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Schneier Asks Why We Accept Fax Signatures
Bruce Schneier's latest commentary looks into one of my pet peeves: faxed signature requirements. He writes "Aren't fax signatures the weirdest thing? It's trivial to cut and paste -- with real scissors and glue -- anyone's signature onto a document so that it'll look real when faxed. There is so little security in fax signatures that it's mind-boggling that anyone accepts them. Yet people do, all the time. I've signed book contracts, credit card authorizations, nondisclosure..." It's amazing how organizations are sometimes willing to accept low-quality, unverified scans delivered over POTS as authoritative, when they won't take the same information in a high-resolution scan delivered over (relatively secure) email.
Scott Adams already covered this in "Dilbert".
The accounting trolls told Dilbert that they wouldn't accept copies of his expenses... but he could FAX them.
Get three pieces of black construction paper and a roll of scotch tape.
Tape them together top to bottom, creating one long sheet. On the bottom, place a piece of tape half over the edge.
Insert the long sheet into the fax machine, and dial the number. As it begins to feed through, quickly affix the top to the bottom sheet, creating a long loop.
Go get a cup of coffee.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJkx_oD63KM
-1 not first post
Bruce Schneier here. Disregard what I said about faxed signatures. They are perfectly OK.
Here's my OCR-ed signature: Bruce Schneier
I wrote "See License" on the back of my credit card. I'm still amazed by the number of vendors who don't look, so I make sure to thank the ones that do, and chide the ones that don't.
Actually, Zug.com has an interesting tale of the author trying to see how much he could get away with when he signed credit card purchases. He even did musical notation once. Very funny.
http://www.zug.com/pranks/credit/
http://www.zug.com/pranks/credit_card/
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
We had one vendor who refused to accept a signature on a scanned and e-mailed document - They insisted that it be faxed. We even pointed out that we were just going to print out the scanned document and drop it in the fax machine because the physical document had already been handed off to somebody else and we suggested that they just print it themselves. They still wanted the fax, so we printed and faxed the document we'd already delivered and that satisfied them. Bizarre.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
And I just sent my first fax a few days ago. Clearly it is the more modern technology!
So, YES, the fax machine is OLDER. Much older. There's something wrong with your caps lock key. Every eight or ten words it activates itself and then gets stuck until you hit the space bar again.
Longboats!
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
Not quite true.
America, Home of the Brave.
Cool. So I can copy some money and it's equivalent?
I thought it was:
4 melvon
5 mevon
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Add a half twist, forming a Moebuis strip, which can then cause a rip in the space time continuum at the receiver's end.
Of course, you'll need to get a Klein bottle of coffee (which has its own problems)
This reminds me of a story from my youth...so we... scanned...
You have no idea how depressing this is.