23157408 work quite well.
| ff7c11 wrote:
| Signature_example.pdf 8====> :)
| singlow wrote:
| *add NSFW
| jalk wrote:
| Would be nice if one could add some stego-like features to the
| inserted signature img so that if lifted it would be detectable
| in a new pdf. Obviously the savy forger could circumvent it
| pretty easily but the lazy screenshooting crook would not notice.
| marcodiego wrote:
| By signed, it doesn't mean digitally signed, right?
| drjasonharrison wrote:
| Correct. "wet print" signature.
| godot wrote:
| Don't most PDF reader software (Adobe or otherwise) have the
| functionality to let you imprint a signature onto a PDF file and
| save it as a new file? You'd have to set up your signature
| (likely by scanning it) the first time, but once it's done, you
| can "sign" PDF documents with by clicking a couple buttons. I've
| done that for a ton of documents by now and have never heard a
| complaint.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Yeah but they don't accept that. They literally make you print
| out, sign in ink then scan back in and reject it if they detect
| you haven't done that properly.
| kingcharles wrote:
| A similar absurdity is that most legal documents filed with the
| courts in the USA now use "conformed signatures" which means you
| just type your name and put /s/ next to it. That means you
| pretend you have a "wet signed" document somewhere to back it up,
| but in reality no lawyer is doing this.
|
| https://www.cogencyglobal.com/blog/getting-document-signatur...
|
| You can even sign your life away like this, especially as most
| notarization has now been replaced by systems like Verification
| by Certification.
|
| https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/documents/073500050k1-...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sworn_declaration
| heydonovan wrote:
| I hate PDF's with a passion. Not once have I ever wanted to use
| one. All the pinching and zooming, such a waste of time. I'm
| giving this a shot next time I need one, the whole scanner thing
| needs to go. Are we stuck in the 90's?
|
| Just bought another rental and it was an ordeal trying to find a
| scanner. Tried the college near me, was denied as you have to be
| a student. The library is closed down apparently. FedEx didn't
| have one. The one at the Office Depot was broken. I ended up
| driving 30 miles to a friends house to use theirs, which required
| driver upgrades since nobody had used it in a year. I don't
| understand the point of jumping through all these hoops.
|
| I feel the same with credit card signatures, completely useless
| and has never once helped me with identity theft or fraudulent
| transactions. Now I just draw a horizontal line or smiley face.
| maupin wrote:
| > All the pinching and zooming, such a waste of time.
|
| Sounds like what you really hate are mobile device displays.
| lucb1e wrote:
| When is the last time you had to pinch and zoom on a website?
| Text can reflow perfectly well, if you give the renderer the
| necessary information. With PDF, similar to PNG, you're
| specifically telling the renderer to put this pixel exactly
| over there and nowhere else, so it cannot nicely make it all
| be readable comfortably.
|
| If mobile devices required zooming and panning to read
| anything, they'd not be popular at all, so they're apparently
| not where the problem lies.
| koliber wrote:
| Smart phone scanning apps are incredible. I've ditched a
| flatbed years ago and solely rely on my iPhone. It works like
| magic. The quality is good-to-great, and it fits well with my
| workflow. Worth the ten bucks or so investment.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| Don't even need to spend $10 -- the scanning is built into
| iOS, you can get to it from the Files or the Notes app, or
| even from your Mac (right-click somewhere and "Import from
| iPhone or iPad").
| detritus wrote:
| If you have a basic handle on a GUI Bitmap editor such as
| Photoshop or GIMP, and you have a hi-resolution phone, you can
| just take a photo of the sheet as parallel as you can manage
| and then create a document that is the same dimensions and then
| use the warp tool to fit the likely skewed photograph to the
| exact digital document.
| ahoka wrote:
| Just take a photo next time, you can use Office Lens or Apple
| Notes.
| space_ghost wrote:
| Dropbox's mobile app includes a document scanning feature that
| seems to work well.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| martneumann wrote:
| >Are we stuck in the 90's?
|
| Since we accept signatures as proof of identity, we are really
| stuck in 3,000 B.C. [0]
|
| [0] https://blog.thegrizzlylabs.com/2020/11/history-of-
| signature...
| ihattendorf wrote:
| Do you hate PDF's or do you hate scanned documents? How else
| should we send text or image documents in a portable format, MS
| Word? Google Docs?
| halpert wrote:
| Preview on Mac OS can do this. You hold your signature up to the
| camera and then it creates an image you can add to any pdf.
| SamBam wrote:
| This issue this app attempts to solve is companies that insist
| on a scanned "wet" signature, and will send it back if it looks
| like you just pasted in your signature stamp.
| arsenico wrote:
| It is so handy, indeed! I really wish Apple spent some time to
| make users aware of things like this, which are baked into
| standard macOS software.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Preview has to be one of the most under-appreciated apps on
| MacOS. It implements so much handy everyday functionality that
| requires third-party software on Windows. Or did, last time I
| used Windows (admittedly some time ago).
| satsuma wrote:
| on windows i find myself bouncing around a lot between pdf
| viewers, choosing between lightweight but feature sparse
| options (sumatra) and heavier, more featured programs
| (acrobat, foxit)
|
| i've never thought about replacing preview.
| gorbypark wrote:
| I love the integration with iOS as well. I was pleasantly
| surprised to find an option in Preview to use my iPad and the
| Apple Pencil for my signature. It even popped up some
| otherwise hidden UI on the iPad to do so.
| brimble wrote:
| Preview is the reason my personal, non-gaming computing is
| still on MacOS and not _purely_ iOS. I 'm not even joking.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Preview has an odd selection of functions, though. On one
| hand it allows you to do plenty of these functions that you
| mention, but otoh misses on very trivial stuff like "I'd like
| to make my image a bit larger so I could paste another one
| next to it".
| lostlogin wrote:
| Isn't that just on the menu > adjust image size?
| moralestapia wrote:
| I mean, extend the canvas but keep the original image as
| it is.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Ahh, yes. I have wanted to do this too, and can't. I
| suspect Preview isn't the tool I'm supposed to use, even
| though it's the ones I want to use as it doesn't almost
| everything I want.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Exactly! It does everything BUT that, and because of that
| you have to go open a different app.
| wolfhumble wrote:
| Yes, really. I use it all the time.
|
| On feature that I use a lot in Preview is to combine pdf's.
