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Robo-Arm Signatures Are Legal, Gov't Buys One
AndreV writes "It's endlessly comforting to know a recently designed and implemented long-distance robotic signing arm can produce signatures legal in both the US and Canada. The aptly named LongPen replicates the handwriting from a person writing in a remote location — with the unique speed, cadence and pressure of a human pen-stroke. It started as an idea from author Margaret Atwood to help free her from grueling, multi-city, multi-country book tours, but the hard stuff was done by a bunch of Canadian haptic gurus, whose design took into consideration many factors of the human arm and how we write. How it works: from the author-end, data protocols are set up, and the pen pressure is measured on a special tablet. The data streams to the robot, while algorithms smooth out all the missed points. Complex math operations were used to help the mechatronic limb repeat the hand's motions without unnecessary jerking, and programmers had to 'scale time' or 'stretch time' by breaking down the movements, essentially tricking the eyes into thinking the robot is writing fast. It was recently adopted by the Ontario Government to sign official documents. It helps criminals sign books, too."
Canada's best-known novelist and inventor of the LongPen.
Boy, you learn something every day.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
...what could possibly go wrong with this idea!?
is whether a handwriting expert can tell the difference.
This is less laughable to me than the State of Michigan where government workers are required to "sign" memos by typing their name in italics over their non-italicized name.
How this handle security? If the signature is sent remotely, it is possible to store ones signature to reproduce it several times afterwards.
Robotic signature machines have been around for decades. Some of my colleagues at MIT worked on the first modern ones based on plotter technology in the late 1980s/early 1990s which were quickly bought by places like the US White House to sign letters.
A 5-second search on Google for "signature machine" comes up with 8 thousand hits. There's an autopen entry on Wikipedia indicating that mechanical signature machines have been around since the early 1800s (yes 1800s), and lists three current manufacturers of the devices.
So, this is news? Just because someone hooked up the recording part and the writing part across an internet connection and made them work in real time? That makes it to the front page? Is that really the first time it was ever done? Lots of other things have been done telerobotically already.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
longpenislong
Manually signing things is cumbersome because (a) you have to be within arm's reach of the signature's destination, and (b) because it takes a certain amount of time to sign each paper.
These folks seem to have a (complex) system to create signatures remotely, addressing (a). If you record and play back what comes into the signing machine, you would also have (b) - at the expense of an even greater security headache. I really hope they are keeping the connection encrypted. And kudos to them on account of imitating fine manipulation.
But signatures as authentication are more than flawed. Only a specialist can distinguish between a valid signature and a forgery of any quality, and there are few specialists. About the only saving grace of signatures is that they are low on technology - anyone can sign, and anyone can "low-leve-verify" a signature.
If you are going to use a machine and a secure communications channel for identification -- use cryptography.
Also, if whatever the machine signs in your name is going to be legally binding, you had better be very sure that the machine is signing what they tell you that it is signing. I can imagine all types of mischief with blank checks instead of "book covers". An advantage of being (a) within arm's reach of something is that you can easily examine what it is that you are signing.
Yes, off topic. Where should I post this then?
Slashdot's CSS is all broken. I can't see any images! And the pages are fugly. My error console in firefox has "$ is not defined" about a million times for slashdot.org, even if I log out. Anyone else getting this? It's been going on for about a day.
Auto signature machines are not the same as long distance signature machines. It's also worth noting that mechanical signature systems are rarely used for sensitive data etc. (they're normally used on cheap merchandise etc. and hand writing experts can tell the difference between the mechanical version and a real signature)
On a business, rather than celebrity autograph level, how is this different than an autopen except that it's (lots) harder to detect forgery? How is this a good thing?
Anything that can be sent can be recorded, and anything that can be encrypted can be decrypted given enough time. The security of the device seems to be based on the fact that it is more or less unique. This will not remain true, and therefore the security offered will not continue to exist. All this machine has done is make one of our last fairly good low tech verification systems useless not even for some other great purpose, but for the convenience of celebrities. Forgive me if I find this less than noble.
Cryptographic signature anyone?
It's going to be hilarious when the LonPen 15 is introduced...
