FalsiScan: Make it look like a PDF has been hand signed and scanned
gitlab.com
gitlab.com
People in front of me in line got turned away for using printed bills, but mine worked just fine.
Also why does the DMV need a proof of residence? What if you live in a van?
I know many people don't want us to risk becoming a "show your papers" country, but A) We already kinda are (ever been pulled over?), and B) It just makes more sense to have something like ID be centralized, preferably with a much better model then SSN's.
People mainly rely on their state drivers licenses because states regulate driving. (And most other day-to-day government interactions that require ID)
If you’re the authority asking for ID, you get to decide which one to ask for.
1. The ACLU-style left fear it will lead to more pervasive, easier surveillance, and more "papers please" style checks on poor people and immigrants.
2. The right hates it because it's an extension of government power, arguably a 10th amendment violation, and it would greatly simplify voting for people who traditionally vote democrat.
3. A nontrivial number of people believe (no-joke) that it would be a portent of the apocalypse, relating to the number of the beast in the book of revelation. This actually came up in a number of state legislatures as they standardized drivers licenses after 9/11.
The few polls I've ever seen actually say it's fairly popular with people, but those interest groups are non trivial.
Also, there are collisions.
Presenting, and having infraction points assigned to, different licenses for traffic offenses.
Using nonresident states to avoid license restrictions in the state of residency.
This probably won't get you past the requirement of utility bills in your name at that address to get a "Real ID" that allows domestic flights without a passport, though.
Same thing for getting a PO box, you need a physical address first. The post office will tell you the same thing, to use the address of a homeless shelter.
The folks writing these laws do not live in vans, and do not care, nor even think about the impact of their actions on folks with alternative living arrangements / folks poorer than they are.
Like, what if you are a millionaire living in a fancy RV driving around national parks for a couple years?
At the very least you can definitely get your bank statements sent there ...
Now you have a residence address and utility bills in your name to your residence address, and you can get a driver's license there, just like a real boy.
Is there a $100/mo closet I can rent for that purpose or does it have to be $500/mo bedroom? What's the smallest one can go?
Do you really think wealthy people (who are naturally at risk of kidnapping, extortion, blackmail, threats against family, etc) have their driver's license address pointing to the place where their children sleep at night?
The DMV gives those records in bulk to third parties. It's as good as public. Additionally, every dumbfuck services vendor from a gym to a daycare to a doctor's office will demand to photocopy your ID card to provide service, and you can be damn well sure that they aren't doing a good job protecting that information. They're storing it on their malware-ridden front desk Windows computer along with everyone else's.
As far as $100/mo vs $500/mo: what's the difference? It's all under $10k/year. Who cares?
"No-one important enough is bothered, so we haven't had to try to fix it" is a far cry from "there [aren't] any better alternatives". We're HN; that's not the hacker ethos.
The state surely must know how to tax you, and thus they need to know who you are and that you're a resident in the state... It seems the information inevitably must be there already so why try to imitate that with a bunch of random tokens such as bills sent to an address where they could go straight to the source?
Just curious.
You're responsible for filing your own state taxes based on when/how/where you worked.
Most states do require by law that you do this in a very short period of time after moving. (Although yes, it is not uncommon for people to violate this)
I agree, it's quite odd that you never officially register as a resident of the state, but I guess it's part of the US's aversion to "papers please."
My municipal tax authority and the US State department may have very different standards for validating “residency” and very different reasons for doing so.
My state (CO) semi recently hit a morph of this concern because they had "pioneer" license plates that cost an extra $100 or so and were only available to people who could prove N generations of ancestry in CO. The feds struck that down as .gov services provided being dependent on state origin and therefore against the interstate commerce clause.
That said, Florida can take Rep. Boebert back at any point.
You're responsible for filing your own state taxes based on when/how/where you worked.
This seems like having so many knots left untied, considering how much importance one might expect to be placed for a fundamental question such as residency.
The obvious case is that it seems like people could just move into a state and never tell anyone and omit paying taxes. While there must be mechanisms to prevent or curb this, it still probably applies to a non-trivial minority of so-inclined people already? Not an option for people who want to settle, of course, but for certain people, living some months or years anonymously in a particular state might be a viable opportunity.