| If you e.g. have a pdf invoice and want to combine that with
| the corresponding pdf receipt from the bank, I just open the
| two pdf files side by side in thumbnail view and just drag
| the pages (thumbnails) I want from one document to the other
| where I want to place them; rearranging the pages
| (thumbnails) later if I need to in the same thumbnail view. I
| am a huge fan of Preview! :-)
| lelandfe wrote:
| Recently learned about Ghostscript and man, it does PDF
| manipulation _really_ fast. If you find yourself merging
| PDFs a lot, here you are: gs -q
| -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -o merged.pdf tobemerged1.pdf
| tobemerged2.pdf tobemerged3.pdf
|
| Ghostscript is similar to ImageMagick in that it does so
| much that learning to do one specific thing is hard. But
| that line merged ~300MB of PDFs together in 20s on my M1.
| Doing that in Preview causes a beach ball.
|
| I installed it with Homebrew, but the project home is
| yonder: https://www.ghostscript.com/
| martneumann wrote:
| On Windows, everything requires a third party app. It's
| insane.
|
| I wanted to convert XML to JSON. Well: Tough luck. Go
| download some app by some person from the store. We are sure
| it's completely safe!
|
| Want to convert a video to a gif? Get another bloatware
| program.
|
| There is so much command line stuff Linux users take for
| granted that Windows people struggle with every day.
| tootie wrote:
| Same. You don't need a camera, you can doodle a signature with
| a mouse and it's fine. I bought a house this way with no
| trouble.
|
| It's funny to me to look at a company like DocuSign whose
| shares surged early on the in the pandemic because they
| expected a dramatic increase in need for digital signatures and
| then the price crashed when it turns out that signatures aren't
| actually useful and we can just live without them.
| andrewmunsell wrote:
| I always use Preview to "sign" documents due to a lack of a
| scanner, but I've found in some cases, companies refuse to
| accept the document because they think it's not actually
| printed, signed with a pen, and then scanned...
|
| Tools like this will skew and degrade the image in a similar
| way to a scanner so that it fits this ridiculous requirement
| halpert wrote:
| Have you tried signing a piece of paper with a pen and using
| Preview's signature scan feature? It creates a very realistic
| looking signature in my opinion.
| andrewmunsell wrote:
| Yep, that is what I use. The signature itself looks
| completely handwritten (because it is), but the companies
| in question complain that it can't possibly be a
| handwritten signature because the document didn't look
| printed and scanned (???). It's slightly ridiculous, but
| not much I could do other than find a scanner/printer or
| "comply" with their document formatting requirement
| ddavis wrote:
| Signature_example.pdf in that repository is NSFW.
| efsavage wrote:
| See also: The license :D
| thematrixturtle wrote:
| Unless you've Gavin Belson.
| jeroen wrote:
| As is the readme.
| uhrush wrote:
| It seems fine. It's just someone's initials => OlO
| efdee wrote:
| If that signature is NSFW, you might want to consider W'ing for
| another company instead.
| defanor wrote:
| I vaguely recall hearing a while ago that it may be counted as a
| forgery if you copy and paste your own signature that way. These
| days it even happens that you can simply type your name as a
| signature, but it's quite hard to be sure what's okay and what's
| potentially a crime with these bureaucracies. But for a tool like
| that, it might be useful to write down in which jurisdictions
| it's certainly okay (or not) to use.
| drjasonharrison wrote:
| IANAL. Wikipedia, "Forgery is a white-collar crime that
| generally refers to the false making or material alteration of
| a legal instrument with the specific intent to defraud anyone
| (other than themself)."
|
| Note defraud.
| grst wrote:
| Having moved from Germany to Austria I was pleasantly surprised
| that they have a functional national ID system that you can use
| to sign PDFs with a qualified electronic signature. Within
| Austria, they have been accepted everywhere so far.
|
| https://www.handy-signatur.at/hs2/#!sign/single
|
| When I tried sending such a document to a German insurance
| company, they refused to accept it. I ended up faxing the
| document :/
| 7steps2much wrote:
| Usually sending them the following helps them be less stubborn:
|
| > Gemass Artikel 25 eIDAS-Verordnung hat eine qualifizierte
| elektronische Signatur die gleiche Rechtswirkung wie eine
| handschriftliche Unterschriftund wird in allen Mitgliedstaaten
| anerkannt.
|
| Doesn't work always, but the times it doesn't I usually find a
| competitor that does prove to be more cooperative pretty
| easily!
| benjamir wrote:
| At least in the federal state of Hesse a fax isn't considered
| safe: (German)
| https://www.heise.de/news/Datenschutzbeauftragter-Gaengiges-...
| schroeding wrote:
| ... anymore. It was seen as safe until the last old ISDN /
| analogue landlines were converted to VoIP ones, which was
| really not that long ago :D
| nashashmi wrote:
| My go to tools:
|
| Create an array of signatures on paper.
|
| Use photoshop to make it transparent.
|
| Take transparent images of signatures and make pdf stamps out of
| them.
|
| Use pdf stamp to sign docs.
|
| Print pdf with stamp markups as image to pdf printer.
| aith wrote:
| I built the same thing for the same reasons as a client side web
| app http://patmood.github.io/scanned_look/
| BrainBlur wrote:
| Favourite part has to be where you can have a list of signatures
| to randomly choose from. I assume it was done so that not all
| signs look same and robotic ?
| Osiris wrote:
| If you have a PDF editor that can save a PDF/A (archive PDF),
| it'll convert the whole document into an image. So, I just paste
| in my signature and export as a PDF/A and from their perspective
| it's just a single image like it was scanned.
| xyst wrote:
| the author appears to be a fan of rocket ships
| mrb wrote:
| I have a shell script based on ImageMagick that gives a PDF a
| "scanner" look. I typically open the PDF in Master PDF Editor to
| insert an image of my signature, then pass it through my script.
| When I do need it, it's rare, but it becomes a real life saver.
| It has avoided me the need to print and scan 100+ pages for a
| mortgage company, some stock brokers and banks. Key points of the
| script:
|
| "+noise Random -fill white -colorize 95%" to add some noise to
| the image
|
| "-distort ScaleRotateTranslate '$x,$y $angle'" to randomly shift
| horizontally and vertically the document, and randomly rotate it
| slightly
|
| "-density 150" for a low-ish resolution so it better hides the
| fact the PDF wasn't really scanned
|
| "-colorspace Gray" to make it black & white
|
| "-quality 60" to increase JPG compression and somewhat reduce
| picture quality #!/bin/bash # Make a pdf
| look like it was scanned. if [ $# -ne 2 ]; then
| echo "Usage: $0 input output" >&2 exit 1 fi
| tmp="$1".scanner-look.tmp mkdir "$tmp" && # without
| -flatten some PDF convert to a JPG with a black background
| convert -density 150 "$1" -colorspace Gray -quality 60 -flatten
| "$tmp"/p_in.jpg && : || exit 1 # each page is
| randomly shifted in the X and Y plane. # units seem to
| depend on angle of rotation in ScaleRotateTranslate?
