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New Standard For EU-Compliant Electronic Signatures
An anonymous reader writes "ETSI has published a multi-part standard that will facilitate secure paperless business transactions throughout Europe, in conformance with European legislation. The standard defines a series of profiles for PAdES — Advanced Electronic Signatures for PDF documents — that meet the requirements of the European Directive on a Community framework for electronic signatures (Directive 1999/93/EC)."
It's good to see some progress being made in the formalization of standards for accepting electronic signatures. I'm reminded of the issues with conventional legal guidelines surrounding hand-written signatures, and look forward to cryptographically verifiable alternatives.
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It's an unfortunate inevitability of life -- everybody poops. And
while this task can occasionally provide us with an opportunity to
relax or engage in some deep thinking, there are other instances when
this basic undertaking becomes a chore no person should have to
endure. Whether or not these stooling sessions can be tolerated, is
often determined by one single factor: where it is taking place? If
you're alone in the privacy of your own home, why not make an hour of
it and get some reading in? However, if you're at work with your boss
sitting in the adjacent stall, you'd better hold off on dropping
anything for fear of creating an embarrassing splash. With that in
mind though, things could be worse, and here are eight examples of how
much worse..
8-The Wilderness Toilet
This is essentially taking a #2 in a wall-less bathroom. Sure,
you're in a pretty remote location, but it's not so remote that they
haven't needed to accommodate other people with full bowels. At any
second, some fellow hiker could round that nearby group of trees and
put an eyeball on you while you prepare to release yesterday's granola
bar. It's also safe to assume that since this toilet is on a path
intended for people who want to get away from the hectic bustle of
society, that same society's emphasis on cleanliness and sterile
toilets is far removed as well. And since the act of pooping leaves
man at nearly his most helpless, this would seem like the ideal time
for a voracious wild animal to attack. So, not only is this an
uncomfortable practice, but it's a dangerous one as well.
7-School
Kids can be merciless. They will go to great measures to find any
points of weakness in their unfortunate victims, and to a youth,
finding out that someone has been pooping presents an incredible
opportunity for ridicule. Yet, at times your body requires you to crap
at these academic establishments, and so you are immediately presented
with the impossible task of somehow taking an undetectable dump, or
completely leaving school. If you excuse yourself from class, the time
you spend in the bathroom will surely be recorded by your callous
peers, and upon return, you will be thoroughly mocked. If you try and
poop in between class, you'll be too worried about the possibility of
being tardy, and you'll probably pinch it off before you're completely
done. And even if you muster up the courage to attempt this risky
procedure, there's always the risk of someone walking in and berating
you while you take part in what should be one of mankind's most
private moments. So please children, let each other poop in peace.
6-Your New Girlfriend/Boyfriend's House
Let's say you're about to leave your newly-acquired significant
other's residence after your first sleep over, when nature suddenly
decides this would be the perfect moment to defecate. Maybe it's the
nerves after a night of apprehensive tongue-kissing and heavy petting,
or maybe it's the three-bean taco salad you ate prior to the
caressing, but whatever the case, your body's telling you it needs to
be relieved immediately. Now the bathroom in this situation is
certainly not the problem; it's clean, and probably provides some sort
of reading material. The problem is what will happen to this new and
delicate relationship once the odorous evidence of your actions hits
the air. There may be an air-freshener, or perhaps you're carrying
some matches, but that will only mask the smell, and the psychological
damage of having your body demonstrate what it's like at its most foul
will forever remain in the nostrils of their brain. This will
permanently change how your significant other looks at you.
5-The Port-a-Potty
Here's what the Port-a-Potty brings to waste elimination sessions:
One--They're typically found in unfamiliar, public locations that can
make an already-taxing exercise more stres
Great to see the Adobe Lobby Machine in action. They are really pushing very hard to convince everyone into using PDF at the Service Directive level. OK, there is the ISO 32000-1 standard. But there's more to it than just an open standard. The biggest issue is the risk of vendor lock-in. The big problem with PDF is that there's basically only one vendor supporting the full specification, being Adobe. If you compare this with OOXML you could even state that Microsoft products are less risky as it comes to vendor locking. You can at least open an OOXML or ODF file with some unzipper and have a look at the XML files in case the specification documents are incomplete. This is something you can totally forget when using the PDF standard.