Do counties / cities / towns also lack similar logging of identity? How can they offer public services to people if they really don't know who the people are, and most importantly, if the people are residents or not? Does everyone just keep showing their utility bills? How do they deal with the various John Smiths moving from place to place -- inevitably to addresses where another John Smith was living before as there will be collisions without an unique identity? Or does the driving license become the de-facto proof of residence once people move it over, and the driving license has a unique number to differentiate between individuals regardless of name and address?
I mean, for the state government there's an inevitable and pragmatic need for uniquely identifying the people who live in the state and if there's no central registry then this need will be approxximated by various mechanisms so that the society can function at all.
Conversely, let's say the government does track down residents who nobody officially knows about. If the state government really doesn't know who lives in that state how could they impose liabilities such as taxes onto people whose identity and location and length of official residence they don't know? If I move in with my friend who lives in another state at which point can I still say "I'm just visiting, no taxes me for, thank you" and if the state were to disagree how would they go about establishing I was a resident after all? How would I prove I'm still actually a resident in the old state (if I were) vs how could they prove I'm no longer a resident in the old state (if I weren't)? What is the mechanism that prevents me from living in two states and claiming always in one that I'm resident in the other state?
I wish, but I don't think each of many departments talk or share individual's personal data between them, unless its collections or something. Like, DMV would not have access to one's tax status or details, and tax one's might not know one's driving license details. I wish the willpower & technology increases to make it happen.
If you wanted to truly authenticate residency or at the very least prove that someone has access to the mailbox, sending them a one-time auth code per mail would be a better idea rather than relying on third-party services where people may use paperless billing for convenience.
Mailing someone a code would be more secure but, to the parents point, would be even more onerous of a process for people to comply with.
Some comments above suggested above that this is an intentionally burdensome process, but to the contrary, bringing in a bill is one of the least burdensome ways to authenticate residency.
My problem with this is how is the recipient supposed to authenticate said bill. Now we're talking about bringing a paper bill vs a printed one (or "faking" a paper bill by creasing/folding the printed one), but the real threat is fraudsters completely making up a fake bill to begin with. Unless the recipient has a relationship with the company that issues the bills, there is no way for them to verify whether the bill is real in the first place, making the whole endeavor pointless and only inconveniencing legitimate users.
The latter is probably where they get the most utility out of these requirements.
Fraud is not nearly the problem people think it is...
A utility bill doesn't require proof of residency to get. Neither does a credit card statement. Infact if I were creative I could say I live anywhere and provide false documents of that. It is the legitimate use of this system that is difficult, not illigitimate use.
The system is not designed to be secure or to ensure residency, that's not it's purpose. Its purpose is to create further government control to suppress citizens rights to operate freeley in their own country. Specifically, to target low income individuals. These people creating the policies are not the same people whom are affected by them.
If I am U.S. born I have a right to operate in certain capacities as a citizen. Voting, owning land, and working are all rights unalienable. The fact this is not currently true is proof of the federal fascism we live in.
The US federal government has to be too loose about keeping track of citizens specifically to avoid looking too fascist. One of your many American rights is to have no ID at all. Protecting that right for two dozen people makes everything extremely complicated for the rest of us.
It fuck people coming and going. You can’t get an ID if you don’t have a place of residence, and yet you can’t just go about your business without an ID.
Ha, if only. Everyone from FB to the NSA is keeping tabs on individuals in all aspects of life. There is no hiding in the US
Utility bills are the DMV's equivalent of a cheap lock. A smart attacker can pick the lock, and a determined attacker can cut it off. But the majority of thieves are walking around looking for unlocked car doors instead.
Do you really think DMV asks for a copy of a utility bill because it's a good way to suppress your rights? I would think that there are plenty of more effective ways to do so, if that were actually their goal.
The DMV complies with whatever regulations are imposed on them. Those rules are created by legislators whom are entirely disconnected from their constituents and are paid for their votes.