| offset() { echo $(($RANDOM % 1000)); } for f in
| "$tmp"/p_in*jpg; do # each page is randomly rotated by
| [-0.5 .. 0.5[ degrees angle=$(python -c 'import random;
| print(random.random()-0.5)') x=$(offset)
| y=$(offset) convert "$f" \ -blur 0x0.5 \
| -distort ScaleRotateTranslate "$x,$y $angle" +repage \
| \( +clone +noise Random -fill white -colorize 95% \) \
| -compose darken \ -composite \
| ${f/p_in/p_out}.pdf || exit 1 done # concatenate all
| the pages to one PDF # use "ls -v" to order files correctly
| (p_out-X.jpg where X is 0 1 2 ... 9 10 11 ...) pdftk $(ls
| -v "$tmp"/p_out*.pdf) cat output "$2" && rm -rf "$tmp"
| hyperdimension wrote:
| Kind-of-related: I'm wondering if anyone can help me find a
| website I found a long time ago (probably through StumbleUpon,
| if that tells you anything about how long ago)
|
| It was a "government document simulator." What you would do is
| upload a nicely scanned document, and it'd give you back a mis-
| alighed, crappy quality "scan" of that document, with random
| blotches and other visual noise. You know, like regular
| government/FOIA-received documents.
|
| I feel like this is halfway there, if not more (so thank you!),
| but that website was so authentic.
|
| I don't know if it's even around, but it made me giggle, and
| I'd like to find it again. If not--great startup idea!
| distances wrote:
| I have a script for the same purpose too, but I prefer a black-
| and-white 1-bit palette for that fax look. Here's my version --
| note that it uses graphicsmagick, img2pdf, optipng, and pdftk.
| Also enforces A4 so some of you may want to change that. For
| fun it's doing the page processing in parallel to speed up a
| bit with large documents. #!/bin/bash
| # Adds a bad scanning effect to PDF files. if [ $#
| -ne 2 ]; then echo 1>&2 "Usage: $0 input.pdf
| output.pdf" exit 3 fi
| convertPage() { # PDF filename in first parameter,
| page in second file=$1 page=$(($2-1))
| png=$(printf "pdf2scan-page-%05d.png" $2) #
| Convert PDF page to black and white PNG gm convert
| -density 300 "$file"[$page] +dither -rotate 0.35 +noise
| Gaussian -type bilevel -fill white -fuzz 90% -colors 2 $png
| # Optimize PNG optipng -silent $png }
| export -f convertPage # Read number of pages
| pages=$(pdftk "$1" dump_data | grep NumberOfPages | sed
| 's/[^0-9]*//') # Loop through pages and convert in
| parallel for i in $(seq 1 $pages) do
| echo "$1":::$i done | parallel --eta --colsep ':::'
| convertPage {1} {2} # Create PDF from PNGs
| img2pdf -o "$2" --producer "" --pagesize A4 pdf2scan-page-*.png
| # Remove temporary files rm pdf2scan-page*
|
| For a cleaner 1-bit look without noise and rotation, use "gm
| convert -density 300 "$file"[$page] +dither -colors 2 -type
| bilevel -fill white -fuzz 40% $png".
| mrb wrote:
| The 1-bit palette is a good touch. Making it use parallel(1)
| is a great and easy optimization. Nice!
| ca7 wrote:
| Thanks for this!
|
| "-flatten" results in all PDF pages being rendered into a 1
| page PDF output. If "-flatten" is removed, I get a multi-page
| PDF output as expected. Thoughts?
|
| EDIT: "-flatten" does what it is supposed to. Delete if
| operating on multipage PDF.
| mrb wrote:
| Weird. I could swear "-flatten" didn't behave like this years
| ago when I last used my script. But maybe I am misremember...
|
| Edit: haha! The "-flatten" needs to be replaced with "-alpha
| flatten". This way, multi-page documents are still handled
| correctly, and alpha transparency is also handled correctly.
| I just tried on this sample file with transparent images:
| https://tcpdf.org/files/examples/example_042.pdf
| m3kw9 wrote:
| I don't get this, do people actually care if it looks scanned vs
| someone actually added a sig to it from acrobat/preview?
| iso1631 wrote:
| I love the highly calibrated signature_guide.pdf you have to sign
| :D
| j4yav wrote:
| Very nice, I do this a couple times a year by hand. I'll have to
| keep this in mind for next.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| I think I have witnessed the apogee of bureaucratic obsessions
| with printing and signing. I sent an email to what is similar to
| the IRS in my country and they answered by typing up the answer,
| printing it, signing and stamping it, scanning it and attaching
| it to the reply in my email.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Another comment: I completely love PDF exchange editor. Used
| their free version for years and finally paid for it which I
| should have done a long time ago.
| lionkor wrote:
| Honest question: As long as you say you signed it, and you say
| it's your signature, does it matter how real it looks?
| candu wrote:
| IANAL, but this depends on the jurisdiction. In some places
| (e.g. Ontario, Canada), e-signatures are fine; often this is
| because the law explicitly says they have the same effect as a
| "wet" signature. In this case, "looking real" doesn't enter
| into it.
|
| In others (e.g. Denmark), you don't even need to sign - merely
| stating your intent to accept a contract, and having a clear
| record of that intention, is enough. In this case, again,
| "looking real" is a non-issue; you can even send an email in
| some cases.
|
| In yet others, you will definitely be asked for a "wet"
| signature, and a digital signature is not considered legally
| acceptable. Here looking real could matter; if your signature
| is obviously non-physical, it may be refused.
|
| This also varies by situation. In some places, banks want to
| see a wet signature, _and_ will compare it with an existing wet
| signature they have on file. In this case, it very much matters
| how real it looks, where "real" means "matches this other real
| signature". (Does this make sense? Arguably no, but that's the
| way it currently is.)
| bachmeier wrote:
| And that raises the question for those of us that had to sign a
| bunch of documents when things were locked down: What purpose
| does the signature serve? It was a constant hassle that wasted
| a bunch of my time, and it ultimately was not a signature.
| aasasd wrote:
| I had to look it up when doing deals with someone in Japan, and
| Wikipedia (iirc) told me that specifically in Japan just
| scribbling over the pdf via the touchpad is not a legal thing--
| you have to do the paper dance. Judging from the comments here,
| France also doesn't encourage all-digital laziness.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| You are right, that it shouldn't make a difference technically.
|
| I think the goal is to minimize the risk of someone rejecting
| your document because it looks photoshopped.
