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USPS Providing Electronic Postmarks
isn't my name writes "Back in 2000, Clinton signed the ESIGN Legislation which set forth the requirements for making electronic signatures. But many questioned the weakness of its definitions that allowed an e-mail address to be used as an electronic signature. Well, it seems the USPS has come up with something stronger. They even have a Java and MS COM SDK's Apparently, the USPS feels that the strong legal protections against interfering with the US mail will apply to the EPM program. It seems that AuthentiDate is doing all the heavy lifting. According to the whitepaper on their site, it provides non-repudiation and legal timestamps of documentation by having the customer use a public-key to sign a hash of the document, which is then sent to AuthentiDate's servers which combine that with a timestamp and sign with their key. So, AuthentiDate does not have access to any of the data in the documentation. It sounds very similar to the free PGP Digital Timestamping Service, but it likely is more likely to be legally defensible in a US Court. They also have a new plug-in for MS Word documents. Interestingly, despite the mention of the SDK and it's ability to work with any documents, the only login setup I could find just allows you to use the MS Word version."
The EPM is designed to deter and detect any fraudulent tampering or altering of electronic data.
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Hell, they weren't even able to deliver the bubblewrapped hard-disk I sent in a triple-thickness FRAGILE-sticker-equipped box I overnighted to my business partner in one piece
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
would you send your taxes by email five minutes before they were due? If a late timestamp meant a fine?
;-)
Simple: chose a USPS signature server located on the west coast
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
10 links in one article - I like to keep up on stuff but that article had more links than a full day at FARK (and far less boobies)...
Funny story: One time my boss got a call from his bank because the signature on a check he signed didn't match the signature on all the other checks they had. The reason? It was the first check he actually signed himself in several years.