> If it cannot be implemented properly, then it shouldn't be done at all.
Perfectionist fallacy. I can't think of any civic requirements that are perfect. We always compromise on perfection because our civic processes also have to be reasonable.
iirc stealing other people’s mail by tampering with a mailbox is a ~~felony~~ federal crime. If they threw out the mail and you went through their trash it might be different. I anal though.
The USPS could function quite successfully as an ID system and a bank, were they allowed.
It just feels kinda random.
1. Court Houses are not everywhere like Postal offices
2. Court houses are not part of the Executive Branch, where as a Service like the Postal Service or banking would need to be part of the Executive Branch, not Judicial. A Better counter would be DMV or some other government service.
3. Court Houses are not nearly as accessible and are much harder to get in and out of due to their nature. Not consumer friendly
4. Court Houses by the nature have alot of criminals going in and out of them all the time, probably a bad idea to put money services in the same place....
for the record I do not support the idea of USPS being a bank either.
Know why?
I can see people having different opinions of this trend. What is your take on it?
How is that any different than bringing any other piece of official mail that you receive at your home address?
Or maybe I conspire with someone that doesn't live here but wants to appear to live here (which can obviously also be done with utility bills).
I'm all for making it as easy as possible to vote, I'm analyzing the properties of the piece of mail that the government sends.
Of course there is. It's having a central resident registry like is common in most countries other than the US.
We need people to feel pressured into doing shitty jobs, if the poor get less poor maybe they won't flip burgers for minimum wage.
Except that when everyone knows what a poverty trap is, how they form, how to spot them, and what to do about them, and none of that gets done, we start to fall on the opposite side of Hanlon’s razor. It’s not like that scholarship is new or controversial, so why is this still a problem?
Does this clarify things a bit? I'd like to find a better rhetorical method than just swapping out terms, but it really does highlight the point here. Can we conclude that government is trying to kill people just because some people still get struck by lightning? Alternatively, what would the government need to do to prevent anyone from ever getting struck? Now consider all the different ways people can end up poor, and project this infrastructure out to ensuring that that can never, ever happen. Should we have better methods to handle it when it does? Probably! Does the fact that poverty traps exist mean that people explicitly set them up? Probably not!
Curbing people's ability to leverage poverty traps for profit in a capitalist system would reduce how many people get stuck in them.
In general, government legislation can and does directly affect poverty rates as well as who is most likely to be affected.
People will argue about the effectiveness and intent of government actions to ameliorate/impose poverty. Claiming that it is outside of a government's influence is nonsense.
For that matter, if you are one of the masters of the Universe, why do you even need the poor people who only interact with other poor people? If you were optimizing the world and were actually evil, wouldn't the world look a whole lot different than the uncoordinated mess we have today?
Why do "we" need people to feel pressured to do anything when frankly it's just easier to rule without a giant underclass you have to constantly fear?
It actively feels like everybody is looking for someone to blame for the state of the world when really the world is just the result of a whole bunch of people with a whole bunch of different hopes, plans, and dreams, many of which you might possibly disagree with.
It’s not super complicated, it’s just the natural consequence of an elite in power wanting to stay that way. You can see it as some kind of class behaviour. It has been going on since as far back as we can see, e.g. in Ancient Greek and Roman societies. People are being replaced by robots, as soon as it makes financial sense. This itself is really not new, and has caused issues since the start of the industrial revolution (see the various textile labourers strikes over the last 2 or 3 centuries).
> If you were optimizing the world and were actually evil, wouldn't the world look a whole lot different than the uncoordinated mess we have today?
It’s uncoordinated because it isn’t actually a large conspiracy by a couple of evil masters of the world. It’s a result of everyone in a position of power acting it their own self interest over time.
> Why do "we" need people to feel pressured to do anything when frankly it's just easier to rule without a giant underclass you have to constantly fear?
Mechanisation has been a more and more realistic strategy, but this is very recent. You still need people to make stuff. Also, “the underclass” is not going to disappear on its own.
> It actively feels like everybody is looking for someone to blame for the state of the world when really the world is just the result of a whole bunch of people with a whole bunch of different hopes, plans, and dreams, many of which you might possibly disagree with.