| jedberg wrote:
| Heh I had to make a version of this for myself. I had a vendor
| that required a "wet signature" for a document, so I took the
| PDF, added my digital signature, exported it to JPEG, and then
| used a command line tool to rotate the image 1% left and then 3%
| right so it looked like I scanned it a little crooked.
|
| Worked like a charm.
| globular-toast wrote:
| I had to do this! It was a 3-4 page document and I thought
| printing and scanning was stupid, but did it anyway. Naturally I
| only printed and scanned the last page with the signature on it.
| They rejected it saying I had to print and scan the _entire
| document_!
|
| I would be very tempted to use something like this next time,
| however I have a feeling that the same people who think this is
| sane would accuse you of fraud if they ever found out. Not sure
| if it's worth it.
| lucb1e wrote:
| I've done this sort of thing often (and more quick&dirty) and
| nobody had an issue with it yet. Just put a good quality
| signature on the doc and then export the whole thing as fairly
| low quality. Making the signature blue and the rest of the
| document black and white probably also helps. But I never even
| needed that much.
| drjasonharrison wrote:
| Please don't use the WTFPL (the "whatever the fuck you want to
| do") license. It's not well thought out legally, especially in
| Europe.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL
| fart32 wrote:
| > It's not well thought out legally, especially in Europe.
|
| Does it matter, given its intent?
| obert wrote:
| If you have MacOS, open the PDF with "Preview" and you can add
| your scanned signature using
| Tools->Annotate->Signature
|
| You can have multiple signatures ready to use (see
| Annotate->Manage Signatures), e.g. multiple variations of yours,
| so they don't look all the same when signing a doc multiple
| times.
|
| When including a signature you can position and resize it, e.g.
| to adjust for layout, font size, etc.
| digisign wrote:
| I use gimp for this. One layer the imported pdf, the next with my
| scanned signature from ... 1998? Position, scale to 1024 or so,
| export grayscale jpg with enough compression to create artifacts,
| done. The poorer quality the better, tends to make it seem more
| "legitimate."
| hnitbanalns wrote:
| 83457 wrote:
| I used my remarkable tablet to sign something once and it got
| rejected for looking too good. Had to print, sign, and scan with
| phone app to pass the must look crappy approval process.
| vyrotek wrote:
| I just use Micrsoft Edge to view a PDF and the pen tool to draw a
| signature.
|
| Am I missing something?
| Fiahil wrote:
| > For bureaucratic reasons, a colleague of mine had to print,
| sign, scan and send by email a high number of pages. To save
| trees, ink, time, and to stick it to the bureaucrats, I wrote
| this script.
|
| I hear you, fellow Frenchman !
| wolframhempel wrote:
| As someone living in Berlin, having to deal with German
| bureaucracy I can't thank you enough. Now it just needs a "send
| as Fax" button...:-)
| tmalsburg2 wrote:
| I send "fax" via https://epost.de which is incredibly useful
| public authorities. You upload a PDF and they print it and send
| it as snailmail. Since they verify your identity, it has the
| legal status of a fax (is my understanding).
| upofadown wrote:
| I recently learned that a cryptographic signing operation on a
| PDF is more or less bogus due to the complexity of the format.
| Every once in a while some researchers take a look and find a
| bunch of new ways to forge such things. I guess the root problem
| is that you end up signing a whole whack of stuff that you don't
| see or understand. That isn't ever going to work. I think that in
| practice you can only sign plain text if you want it to be
| secure.
|
| So this really isn't any worse than the alternatives, at least
| for PDFs...
| davchana wrote:
| I made a font of my 3/4 variations of signature, some initials,
| and personal logos, total about 10 characters, all mapped to
| A,B,C etc..
|
| When I need to sign something & print, I use that font in pdf; or
| use Rand & Char formula is excel.
| kristofferR wrote:
| What's the use case of this?
|
| Signing documents with visual signatures instead of cryptographic
| ones is already extremely archaic, but having to make them look
| like being signed by hand is absurdly so.
| monkpit wrote:
| You're implying that a bureaucratic process being absurd and
| extremely archaic means it doesn't exist?
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| It says right there in the description
|
| > For bureaucratic reasons, a colleague of mine had to print,
| sign, scan and send by email a high number of pages. To save
| trees, ink, time, and to stick it to the bureaucrats, I wrote
| this script
| oplav wrote:
| I have, in the past but not recently, run into situations where
| I need to visually sign something, and the form was rejected
| when I digitally signed it with MacOS Preview because they
| required the form be printed, signed, and re-scanned.
|
| This would be helpful in that case.
| k8sToGo wrote:
| Fun?
| glitchinc wrote:
| The primary use case is addressing situations where wet ink
| signatures are required by a party to a transaction without
| having to print, sign, and scan a document.
|
| Yes, it is an odd combination of legacy (sometimes regulatory)
| requirements and modern technology, but there are numerous
| situations where only wet ink signatures are accepted, and
| "digital signatures" are not accepted--even though the document
| is stored in a digital format.
|
| Wet ink signatures are most commonly required in finance /
| investment / banking transactions. They are sometimes required
| for B2B transactions. While not as common in the US as in other
| countries, you can also run into requirements where documents
| must be signed via wet ink signature under seal (or stamp).
| Scanning a document with a signature line that has been
| embossed with a company seal looks somewhat comical and
| arguably legible (especially if the scan is done with a feed-
| through scanner) but is required to get business done
| sometimes.
| DarylZero wrote:
| But it's not a "wet ink signature," it's a PDF. The "wet ink
| signature" is on a piece of paper that never gets delivered.
| [deleted]
| russelltran wrote:
| Oh my goodness, I have dealt with a pedantic bureaucrat who
| rejected my signed PDF and insisted on the hand signature hahaha.
| So I printed the document out with my digital signature pasted
| twice, one below the other, and added a couple sharpie smudges to
| the bottom one before scanning to quietly "insist back" that
| there's no difference between my manual and digital one.
| Regardless, The automaton was satisfied!
| amelius wrote:
| I still miss a coffee stain.
| pydry wrote:
| it could use a --coffee-stain
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| That this even needs to be done is just absurd in 2022. Wow.
|
| Great work though.
| RyanShook wrote:
| Web tool that does pretty much the same thing:
| https://www.scanyourpdf.com/
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| Whenever I had to do this, I inserted my signature, that have
| saved as image file, with LibreOffice Draw and then used an
| ImageMagick one-liner to make it look scanned. A script
| automating this is welcome.
