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Comment by tpurves | Hacker News Reader

I think the main point the parent comment is making is that, today and historically, the great majority of contract disputes today don't involve disputing (analog or digital) signatures. People usually dispute about all the other terms rather that about the act of having signed it. [Even though analog signatures aren't particularly secure either]

However, if Microsoft signatures have now became more forgeable at scale, perhaps we could see some rash of fake contract fraud in the future where disputing fact of signature becomes more common.

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The question of signing generally arises with dueling forms, where there's no dispute that "a" 20-page contract was signed on June 4, 2017, and that this is page 20, with all of the signatures, but... What did that contract say in Paragraph G on Page 12?

Perhaps the bank only retained page 20, and is saying that they used the same master form for every mortgage and the master form says "this" on page 12.

Or one party discovers that other has misplaced their copy of the contract and then shows up with a copy that has advantageous wording on page 12.

Asking for a copy of the signed documents for my corporate bank account was how I discovered that my bank’s internal processes were using one revision, and the forms they ask you to download and fill out ahead of time were a different revision, despite being the same (uniquely numerically identified) form.

They accepted my copy verbatim and scanned it right into their DMS, despite the fact that my revision was older than the internal revision it was tagged under. They scanned the -whole- document though, so the language on the signed copy is crystal clear.

The banker’s remark: “that’s unusual, no one ever asks for a copy of them signed.”

Edit: my initial draft was a grammatical mess up top

On "serious" contracts, it's common to put your initials on each page, or to fan out the stack of papers and sign the margin so that each page contains part of that signature. Both are in addition to the "real" signature at the end, and provide some protection against exactly these kinds of problems.

I guess a cryptographer would add a hash of all preceding pages on the last page.

> I guess a cryptographer would add a hash of all preceding pages on the last page.

That's basically how hashes and signatures work anyways. They basically take in the result of the previous block and integrate it into the new block so that if you change any part of the previous parts, the whole thing breaks.

Edit: I should specify this is how the algorithms themself work. Implementations can fuck this up (and they do a lot).

There are also Merkel trees, which are closer to the signature -on-"subdocuments" mentioned above. Also blockchains that explicitly include the previous block's hash.

Signing a PDF via "/s/ Name E. Name" and sending it via e-mail solves the "lost pages" issue, and doesn't require the parties to use cryptographic techniques.

Without cryptographic techniques that is all easily forged.

The point is forgery of signatures and contracts is not typically an issue.

In contract disputes, there's usually no dispute of if a contract was signed. Sometimes there's a dispute over which contract was signed, but then each party may have a signature on a contract or not. Much more often there's no disagreement on the contract or that it was signed, but on the terms.

It's nice that electronic signing can solve the issue of validity of signatures, but it's not that big of a deal, because it wasn't that much of an issue; and that's why e-signing has devolved into 'click a button to enter a signature' without any sort of cryptography.

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