Exactly. That, and the fact that some people’s hopes and dreams depend on them exploiting other people.
Once you have the job you can use the paycheck as proof of residency.
You can’t do much in life without ID.
This is a common belief that, to me, displays a serious lack of knowledge of the breadth of human experience. It should not be hard to imagine how people who are some combination of very sick, old, lonely, disabled or poor can have their ID expire and then not get a new one for year after year. Yet people seem to constantly proclaim this as unthinkable or nonsensical, as if only their version of a lived life is believable.
For the driver’s licence it was even easier, I just had to upload a photo and a pdf bill as a proof of address on a government web server, and I had it in the mail 3 weeks later.
Voting is a fundamental right. If you are going to require IDs for it, it follows that IDs are a fundamental right, and making them arbitrarily difficult to obtain is capricious, discriminatory and should be considered unconstitutional in a sane democracy.
Also when I was a kid (20 years ago) no ID was required to vote. Actual voter fraud is incredibly, vanishingly rare. But the lie that it is common is used to drum up support for these regressive measures.
https://americanindependent.com/arizona-republican-john-kava...
But as I said, this is not just about IDs. There are a whole host of laws being introduced, typically by republicans, that do definitely have the effect of disenfranchising poor people and people of color, who tend to be the political opponents of the people introducing the laws.
Closing poll places for example. They will suggest closing down polling places in poor neighborhoods, using some extremely thin disguise over their motives. It seems obvious to any person who believes in one person, one vote, that the color of your skin or the amount of money in your bank account is no reason to degrade someone's ability to vote. But we see long lines at polling places, where some people have to stand in line for many hours to vote! An obvious failure of democracy.
And they strike voters off of voter roles, going after people with hispanic names for example, finding a "Rosalind Sanchez" and a "Rosa Sanchez" in some city and deciding, based on that information alone, that this is a "duplicate voter" and disqualifying one voter's vote from being counted.
There is a transparent effort to block people from voting, and voting with ID is used as a talking point to steer the conversation away from the more egregious side of their efforts.
Voting is looking like it’s getting even more convoluted for the next election. In all, I feel less and less like my home country even wants me to come back eventually.
Reap all the benefits of the slaves doing their work, avoid any of the downsides of having to actually listen to their needs.
This seems utterly inflammatory, and somewhat divorced from reality. I absolutely understand systems thinking, and specifically can see the argument for posiwid here, but even then... This sort of conspiracy thinking strikes me as profoundly not useful.
Before attributing laws requiring IDs to the evil evil overlords, first ask yourself why 80% of citizens approve of these laws? Is everybody just all working to keep a tiny group of people down? Might it instead be that complex systems have edge cases and people who are already on the margins of society hit these edge cases more? The reason I ask is because we can fix bugs, but obviously we can't fix a global conspiracy, so I'd really like to know which I'm dealing with. If it is a conspiracy this makes it seem like there's nothing I can do to solve the problem.
[0]: https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthp...
Voter suppression is a real thing in the United States. It's a strategy often used to hold and retain power by the minority (often richer, privileged) party
See https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/block-the-vote-vot...
> Suppression efforts range from the seemingly unobstructive, like strict voter ID laws and cuts to early voting, to mass purges of voter rolls and systemic disenfranchisement. These measures disproportionately impact people of color, students, the elderly, and people with disabilities. And long before election cycles even begin, legislators redraw district lines that determine the weight of your vote.
" The reason I ask is because we can fix bugs "..
These problems can be fixed, but they require effort by all citizens to vote and put pressure to make voting equitable.
Fortunately I live in New Zealand so our democracy is quite healthy, though it could always be better.
Unless the purge is over-enthusiastic, with unrealistically high barriers to re-entry. It’s not a problem for someone who has all the documents and the time to jump through all the hoops (or someone to do it for them), and a sympathetic administration with an office close enough that you can go there without taking a day off. Assuming you have days off at all. It’s quite harder otherwise. The result is a disproportionally large fraction of “undesirables” (poor and living in specific areas) being disenfranchised.