| valzam wrote:
| When I moved to Australia I needed to get some documents (uni
| degree, work experience etc) verified by the Australian Computer
| Society. They required me to get a notarized copy of the original
| and SCAN the notarized copy, to be uploaded electronically. To
| this date I've yet to come across anything more stupid than
| this....
| ajot wrote:
| Previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22811653
|
| First comment posts a way to achieve something similar with
| imagemagick, which I've been using flawlessly since.
| spapas82 wrote:
| For a project that you can use to _actually_ sign (electronically
| of course) a PDF file or verify that a PDF file has a proper
| signature take a look a this:
|
| https://github.com/spapas/pdf-sign-check
|
| It uses org.bouncycastle and apache pdfbox and is completely open
| source. I'd be happy to help anybody that wants to use it in his
| organization!
|
| We use it sucessfully in my organization (public sector in
| Greece) for some years; notice that to be able to sign you need
| to have a proper certificate for your organization.
| seb1204 wrote:
| Nice, but from my experience people don't know digitally signed
| PDF. They want paper with wet signatures or looking like wet
| signatures. On the other end of the scale I have seen pdfs
| signed with self created certificates or signed by mouse
| movement.
| divbzero wrote:
| Yes, and in some contexts people seem to recognize digitally
| signed PDFs only when they "officially" processed by
| DocuSign, HelloSign, or a similar professional service.
| spapas82 wrote:
| Well it depends on the laws of each country. In my country
| (Greece) a digitally signed document is acceptable
| everywhere at least in the public sector. Actually it's
| illegal for a public servant to deny a digitally signed
| document!
|
| No professional service is really needed to sign a
| document; it all depends on the acceptance of the
| certificate you use for signing by your government/laws.
| I.e you may need to buy a certificate from a trusted
| organization or you may need to generate a certificate from
| a public sector organization of your country.
| jsiepkes wrote:
| Nice tool!
|
| Though personally I just use something like Xournal++ to edit the
| PDF (add text, add a signature image, etc.) and then use the
| following command to "fake scan it":
|
| convert -density 150 input.pdf -colorspace gray -blur 0x0.1
| -sharpen 0x5.0 -level 10%,90% -rotate -0.5 -sharpen 0x1.2 output-
| scanned.pdf
| seqizz wrote:
| I don't even bother with making it look like scanned. Just
| adding a png signature with Xournal and that's it. Mostly
| government requests it so they never cared enough to complain.
| longstation wrote:
| I did similar things when signing stuff. I used Adobe Sign (the
| Android app) to add my signature to the PDF and email it back.
|
| Question: Is the signature done by FalsiScan and Adobe Sign
| equivalent legally?
| f311a wrote:
| I just use convert from imagemagick.
|
| There are so may options, e.g.: convert
| -density 100 -blur 0x0.1 +noise Gaussian -colorspace gray -rotate
| 0.5 -attenuate 0.2 mypdf.pdf scan.pdf
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| That's basically what this is doing to fake the scan:
| https://gitlab.com/edouardklein/falsisign/-/blob/master/fals...
|
| > convert -density "${DENSITY}" "${PAGE_IN}" -linear-stretch
| 3.5%x10% -blur 0x0.5 -attenuate 0.25 -rotate "${ROTATION}"
| +noise Gaussian "${TMPDIR}/${PAGE_BN}-scanned.pdf"
| fallat wrote:
| My go to these days is just open gimp -> use my tablet pen ->
| save again to PDF. I've never been questioned.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| If you have a Microsoft Surface you can just open PDFs with
| Edge, draw on them with the pen, and save them. It's such a
| nice feature!
|
| Makes me actually like signing things. And it's also wonderful
| for sending feedback on stuff.
| technothrasher wrote:
| Yup, I just "sign" in Acrobat Reader using a signature image I
| scanned a long time ago, which should be pretty obvious to most
| people what I've done. But nobody ever complains.
| jve wrote:
| Or use foxit reader to draw or put image as a signature on PDF:
| https://help.foxit.com/manuals/pdf-reader/foxit-reader-for-m...
|
| I'm no way affiliated to foxit but that functionality there
| works. And saves trees.
| [deleted]
| ewuhic wrote:
| Does anyone know of a good PDF-editor (with ability to alter
| OCR'd text) for Linux? Editing pdfs (I know, I know, pdfs are not
| meant to be edited) on Linux is huge PITA, and LibreOffice
| Draw/Write do not cut it for me, so I have to resort to Adobe
| Acrobat from dualbooted Windows.
| baxtr wrote:
| What's the thing with the Penises in the readme and example pdf?
| Is this a joke?
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Because the author is a child, and so am I, so I approve.
|
| Ah yes, all of it is a joke, the example text is too. Which is
| fitting for the problem it is intended to solve.
| mhuffman wrote:
| That was substantially more penii than I was expecting to see
| today. On the other hand this whole project is a pretty funny
| troll tool, so fair play!
| jve wrote:
| Don't know about different Jurisdictions, but from where I am -
| this has NO legal binding whatsoever. We have those gov issued
| digital, invisible signatures for that, embedded in our personal
| ID card. Whatever is properly signed with digital signature, the
| printed out page bears no legal force.
|
| Anyway, businesses still like to do it this way ("Signing" pdf by
| applying some pixels). I wonder if it is just an inconvenience to
| overcome both for businesses and consumers that just write this
| off and don't bother that it is such a weak binding. It is like
| some dirty workaround/hack to put those silly signatures on
| digital documents to get stuff done.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| I'm in the US and as far as I know, a digital signature is
| completely valid. [edit: ~it's the same way here.~
| Misinterpreted parent comment.]
|
| Yet Ford repeatedly insisted I print out the documents, sign
| them, and scan them. I tried a digital signature anyway - and
| they called me out on it.
| kube-system wrote:
| When companies ask for signatures to be done in a certain
| way, it's often not because those things are a requirement to
| be a valid contract under the law, but because they want more
| evidence to support them should the contract be brought into
| question in court.
|
| You could theoretically, in some cases, run a business on
| nothing but verbal contracts, but you would be foolish to do
| so because you'd have difficulty proving anything if it were
| disputed.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| "I tried a digital signature anyway"
|
| Do you mean:
|
| A) a cryptographic signature?
|
| B) an image of your handwritten signature?
|
| C) something else?
|
| I think you and GP might be talking about different things.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| I meant B.
| eof wrote:
| Presumably B).
|
| I've had many instances where people insist I print, sign,
| scan, rather than e-sign.
|
| I too have put an image of my signature on the pdf rather
| than printing; I have had those both rejected and accepted.
|
| I don't have a printer and have been annoyed by this
| insistence greatly. Enough that seeing this post filled me
| with glee.
