--- begin forwarded text Date: Tue, 8 Dec 1998 00:17:17 -0500 (EST) From: <Somebody> To: rah@shipwright.com Subject: Re: Quick ping about Surety Technologies

*That*'s interesting. Haven't heard it before. If you want, I'll bounce it around.

If you would, that would be interesting. The patent info on their web site includes: Method for secure timestamping of digital documents. U.S. Patent No. 5,136,647, issued August 4, 1992. U.S. Patent Re. 34,954, reissued May 30, 1995. The initial patent issue covers a variety of fundamental technology and algorithmic components of digital timestamping. More specifically, the claims cover: * Any use of an outside party's digital signature to timestamp a document. * The "hash-and-sign" method in which the outside party receives the one-way hash of the document to be timestamped. I distrust software patents, but even that aside, these sound really broad to me. More info at <http://www.surety.com/patent_overview.html>. <snip> <Somebody's .sig> --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com> Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'