The link you posted indicates that 80% of people think it's reasonable to show ID at a polling station. I think you'd find that's a pretty common opinion on it's face because it's perfectly reasonable to show ID to do things like vote or get social security benefits or register property you own or all those government-y things.
The trouble comes when you hijack that perfectly reasonable expectation by then making ID preferentially difficult to get for certain classes of people. You don't need to trust that this is the case - it's apparent from the statistics. More than 10% of adult US citizens don't have ID. Why not? Because it takes time and money - you need to pay fees, you need to travel, you need underlying documents that can sometimes take hundreds of dollars of fees themselves to generate, etc. Politicians also can 'tune' what counts as ID to preselect the voters they want. TX for example, counts concealed carry cards as ID but does not count student IDs.
In fact, in 2014 the GAO itself found that strict photo ID laws reduce turnout by at least 2-3 percentage points on average with significantly higher proportions in economically depressed and racially diverse areas, and it's well documented that the people impacted by that lower turnout are overwhelmingly members of specific demographics that tend to vote for specific policies. That's a pretty big incentive to marginalize these people if you don't agree with those policies.
It's undeniable that for many of the most vulnerable and powerless members of society obtaining ID under the current regime is in direct conflict with simple survival, and is unlikely to be a priority. If we want to require ID for voting we should make the process of obtaining that ID require as little economic power as possible - a task that is easily within our grasp.
This seems naive to the point of being bizarre. Employers of lower skill and lower margin labor can get it cheaper if their prospective employees are more desperate and thus have less bargaining power. Low wages are the gift that keeps on giving because it keeps your prospective workers from saving enough to weather the risk of negotiating harder, quitting to look for better pay, etc.
If you look at places that have policies that seem to keep the poor down vs places less so, there's at least some clear correlation in terms of who the major employers with more influence in the state are -- those who rely more heavily on cheaper labor with lower profit margins, vs those who are much less exposed to that due to having higher profit margins or less of their costs come from commodity labor.
Just think about what the biggest businesses might be in say, Oklahoma versus New Jersey.
Another way to bring this point home, compare a middle class family in say, Mexico or India, to say, California or New York. Inequality is higher so the cost of basic labor is cheaper, which translates to people with the same middle class job in a place like Mexico or India being able to easily afford a lot more of the sorts of labor intensive services only wealthier people would have in much of the US, like a live in maid/cook, taking a long taxi trip to and from work 5 days a week, etc, stuff that a middle class person in the US would need to ration a lot more even if they do take some ubers here and there and eat out here and then.
That's not what Karl Marx said
I can tell its all very well intentioned, I can understand how and why all the rules came to exist, it still has the net result of making the poor, poorer.
Poor people are excluded via apathy not malice
This was around 1995-7, so 9/11 had zero infuence on the origin of this idea, although it likely helped provide justification for it.
That said, I find it mildly interesting that it took at least two decades to even begin to roll out from serious discussions in the corridors of power to actual changes affecting the drivers and voters.
Why do you assume that this debt went to the poor? There is quite a bit of evidence of welfare for the wealthy and large companies.
> the countless duplicative entitlement programs subsidizing food, health care, housing, schooling, etc.
Any figure for this? No mention of the stupidly large military spending or tax breaks?
IOW, the US legislature is responsive to people and especially poor people only 5-20% of the time.
> Congress wanted to pretend in front of the voters and the public that they were making it difficult ...
Then it makes sense
This is just bureaucracy expanding and slowly taking over a working nation.
The unproductive members of society slowly winning over the productive ones and setting up rules to justify their comfortable existence.
The same happened in most countries and won't die until the government itself dies (because a government never makes itself smaller) and a new society replaces it.
If you have a passport... no need for a "real ID" driver license.
If you don't like having to carry that big book around, other solutions include a federal passport card (USD 65) [1]. Same size, so fits in wallet. Bonus is it does not have my address on it, nor does it show what state I live in.
If you're a legal non-citizen, you can use the passport of your home country (which you're required to have in the USA, and should carry with you when you travel anyway).
