Re: [FoRK] Does the web have a public timestamper?

That challenge only defeated Surety's general claim to all forms of digital timestamping. There are other claims in the patent which still stand. The most useful of these is the chaining of hashes from one document to the next. Every week, Surety publishes a cumulative hash in the New York Times. Each new document is signed by hashing the document, and sigining that hash combined with the current, global, cumulative hash. This ensures that nobody can backdate a faked document. I had long thought about implementing this technique in a user-friendly app, where initial document hashing is done in client-side JavaScript. That would protect customer data, yet not require a software download (as Surety does). Applications include everything from dating the condition of something you take possession of (car, apartment, etc.), to dating blog entries to prove your journalistic integrity (i.e., to prove you don't backdate). With user-friendly software, you could offer timestamping for free and make your money with AdSense on your validation pages. It's funny, because this was a back-burner project I was planning on working on this morning. But this thread led me to check the patent situation more closely, and it seems to this layman that Surety's remaining patent claims are too powerful. -Matt Jensen http://mattjensen.com Seattle
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Matt Jensen