The value of a signature is its difficulty to replicate. The historical cut off for this has been the talent and prevalence of expert forgers. Having automated forgers is quite irrelevant if they require more investment of time and effort to perform the same replication. (which would clearly be the case for this implementation, at least)
If anything, I would say the problem is that these machines are being underapplied. What they should *really* be used for is to create extremely complicated signatures a human being would not be able to accurately reproduce. Then for the first time in hundreds of years written signatures would become more secure.
(Granted, only until someone develops a machine that can reverse-engineer them, but at that point human-written signatures would have been even less helpful.)
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
http://www.earlyofficemuseum.com/copy_machines.htm
Scroll down to the Polygraphs paragraph.
I swear I saw in a very old movie the original-idea polygraph on a machine separated over a phone line. Cannot find a reference to it anywhere.
I love /. for what I learn while looking for other things - originally, a polygraph was a machine to copy signatures.
Props to the LongPen for its tech - but I think we have a history-recording gap between it and the polygraph.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
These have been around for hundreds of years I believe. We just now can send them longer distances.
Living in Chile
Using robotic arms to sign official documents? In Spain we use rubber stamps.
someone hooked up the recording part and the writing part across an internet connection and made them work in real time
Excellent! Someone just worked out my business model patent! I'm going to be rich! I love how this works, think of a idea, get a patent on it, then wait for someone to actually work out the details.
Where is the 'whatcouldpossiblygowrong' tag?!
Look at patient #5,222,138
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5222138.PN.&OS=PN/5222138&RS=PN/5222138
It was called the Telesignature and used dual key RSA for authentication and encryption. The system used a combined scanner (chinnon planetary configuration scanner) attached to a flat bed plotter inside a security enclosure. A pen computer was used at the remote end to review and sign the document. I am listed as co-inventor as I was responsible for most of the systems design. My wife and best friend did all of the programming. We first showed the operating prototypes at Fall Comdex in 1992. My wife used a bezzier curve to smoooth the signature and many people marveled at how good the signature was.
We later did a spinoff product for mass signature reproduction called Autosignature (no patent).
Later I'll dig up some of the old brochures and scan them and put some of the picts at the link below.
http://explorer/cyberstreet.com/telesignature
How can such an arm be secure?
I mean: how is the data transmitted? Any details?
...is can this (not) be hacked? Now where did that checkbook go?
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
How is this any different from the "telautograph" machines common in the 1950s? As a kid I was fascinated by one I saw in a New York hotel that was used to allow a manager in one location to remotely sign documents in another. Heaven only knows that technology it used, but my vague memory is that it looked like an X-Y version of an analog, galvanometer-type pen recorder.
Click, click, Google: Wikipedia has an article on the Telautograph which mentions that "The telautograph was first publicly exhibited at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
It doesn't matter, signatures aren't secure anyway. The variability between separate signatures of one person is often greater than the difference between any one of them and a reasonable forgery. In that respect the law is out of sync with reality, in the sense that a signature is supposed to guarantee that the document was signed by the undersigned while in reality it could be signed by anyone who had taken the trouble to exercise jotting down someone else's signature for half a day.
In the Netherlands this recently caused a bit of a scandal, I'll recount it for your entertainment. If you're an official for a company or public charity or the like you have to register with the Chamber of Commerce. Because other people can have public dealings with such an entity all the books and other documents relating to it need to be public. However, that meant that the signatures of all officials of companies etc. could be obtained for a small fee filing a request with the Chamber of Commerce. Turned out crooks knew about that. They chose low-profile targets, and signed documents like "I, H. Victim, hereby donate my company to W. Crook.", milk the company, disappear and by the time anyone notices to money's gone and nothing can be done about it anymore. Apart from the attack vector these are very similar to the recent house selling scams in Britain.
The value of a signature is that it is a deliberate act, nothing more. It's like the flippy thing over the "weapons hot" switch. It's there so that you can't say, "I didn't mean to agree to those terms."
A signature is NOT a security device. I don't think they ever were.
What else can this baby grip from a distance. Cyber handjobs will grip you if your pen.is leaky.
You're right. I remember seeing a long-distance handwriting machine at an airport 50 years ago, where someone in a remote city was writing messages to our city -- I think about the weather and flight delays. (I assume they could also have used teletype.)