| jelling wrote:
| Yup, there was a literal act of congress that made
| e-signatures legally valid but it's not worth arguing with
| anyone who asks for an "ink" signature ime.
| legalcorrection wrote:
| This is wrong, in the US an electronic signature can be just
| about anything. See my comment here
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30025456
| johnmaguire wrote:
| What exactly is wrong? This doesn't contradict what I said.
| I agree my signature was valid without printing. It's
| frustrating that businesses do not.
|
| edit: I see that I misinterpreted the parent comment.
| Sorry.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Same here. Real signatures on paper as well as cryptographic
| signatures are legally binding. Pasting a picture onto a PDF
| isn't but nobody wants to deal with the bureaucracy so they do
| it anyway. Getting a cryptographic token you can use to legally
| sign things is such a bureaucratic nightmare too, nobody wants
| to do it, including myself and I really like this stuff.
| [deleted]
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| I don't know where you are at, but I know for a fact that a
| scan of a signed document is binding in the EU. As far as I
| understand it doesn't even have to be a scanned document, you
| can sing a digital document by adding an image of your
| signature or just using your finger and a touchscreen.
|
| In the US from what I read[1] the situation is pretty much the
| same a scan of a signed document is binding as well as non
| cryptographic electronic signatures.
|
| [1] https://resources.infosecinstitute.com/topic/legality-
| electr...
| jve wrote:
| Huh, I'm from EU. But what I remember from lectures on
| digital documents, they said something different. Will have
| to look up this stuff.
| lucb1e wrote:
| It has been four hours, OP is nowhere to be seen. I hope
| they're okay amidst all the legalese.
|
| More seriously, do let us know what you find. I've heard
| both sides on this but the "verbal agreement is also
| binding (just gl proving it)" side is usually from better
| sources like an actual lawyer posting on a forum as opposed
| to a random boss making claims about signature
| requirements, for example.
| jve wrote:
| > from better sources like an actual lawyer posting on a
| foru
|
| Yeah, you're right. Please do not take me as an authority
| or lawyer on that matters. It's just what I think I know,
| but I may very well be wrong :)
|
| What I read is that even informational documents are
| considered in court. However document that bears legal
| validity, must contain: document name, date, signature
| (with exceptions) and recipient.
|
| However I did found a relevant quote:
|
| > Section 5. > (1) A document shall be signed in one's
| own hand. A document of the organization shall be signed
| by the person whose position is indicated in the
| document. A personal signature reproduced in a paper
| document using technical means shall not ensure legal
| force of the document.
|
| https://likumi.lv/ta/en/en/id/210205-law-on-legal-force-
| of-d...
|
| But I'm not sure if print->sign->scan qualifies, as the
| signature itself isn't put there with technical means.
| But this rules out putting image as a signature on PDF.
|
| This is not talking about e-documents. E-document states
| that it must be signed with secure electronic signature.
|
| I know Latvian people are reading this too and this
| document is very helpful in that regard:
| https://www.tm.gov.lv/lv/media/7605/download
| z3t4 wrote:
| Even a spoken agreement is a legal binding. But it's always
| best to get it on paper, and if it's important, also use at
| least two witnesses.
| H8crilA wrote:
| This.
|
| Generally speaking in most countries the civil law does not
| specify how the contract is supposed to be made. You can
| buy from the shop with just a nod of your head. Only some
| specific agreements have to be written down (and even fewer
| made in front of the notary).
| jsiepkes wrote:
| I don't know where you live but in the EU eIDAS regulation sees
| a scanned document as a Simple Electronic Signature (SES). This
| is the most basic possible form of signing which is accepted.
|
| So within the EU a scanned document is valid though the law
| does say the method used needs to be proportional to whats at
| stake.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EIDAS
| flipbrad wrote:
| Comments in this sub-thread need to distinguish between two
| dimensions to a signature: is it capable of legally binding
| the signatory? In most cases, any format will do. Is it going
| to be easy to enforce (I.e., to prove it was you that signed,
| and not your dog headbutting your mouse?) That's a damn sight
| harder, and many forms of (legally valid!) E-signature might
| not be accepted for that reason. Depends how much assurance
| is needed in the circumstances.
| rolleiflex wrote:
| I've noticed that the court documents issued by civil courts
| in Turkey have electronic signatures with signed hashes for
| each of the signatories (judge, clerk and all else) in every
| document. To make people not freak out, they seem to have
| also added a PNG image of a slightly smeared generic wet-ink
| looking signature above the hash so it looks real on first
| sight. But if you look closely the signatures are all the
| same, and the signature says _e-imza_ (e-signature) in
| cursive. Heh.
|
| Another cool thing, the whole document itself does have a
| hash where you can go to the website of the ministry of
| justice and input the hash to verify the document. It was
| unexpectedly neat.
| 7steps2much wrote:
| Same over here! Only difference is that with our IDs/certs you
| usually have a visible cert block on the PDFs. You can get it
| to be invisible somehow, but that's a bit of a hassle.
|
| But yes, anything that's not a proper digital signature might
| as well just be a random png pasted into a pdf. No legal
| binding power whatsoever.
| jve wrote:
| For the software they provide us to sign documents, there is
| a checkbox when I sign PDF files - whether I want some
| overlay that indicated that it is digitally signed or not.
| Thats probably the user friendly part of digital signatures
| :)
| legalcorrection wrote:
| In the US, the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act, passed by
| most states, clarifies that basically any sound or symbol or
| process is a valid electronic signature. This is in line with
| general contract law, under which any manifestation, written or
| verbal or even non-verbal, that would reasonably be understood
| as assent, is sufficient to form a contract. Of course, if you
| want a court to enforce that contract, you're going to have to
| prove that the other party did provide assent.
| n2j3 wrote:
| Great, been using this https://www.scanyourpdf.com/ for very
| similar results (source: https://github.com/baicunko/scanyourpdf
| )
| pmdulaney wrote:
| Oh goody! I've been looking for new ways to commit mail fraud!
| lostlogin wrote:
| Konrad Kajau forged Hitlers Diaries and nearly got away with
| it. He had a memorable line, it was something like "Fake? Real?
| There are efficient documents and inefficient document."