[1] https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/passports/need-pa...
What state? Certainly, that's neither in the Federal REAL ID requirements (more stringent than most preexisting state requirements) nor most states implementation of REAL ID (which can be narrower than what REAL ID allows.)
E.g., California, for REAL ID, requires documents (not necessarily bills, though those are among the things explicitly on the list of acceptable documents) that are printed (not necessarily mailed) and show the physical address.
And then REAL ID is considered as reliable as a passport (except to fly internationally, of course), so you've bumped up the level of trust a huge amount with one simple edited printout of a bill.
I think they just don't actually care where you live that much. And since they'll mail your card to that address, that place has to be associated with you somehow.
Is there a good explanation of the reasoning behind this requirement documented somewhere?
Had to provide proof of address and the only thing I had was the rental agreement with my landlord. But the copy I had was signed by me, but not countersigned by my landlord.
The clerk didn't want to accept it. I told him I could just walk out and fake a signature. He said that's OK and that he isn't a policeman. So I countersigned it in front of him. He paused and then accepted it.
Well, I mean, forgery is a class C felony, at least in my state. If you had walked in with the signature on it, the clerk would have had plausible deniability. Your act of forging in front of the clerk took the plausible deniability away, making them complicit to a felony.
You're really lucky they accepted it. They had no good reason to take on that legal risk.
Why?
This is obviously way less safe than using digital signatures, which are bound to me by SSO. Anyone could sign any document with a fake signature that looks just like mine, it would be very hard for them to do a digital signature associated with my account.
I get so much paper mail it's insane. Paper mail that I'm supposed to respond to with more paper mail.
Fuck that.
I've run across this many times when people use the word "best practices". The most safe thing is often breaking convention, so "best practices" becomes the unsafe thing everyone has done for years, even when it's _not_ industry standard or a good idea.
I glanced at another state out of curiosity and it seemed stricter.
Another tip if you need “proof of address” is to use any notice from your State that your license or other paperwork is expiring. They’re a government agency, the paper is printed on their letterhead, and it’s addressed to you at the address you’re already trying to establish!
It's a pain, but it's still less annoying than dealing with a printer.
Because Preview lets you draw the signature using the TrackPad and a finger, I've had no difficulty making a very convincing replica of my actual signature in Preview.
While the linked tool may "look" more convincing with fake photocopy marks etc, for just signatures its not been necessary to go beyond Preview for me ever. In the US so much business is conducted on paperfree platforms like DocuSign etc that I don't think many people even notice the fact the signature is digital anymore, given platforms like DocuSign do more or less the same thing.
In Preview I copied one eye and put it over my troubled eye, reversed. It worked.
I’ve been though face detection systems in various countries (US, UK, France) and I seem to get through ok.
Granted, no one is going CSI on anything I sign. I should probably just make like ten pngs of my signature and paste those in.
Combined with notes.app which has some very nice features (document scan, share, to-do lists, reliable sync, adding of files, search etc) it is Apple at its best.
I figure even if they do complain, it doesn't matter. Its not like I don't have permission to do what I want with my own signature. The worst might be that they come back and say "sign it properly please" and then I have to go through the effort of printing it out and scanning it back in.
They were for a 401(k) plan I was updating RMD choices. I got the PDF form from their site, filled it out in Preview, pasted my signature PNG, and used an app on my phone to fax it(!) to their number.
Got rejected. Had to actually print the damn things and sign them with a pen, scan them again with my phone’s camera, and re-fax them.
Was mildly infuriating.
But yes, dealing with brokerage forms that needed a wet signature faxed..
When I refaxed the forms, I just removed the PNG signatures from the PDFs first (leaving all other form fields typed in), printed them, signed them, made sure the two signatures were different in obvious ways (but still the "same"!), and scanned them at deliberately low resolution.
This program sounds like it automates all those steps.
They're ridiculous with this. It's a huge pain with trusts.
For Latex documents, but same concept and a fun little add on.
This product looks interesting, although the idea of me entering coordinates for the stamp instead of just stamping it in a GUI is not at all appealing...