And Harry Truman was the first president to use an Autopen to reply to constituent letters.
I couldn't find the LongPen at PenIsland. Can anyone tell me the URL of LongPenIsland?
to quote the article: "In reality, as a LongPen press release delicately put it, "legal complications" made it impossible for Black to appear in person. Black isn't allowed to leave the U.S. because of bail restrictions following his conviction on fraud and obstruction of justice."
Didn't Reagan use one of these? I seem to remember that.
I'm a 2000 man.
Oh, the autopen is used for so much more than just signing letters. When I worked for a certain elected official, we kept a stack of autopen-signed papers so we could do floor orders and the like. Nothing big, of course, like "move to add Member X as cosponsor to my Bill Y", but there's no reason why they couldn't have been used for more sinister ends. If I ever wanted to write a racist, pro-Nazi diatribe I could've gotten my boss's signature on it without any hassle. Needless to say, it requires a lot of trust to put one of those machines in the back room of the office.
What's this? Another weblog? On transit?
I thought part of the reason a signature is important in the first place is to verify the signers presence at the time of signing.
Is no one going to mention Robert Heinlein and Waldo? They don't make nerds like they used to. http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=23
Plain old signature is getting obsolete, they need digital signature for authentication + something like TACACS/RSA for authorization.
This should be used with hookers and blackjack instead.
In fact, screw the blackjack!
for great justice
What's next?
I have already got a system to prevent this.
No two signatures are the same. That's how you know my signature is genuine - it doesn't match another signature of mine.
Used to cause a bit of annoyance at the bank when they checked these things.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
Reading about this, I just can't help but think of Nixon on Futurama. I'll be much more impressed when they get this technology working to the level where you can sign by rubbing your nose against the glass.
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IIRC didn't Thomas Jefferson have something similar?
Like a duplicator of sorts. The device attached to the butt of the pen and simply followed along with another pen held aloft with pulleys and counterweights.
Ahh one step closer to being able to stab people in the face over the internet.
* nmp3bot dances :D-< :D|-< :D/-<
* nmp3bot dances
* nmp3bot dances
I can't get rid of the feeling that I've seen this somewhere already...somewhere in a book about 19th/20th century telecommunications equipment, next to Pantelegraph and Bildfunk. :)
Add memory. Add a repeat button. Add a {check}book for an account that nowadays actually has money in it.
Her lips were softer than a duck's bill, but her quacks
Your memory is accurate. We used them in the air traffic control tower I worked at to send weather and flight data to the Flight Service Station that was across the field. Hardly nothing new here in terms of hardware. Just a new legal interpretation on an old idea.
... the government is developing a modification of the arm allowing it to reach into your pocket.
Have gnu, will travel.
Yes, the book tours are a lot of work, you get sore wrists, etc. But it's a part of the job that she chooses to do. There isn't anything that requires it. It's just a sales boosting event.
But nobody is going to give a damn about a mechanically reproduced signature. Nobody, except the most hardcore fans, are going to care about that - they want to meet the author, not the author's mechanical stand-in. If she actually used it, it would defeat the entire purpose of the signing.
Also, I have to think that it would make more sense for the government to just shell out for a scanner and a wacomm tablet.
Servo motors can easily resolve 1/2500 of a revolution, and if mated to a relatively inexpensive 60:1 zero-backlash worm gear, effectively can position to within 1/150,000 of a revolution. That is some pretty serious precision that can be assembled for just a few hundred dollars.
Stick it in your journal.
You beat me to a (in my head) clever post. Jefferson created a mechanical device that as he wrote would move a secondary quill in a mirrored fashion. Sounds simple or obvious to many here today, but remember where technology was[n't] then. An absolutely brilliant mind.
Even in 1988 I was using these as an aviational weather forecaster for the USAF. It was used to communicate weather watches/warnings to the tower, Base Ops, and others, and they used it for base wide announcements. It was strange to watch someone's writing style being broadcast in real-time and you could, obviously, even see differences in styles and handwriting. I thought it was funny to have such a system in place when we also had "hotline" phones which rung to all those same places as well as teletype machines, and even a PC or two, since it was sometimes hard to read because there was a lot of noise in the legibility as well as an importance in that person's penmanship.