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Kujau
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_Diaries
| pmdulaney wrote:
| Wow! How cold.
| DarylZero wrote:
| Heh. Probably unnecessary to make it look like it was put in the
| scanner misaligned. Just scan the signature itself and past that
| image onto the image of the document.
| the_svd_doctor wrote:
| Meh. That really doesn't always look very legit. Especially if
| you can "select" all the text, and when you select the
| signature you see a nice box around it. It's then too obvious
| it was added as an image.
|
| I don't disagree that the whole "signing and scanning" is dumb,
| though.
| monkpit wrote:
| You can rasterize the pdf, wouldn't that solve it?
| drjasonharrison wrote:
| But you could also increase the size of the pdf and clog the
| bureaucracy's systems.
| airstrike wrote:
| Previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22811653 (April 2020, 770
| points, 187 comments)
| Chirael wrote:
| This is really going to come in handy during the next real estate
| downturn (https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/false-
| affidavits-for...)
| tombert wrote:
| I really hate dealing with my printer (or any printer for that
| matter), so I make pretty liberal use of my drawing tablet at
| this point. I import the PDF into Krita, use the ballpoint pen
| brush, and sign. I export to PNG, then use an imagemagick script
| to rotate it some random number between 1-3 degrees, and add
| noise onto it to look like a scan.
|
| It's a pain, but it's still less annoying than dealing with a
| printer.
| xur17 wrote:
| I have a png of my signature, and I just paste it into the pdf,
| and submit that. Haven't run into a complaint yet, and I don't
| have to print anything.
| nyir wrote:
| Ditto, had it only once that they complained the signature on
| separate documents was identical. Well, just wrote it down a
| couple more times in case I run into that again.
| rienko wrote:
| This, but with extra noise around the signature and with at
| least 4 unique copies, max number of times one has to sign
| full name a document (in my personal xp). Whomever is going
| to read it and check for digital, will probably check closer
| on the signed pages. Also make sure the signature isn't too
| perfect and not too regular on the ink :)
| QuercusMax wrote:
| When we were buying a house back in 2009 (before electronic
| document signatures, which are the most amazing thing ever
| compared with the old way) we had to sign zillions of
| different pieces of paperwork going back and forth while
| making offers and so on. I was doing most of this during the
| day from the office, and all the paperwork had to be signed
| by both me and my wife.
|
| So what I'd do was take the PDF, paste in my wife's
| signature, print it out, sign it myself, then fax it over.
| Never had any problems.
| function_seven wrote:
| Just a couple months ago I had a couple of forms rejected
| with a note "needs wet signature"
|
| They were for a 401(k) plan I was updating RMD choices. I got
| the PDF form from their site, filled it out in Preview,
| pasted my signature PNG, and used an app on my phone to fax
| it(!) to their number.
|
| Got rejected. Had to actually print the damn things and sign
| them with a pen, scan them again with my phone's camera, and
| re-fax them.
|
| Was mildly infuriating.
| newhotelowner wrote:
| I printed, signed, scanned, and emailed Ameritrade. My scan
| was so good that it got rejected. They told me that digital
| signature is not accepted.
| trimbo wrote:
| Vanguard?
|
| They're ridiculous with this. It's a huge pain with trusts.
| function_seven wrote:
| SavingsPlus. They handle California's retirement
| programs.
| momirlan wrote:
| How wet ? You could add a "splash" effect on top of the
| signature
| jaycroft wrote:
| As an HR administrator for a small business, this
| absolutely grinds my gears. According to every accountant
| and consultant I've ever talked to, the "wet signature"
| rule is enshrined in federal law (although I have yet to be
| able to find out exactly where). It applies to all
| brokerage operations (opening your custodial accounts);
| employee applications (even internal to your own company
| that never leave your own filing cabinet - keep in case of
| audit!); statements of information (form 5500) filed with
| the IRS (it's the only form you can't submit electronically
| - needs a wet signature?!). For everything else we deal
| with a saved drop-in signature in Acrobat works just fine.
| Almost not worth the employee's savings given their low
| participation rate and general ambivalence to the whole
| program.
| mNovak wrote:
| Not sure if it's new, but I just recently filed a 5500
| online. You can do it here:
| https://www.efast.dol.gov/welcome.html
|
| But yes, dealing with brokerage forms that needed a wet
| signature faxed..
| jaycroft wrote:
| My mistake on the 5500 - we have a consultant / tax
| preparer that files the actual form for us, so it does
| look like the actual filing is electronic. What I was
| incorrectly remembering, it turns out, was that the
| _authorization form_ for our consultant to electronically
| file needed a wet signature.
| tombert wrote:
| Do you think it might have worked if you had run it through
| this FalsiScan program?
| function_seven wrote:
| Yes, I bet it would have, and I wish I had heard about it
| then!
|
| When I refaxed the forms, I just removed the PNG
| signatures from the PDFs first (leaving all other form
| fields typed in), printed them, signed them, made sure
| the two signatures were different in obvious ways (but
| still the "same"!), and scanned them at deliberately low
| resolution.
|
| This program sounds like it automates all those steps.
| seb1204 wrote:
| I do the same
| tombert wrote:
| I should probably do that. I've always hesitated because the
| paranoid part of me thinks they'll catch on to it being
| digital if I have to sign in ten different places and they
| see that the signature is literally identical for each one.
| My Krita solution, while annoying, allows for me to have a
| slightly different signature for each one, for each form I
| sign, allowing it to pass all but the most judicious level of
| forensics.
|
| Granted, no one is going CSI on anything I sign. I should
| probably just make like ten pngs of my signature and paste
| those in.
| teagoat wrote:
| I do the same. I just have one saved. No one has ever
| complained, even when it's blatantly obvious that I didn't
| sign it by hand.
|
| I figure even if they do complain, it doesn't matter. Its
| not like I don't have permission to do what I want with my
| own signature. The worst might be that they come back and
| say "sign it properly please" and then I have to go through
| the effort of printing it out and scanning it back in.
| heartbreak wrote:
| I have three different signatures and a several versions of
| my initials loaded into Preview.app for use in signing PDFs
| because I don't want them all to look the same.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Preview is a killer app and it gets me though all sorts
| of situations., document signing (and doctoring), and PDF
| manipulation first and foremost.
|
| Combined with notes.app which has some very nice features
| (document scan, share, to-do lists, reliable sync, adding
| of files, search etc) it is Apple at its best.
| adrr wrote:
| I did my refi using that method till they realized i was
| using a digitized copy and sent over a person to collect wet
| signatures from me.
| SamBam wrote:
| It depends on what you're signing. My letters of
| authorization to my bank require a "wet signature." Scanned
| or photographed and emailed is fine, but they want you to
| print and sign, and they've sent it back to me when they can
| tell I've used a digital stamp.
|
| This product looks interesting, although the idea of me
| entering coordinates for the stamp instead of just stamping
| it in a GUI is not at all appealing...
| tootie wrote:
| You can actually sign a PDF this way just using Preview on
| MacOS.
