Washington’s signature-writing machines rumble into the digital age | Hacker News Reader

Washington’s signature-writing machines rumble into the digital age

washingtonpost.com

21 pointshownottowrite12 comments

This is so bizarre. The point of a signature is that it's an unreproducible way of marking that you have personally approved something.

There is no difference between an auto-pen, and just giving your secretary a stamp saying "the bearer of this stamp speaks with the authority of senator X".

The only difference between the stamp system I described, and an auto-pen, is that the latter can be used to trick gullible people into thinking a real human pressed a pen to the paper.

> The point of a signature is that it's an unreproducible way of marking that you have personally approved something.

That is why that exists -- because it creates that _impression_. A stamp would look cheap and distant, a pen on paper looks mostly indistinguishable to most from a real signature.

If I write a letter to Obama and get a response with a signature, well I can at least dream that Obama could have signed it personally. If I get a stamp from a secretary, I know he definitely didn't.

It is about ceremony like the article said. Pen on paper signature has very long been an "important thing". Signatures bind contracts, put people in jail, sign loan applications, sell companies, etc, etc. That has been entrenched in the culture and it explains why these things are used.

A handwritten signature is basically worthless.

I make it a point to sign something mocking the form whenever presented with a signature box to make this very point.

Not sure what you mean.

It is obviously not worthless since it is required everywhere. So large number of people and organizations hold that it isn't.

> I make it a point to sign something mocking the form whenever presented with a signature box to make this very point.

Again I am confused about that. So you are buying a car, a house or making a deal with an attorney, do you just write "fuck you" in the signature box, put a smiley face in there?

We had one of these things in the back room of an alumni development office that I worked in 10 years ago, which was used to sign appeals and thank you letters to big donors. I was surprised when I saw it, because I assumed printing technology could do a pretty good job of approximating a signature. I was told nothing could copy pen on high-grade paper.

Another outdated signing technology I encountered when I lived in Taiwan was the "chop" (印章) which was used to sign everything from post office receipts to contracts. It was easily fabricated, and in fact I recall a case while I was there involving a lower-level executive at a bank who made one out of soap and pulled off a scam worth tens of millions of dollars.

But when I pointed out how easy it was to copy, my Taiwanese friends pointed out that Western signatures could also be copied.

> Another outdated signing technology I encountered when I lived in Taiwan was the "chop" (印章) which was used to sign everything from post office receipts to contracts.

They use something similar in Korea and I believe Japan as well. There are some differences though between signing and stamping your seal. Both systems have terrible security. For example, forgery in signature based countries is unbelievably common -- it doesn't even have to look like the original person's signature to "work" in most contexts.

Some interesting things about the seal system, at least in Korea but I think it's probably true in other stamping countries, I can give my seal to somebody to stamp on my behalf and the transaction is perfectly legal. Whereas I can't easily give somebody my signature ahead of time. We deal with this in signing countries through power of attorney paperwork and the person granted the power of attorney just uses their own signature on your behalf. It's basically the equivalent function, and terminating the power of attorney requires getting back physical possession of your stamp or 인감.

It's actually pretty common, with the large Korean diaspora, to give a trusted person in Korea your stamp so that you can maintain property or take care of other business or legal obligations remotely.

In court cases concerning forgery in signature countries, the victim is sworn in, shown the signed document and asked "is this your signature" and or "did you sign this" and the victim can confirm or deny it.

The equivalent in seal countries has been harder to prosecute and presents two kinds of "forgery". Either somebody using your stamp without authorization, or using a fake copy. It's kind of turned into a bit of a mess and after a couple thousand years, at least in Korea, they're moving towards a digital based signature system if I recall correctly.

Is this article supposed to be suggesting that autopens are an example of "outdated, bloated government"? Because those machines look like they would be really cool to have (although also maintenance-heavy).

When I think about how much I love HelloSign, I can imagine the appeal of a physical machine that does the mundane work of signing for you.

Plus, it always drove me nuts when my elementary school sent home letters "from the Principal" and the Principal's signature had JPEG artifacts in it.

Gotta admit, those jpeg artifacts make his signature hard to forge.

In an office I used to work in the personal assistants were adept at forging their boss' signatures for exactly the same reasons that these machines are used. I think this is probably quite common.

This is a red herring if I've ever seen one. Honestly, why should anyone care about how members of government sign documents when we have such dire problems as ballooning inequality or an ongoing push toward totalitarianism?

"as long as we have big problems, nobody should discuss or work on smaller ones"

Well opportunity cost is a real thing. If a problem is small enough it may just not be worth worrying about at all.

I upvoted the article because I thought it was interesting, not because I thought the knowledge was useful or important.

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