The same applies to the signature extensions. XMLDSig and XAdES come with very good specifications. And even if a product (like OpenOffice.org or Office 2007) has some specific signature implementation/requirement, you can still investigate the plain XML files and find the details. This is absolutely not the case for Adobe PDF signatures... trying to find out what the hell they're doing inside the CMS signature is very hard.
I hope one day people will realize the major risk that vendor lock-in triggers. Having some open standard is not sufficient, you also need an accessible file format to avoid risk of complete vendor lock-in.
S.P.B.T.? They may as well be trading grains of denim lint like the US'ians.
This is what I think of EU and it's sister Union of North America: more straying from the original exclusive jurisdictions and pulled into a slaughterhouse that only a quasi psychiatrist-conspiracytheorist historian could navigate through pro-per.
That's what you call it when you interact with corporations: constant regulation and re-defenitions. What was once a simple trade using lawful money of a man to a man, has now been obfuscated. People get angrier, because they don't know how to Pen a contract payable in said gold or silver specie, and so it all washes down in the anals of history as another necessary compromise to condition money into corporate units of "currency" that doesn't float around in its own value like a numismatic token from Lakota Nationals or through NorFed.
PAdES? P.A.d.E.S.? What's with the bullshit generator today? Couldn't they just name it somthing fluffy like PayPal?
ETSI = European Telecommunications Standards Institute. (It's not obvious from the article.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Telecommunications_Standards_Institute
I am all that is called jigaboo.
Anyone know if this will be implementable in free software? Are there patent/copyright issues?
It would be helpful if someone posted a link to the standard.
The European Telecommunications Standards Institute's search page is at:
http://pda.etsi.org/pda/queryform.asp
Search for "pades" in the title will get you the five parts of the standard (well, Technical Specification).
ETSI TS 102 778-x
And thank goodness it's ETSI doing this, since they publish their standards without charge.
I've just had a quick look at the standard - the problem here isn't the mechanism of the signature, but the security of the signature itself. Should the computer on which the signature resides be compromised, the attacker can create and sign documents at will. Also as the standard allows for "serial signatures" which means multiple related signatures for serial authorisation/authentication, it also presents the potential of a man-in-the-middle attack. Why should a company actually trust such a system? I can't see this replacing binding contracts between the parties.
I am not a robot. I am a unicorn.
The biggest vulnerability is adobe pdf reader. Everyone accounts for 99% of pcs use adobe reader (with all its vulnerabilities) and this now has just put the icing on the cake. I hope that most people know to use a different reader then adobe to load the content...
unless of course this new format will only be available by adobe and not allowed by other pdf readers...
They have cemented a known bad file system in place for digital exchange ...great!
Judging from the low number of comments posted in reply to this story, it looks like a lot of people are going "So What?"
This could be big though. Here we have a well known and well defined format (pdf) moving in and occupying this space first before Microsoft. This gives pdf (and Adobe if you wish) a big headstart in defining the market for products based upon this standard.
Next, some people in Redmond will try to figure out how to displace this spec with their own. I think they will find it harder to discredit ETSI than it was for them to discredit Peter Quinn. And I hope they find it harder to buy ETSI than it was for them to buy ISO.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
Why are the EU re-inventing the wheel? What is wrong with using existing digital signature specifications such as those defined in RFCs 3851 and 4880?
And they tie it to the PDF file format *why* exactly? PGP/OpenPGP/GnuPG have supported signing *any* kind of file since ... well, forever.
But I suppose it could have been worse -- they could have spent a few years to design
a standard for signing Commodore 64 binaries or something.
Maybe the big thing is really how they plan trust to work -- the article doesn't say and I'm too lazy to check.