| woofyman wrote:
| Also iOS
| lostlogin wrote:
| I had passport photos rejected due to my eyes being too
| shaded or something. One eye seemed a little darker according
| to the error messages. I tried taking new photos, including
| ones from I paid for (done at a pharamacy) and still failed.
|
| In Preview I copied one eye and put it over my troubled eye,
| reversed. It worked.
|
| I've been though face detection systems in various countries
| (US, UK, France) and I seem to get through ok.
| tombert wrote:
| I knew that, and I do run macOS, but the signature always
| looks "digital" to me. It's not bad, but with Krita and it's
| pen or pencil brushes, in combination with a decent drawing
| tablet (well, as decent as a Huion screen tablet is) with a
| pressure-sensitive pen, I can get something that looks
| outright _indistinguishable_ to a physical signature.
| ewuhic wrote:
| Dare telling which exactly config for brushes do you use?
| giobox wrote:
| I've signed and returned almost everything requiring a
| signature for years this way, you can even have multiple
| signatures (helpful when you need spouse to sign something
| too...) in Preview to speed up dealing with these kind of
| tasks. I've never once been asked to sign it with a pen
| instead, even for relatively complex transactions like
| houses/cars.
|
| Because Preview lets you draw the signature using the
| TrackPad and a finger, I've had no difficulty making a very
| convincing replica of my actual signature in Preview.
|
| While the linked tool may "look" more convincing with fake
| photocopy marks etc, for just signatures its not been
| necessary to go beyond Preview for me ever. In the US so much
| business is conducted on paperfree platforms like DocuSign
| etc that I don't think many people even notice the fact the
| signature is digital anymore, given platforms like DocuSign
| do more or less the same thing.
| phreack wrote:
| There's also this website which I've used successfully with
| many bureaucracies.
|
| https://www.scanyourpdf.com/
| JadeNB wrote:
| I'm not too enthusiastic about uploading personal information
| and a signature to a random website.
| tombert wrote:
| I've seen this one, I think it was on HN about a year ago,
| but a lot of the forms I've been signing in the last year
| have been stuff containing a fair amount of personal
| information (e.g. wife's immigration stuff, refinancing a
| house, banking annoyances, etc.). I can't really audit the
| code for an online service, and I find it unlikely that
| either Krita or ImageMagick are sending this information
| externally, considering both seem to work fine even without
| an internet connection.
|
| EDIT: Clicking on it, I see the source code is available. If
| I can run it on my local box then this might be a little less
| nasty than mucking with the `convert` command.
| fragmede wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23157408
|
| Github repo: https://github.com/baicunko/scanyourpdf
|
| But yeah, the security implications of uploading a PDF with
| your SSN and signature to a random website is, um, not
| good.
| seb1204 wrote:
| Years ago I user a good blue Ball pen and signed in a blank
| paper. I scanned this in high resolution, cropped, fattened the
| lines, removed background and saved it as a transparent PNG. I
| added this PNG as a stamp to my favourite PDF software and have
| signed many many documents. The thing to remember is to flatten
| comments after I stamped my signature onto the document.
| jjcm wrote:
| I use Figma quite a bit for this. Just make my signature a
| component and drop it in where I need it.
|
| Used to use Photoshop where I just made my signature a custom
| brush.
|
| Disclaimer: I work for Figma.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| This could go a lot further. I once did something similar with a
| rubberstamp image taken from the web, replaced some of the on-a-
| curve text in the GIMP, applied various filters to make the seal
| look like it was stamped on unevenly, and composited it over the
| page. Did the trick.
|
| Would be neat to have this take a rubberstamp image and do all
| that work too.
| gyulai wrote:
| I think the author of this tool is totally missing the point of
| the print/sign/scan legal hoop that one sometimes has to jump
| through. The law sometimes requires certain documents to be "in
| writing" and there is, unfortunately, a legal tradition tied to
| this that "in writing" means "physically on paper", which many
| lawmakers and bureaucrats unfortunately haven't managed to
| properly transition into the digital age.
|
| However something that is quite a separate matter is the question
| of whether one needs to actually be in possession of that piece
| of paper. A scan of an original serves as proof that the original
| exists. ...and this is usually all that anyone requires for
| practical intents and purposes.
|
| But: You're not supposed to do print/sign/scan, and then just
| throw away the original. You're kind of supposed to keep it in
| case you're ever asked by a court to produce it. The document
| partially loses its forensic value if no original can be
| produced.
| lucb1e wrote:
| If that's the point, why does nobody ever say to keep the
| original?
|
| If the counterparty needs it, why don't they request you sign
| two copies and send them one? The idea that they would later
| want it for forensic evidence that you really did sign it seems
| odd: if it's in their benefit and you wanted it to not exist,
| and you're the one possessing that original copy... you can
| _make_ it not exist.
| gyulai wrote:
| I guess, when such administrative procedures are decided,
| then the kinds of considerations that go into it have to do
| with whether the document is more to your advantage or more
| to theirs. In a high stakes situation where the document is
| to their advantage (like you sign an employment agreement),
| they routinely will insist on having a signed original rather
| than just a copy or scan. In situations where the costs of
| dealing with paper originals outweigh the potential benefits,
| they might well not insist on having paper originals.
|
| But, to come at it from the other side: If _you_ want to make
| sure you can actually rely on the document in court, it 's
| probably a good idea to keep originals and definitely a bad
| idea to use this FalsiScan tool.
|
| The lowly-paid administrator who deals with you might not be
| able to detect the FalsiScan that you submit. But if
| something goes to court and it benefits them to undermine the
| forensic value of the document, then you might well find
| yourself faced with a digital forensics expert proving to the
| court that the document came from this FalsiScan tool. This
| opens the possibility that, for example, a third party with
| access to your computer that contains all the digital assets
| to create FalsiScans (like a scan of your signature) could
| have created the PDF.
|
| It's not obvious that you would want to respond to that by
| saying "but I definitely definitely did use FalsiScan myself,
| meaning the PDF to represent my signature on the document".
|
| If the other party can make it look like you purposefully
| sent something that would make it past their administrative
| procedures but would have questionable forensic value so that
| you could later have it thrown out in court, then you can no
| longer rely on the document yourself and could even be liable
| to damages that resulted from their relying on it.
|
| If they can clear a slightly higher burden of proof in the
| general direction of fraud, they could even come after you
| criminally: Fraudulent creation of digital assets of forensic
| value (like scans of paper documents) is a criminal offence.
| -- At least in Germany; I don't know U.S. law that well.
|
| That also applies to your original suggestion about making a
| document not exist whenever it serves your purpose for the
| document to not exist. ...that too is kind of a criminally
| relevant thing that you probably don't want to do.
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