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Comment by averageRoyalty | Hacker News Reader

Quite funny. Amusingly, the self-portrait method is effectively the signatures we considered acceptable for financial and legal transactions for many decades - make up a scribble and compare it to a scribble you do previously - if it's close enough and you _seem_ to be the guy, we're good.

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> make up a scribble and compare it to a scribble you do previously

I'll take "Lies that your parents told you about how the world works" for 500, Alex.

Serious question though, I thought the whole signature thing was more of a legally binding thing for the signer asserting themselves as X, sort of like checking the "I'm over 18" box. Sort of a "Well we asked you the question, it's not our fault if you lied" type thing.

I remember opening a bank account and having to sign a specific card that the bank would keep solely to verify my signature on checks.

When I got my first credit card, circa mid-90s, no one told me I had to sign the bank. Took my brand new card with my brand new girlfriend to a shop and bought something.

Handed the clerk my card during payment, she looked at it and said it is not signed so she is not allowed to accept it. I took it back, she gave me a pen, I signed it and gave it back to her.

She ran the transaction, got an approved slip, gave me the slip to sign, I signed it and gave it back.

She compared the signature on the slip to the signature on the back of the car, and Lo And Behold, They Matched!

Like logging in after a password reset.

I personally don't mind this because I've been burned too many times by services that mangle a new password in some invisible way, for example silent truncation, so I like the opportunity to log in just to make sure that the update has worked, the value in my password manager is correct, etc.

I always do a random scribble. If I want to later deny signing something good luck proving its me, won't match any of my other signatures. At least that's the theory, this is mostly a joke to me and I don't care if it works.

"lies that your American parents told you about how the world works"

i went to Germany as an exchange student, scribbled out my random scribble for my travellers check, and they denied me because my signature wasn't close enough to their record. heard a similar story from a friend who visited Japan

And in India when you need lots of cash from your own account, you need to sign a withdrawal slip, and signatures on that need to match exactly the original signatures on their file.

Signatures are the tip of the iceberg. Plenty of other forms of bs forensics live on in the legal system in some shape or form. e.g., fingerprint analysis, polygraphs, field sobriety tests, devices that literally do nothing, trainings on reading facial expressions, and so on. If you can take a two week course on it, then chances are there is some cop somewhere using it to detain people.

fingerprints seem pretty solid?

On a good day, with an excellent print and the best people doing the matching you can be pretty sure if this print is from this person, but crime scenes are not that perfect scenario and the actual crime scene investigator might be less than great at the matching or influenced to some extent by what their boss wants.

There's a big difference between "This thumbprint in blood was on the recovered murder weapon and it's a perfect match" and "This smudge of half a finger on a paper bag found near the scene was arguably a match" but the jury isn't necessarily told about this and where on that scale the evidence they've been told about would lie.

Standards vary wildly on what constitutes a fingerprint match. There can be well over 100 ridge characteristics in a fingerprint, but some US jurisdictions only require as few as 12 of them to match, and it all comes down to an investigator's subjective determination anyways. It is not scientific.

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