Joe Greco wrote:
> How do you verify the authenticity of anything? This is a common problem
> in the Real World, and is hardly limited to LoA's.
>
> How do you prove that what was on Pages 1 to (N-1) of an N page contract
> contained the words you think they said? I knew a guy, back in the early
> days, who habitually changed the SLA's in his contracts so that he could
> cancel a contract for virtually no reason at all ... the folly of mailing
> around contracts as .doc files in e-mail. But even failing that, it's
> pretty trivial to reprint a document, so where do you stop, do you use
> special paper, special ink, watermarking of documents, initial each page,
> all of the above, etc?what about using a digital signation of e.g. a pdf version of a scan?
Try putting that up next to an apparently legitimate but actually subtly
modified paper contract with signatures, in a court of law, and feel free
to inform us of which one the court finds more compelling.
In an environment where there's an established history and standard
procedures, they're typically going to prefer the familiar method.
In our world, if we were to have some sort of crypto-based way to have a
netblock owner sign something like that, yeah, that'd be great, and it
would mean that the community would generally be able to manage the issue
without having to resort to faxed-around LoA's, etc., but we don't have
that infrastructure, or even a common/widespread LoA system. Sigh.
I'm not arguing that some sort of technical/crypto infrastructure for
authorizing the advertisement of space shouldn't be developed, and in fact
I think it should. However, as an interim step, things like LoA's are
much better than nothing at all, and worrying about the authenticity of
an LoA is probably not worth the time and effort, given the way these
things tend to work out. If there's cause for concern, those who are
receiving the LoA's will ramp up the paranoia.
... JG