Cornell Researchers Unveil a Virtual Notary 72
First time accepted submitter el33thack3r writes "We've all wanted a trustworthy record of an online factoid, whether it's your official employment status, a tweet someone made or the hash of an open-source distribution to protect it from tampering. A group of Cornell researchers have just unveiled a service called Virtual Notary that can serve as a witness to online factoids. The service is useful for inventors who want to timestamp an invention disclosure, for people who are seeking an officially random number selected for a raffle or crypto protocol, for web services that want a record of a user's email address, and for many other use cases. The service is free and the researchers are seeking community input on other online factoids of interest. What would you like notarized online?" The concept is interesting, but some of the items they've chosen as examples seem well documented elsewhere, such as historical exchange rates and stock prices.
Do they even know what notarizing is? (Score:2, Insightful)
Pure nonsense. And I actually looked at the link this time, not just the /. summary. From the website: You select a factoid that you would like notarized. We check that factoid, create a record of it that you can refer to later, and issue you a cryptographically-signed certificate that attests to that factoid.
That has nothing to do with notarizing. Notarizing is about witnessing and confirming that you (the signer of a document) are who you say you are. It has nothing to do with the the accuracy of the document itself. I could write a deed selling you the Brooklyn Bridge and a notary could perfectly legally notarize it, all they would be doing is affirming that I was the person who signed it. Notarizing something has absolutely nothing to do with confirming that the information contained in the notarized document is accurate. This "service" seems to want to confirm facts, but I don't see anywhere that it manages to confirm who it was that electronically signed something. So it is not notarizing at all.
Re:Notaries (Score:3, Insightful)
The Internet has really changed the game here. What does a trusted person mean in a global context? More importantly, what exactly is the global entity that would declare a person to be trusted? If you've ever had to deal with international notarization, you'll know that the best that the current system can offer is a system of irregular local standards, glued together through Apostilles on dead trees. These are at best inefficient, though archaic would probably be a more accurate description.
Changing that landscape starts with providing alternatives to the public so that your Joe/Jane Lawmaker can see what is possible and change the laws to match the new technological capabilities.