So what I'd do was take the PDF, paste in my wife's signature, print it out, sign it myself, then fax it over. Never had any problems.
EDIT: Clicking on it, I see the source code is available. If I can run it on my local box then this might be a little less nasty than mucking with the `convert` command.
Github repo: https://github.com/baicunko/scanyourpdf
But yeah, the security implications of uploading a PDF with your SSN and signature to a random website is, um, not good.
Used to use Photoshop where I just made my signature a custom brush.
Disclaimer: I work for Figma.
"+noise Random -fill white -colorize 95%" to add some noise to the image
"-distort ScaleRotateTranslate '$x,$y $angle'" to randomly shift horizontally and vertically the document, and randomly rotate it slightly
"-density 150" for a low-ish resolution so it better hides the fact the PDF wasn't really scanned
"-colorspace Gray" to make it black & white
"-quality 60" to increase JPG compression and somewhat reduce picture quality
#!/bin/bash
# Make a pdf look like it was scanned.
if [ $# -ne 2 ]; then
echo "Usage: $0 input output" >&2
exit 1
fi
tmp="$1".scanner-look.tmp
mkdir "$tmp" &&
# without -flatten some PDF convert to a JPG with a black background
convert -density 150 "$1" -colorspace Gray -quality 60 -flatten "$tmp"/p_in.jpg &&
: || exit 1
# each page is randomly shifted in the X and Y plane.
# units seem to depend on angle of rotation in ScaleRotateTranslate?
offset() { echo $(($RANDOM % 1000)); }
for f in "$tmp"/p_in*jpg; do
# each page is randomly rotated by [-0.5 .. 0.5[ degrees
angle=$(python -c 'import random; print(random.random()-0.5)')
x=$(offset)
y=$(offset)
convert "$f" \
-blur 0x0.5 \
-distort ScaleRotateTranslate "$x,$y $angle" +repage \
\( +clone +noise Random -fill white -colorize 95% \) \
-compose darken \
-composite \
${f/p_in/p_out}.pdf || exit 1
done
# concatenate all the pages to one PDF
# use "ls -v" to order files correctly (p_out-X.jpg where X is 0 1 2 ... 9 10 11 ...)
pdftk $(ls -v "$tmp"/p_out*.pdf) cat output "$2" &&
rm -rf "$tmp"It was a "government document simulator." What you would do is upload a nicely scanned document, and it'd give you back a mis-alighed, crappy quality "scan" of that document, with random blotches and other visual noise. You know, like regular government/FOIA-received documents.
I feel like this is halfway there, if not more (so thank you!), but that website was so authentic.
I don't know if it's even around, but it made me giggle, and I'd like to find it again. If not--great startup idea!
#!/bin/bash
# Adds a bad scanning effect to PDF files.
if [ $# -ne 2 ]; then
echo 1>&2 "Usage: $0 input.pdf output.pdf"
exit 3
fi
convertPage() {
# PDF filename in first parameter, page in second
file=$1
page=$(($2-1))
png=$(printf "pdf2scan-page-%05d.png" $2)
# Convert PDF page to black and white PNG
gm convert -density 300 "$file"[$page] +dither -rotate 0.35 +noise Gaussian -type bilevel -fill white -fuzz 90% -colors 2 $png
# Optimize PNG
optipng -silent $png
}
export -f convertPage
# Read number of pages
pages=$(pdftk "$1" dump_data | grep NumberOfPages | sed 's/[^0-9]*//')
# Loop through pages and convert in parallel
for i in $(seq 1 $pages)
do
echo "$1":::$i
done | parallel --eta --colsep ':::' convertPage {1} {2}
# Create PDF from PNGs
img2pdf -o "$2" --producer "" --pagesize A4 pdf2scan-page-*.png
# Remove temporary files
rm pdf2scan-page*
"-flatten" results in all PDF pages being rendered into a 1 page PDF output. If "-flatten" is removed, I get a multi-page PDF output as expected. Thoughts?
EDIT: "-flatten" does what it is supposed to. Delete if operating on multipage PDF.
Edit: haha! The "-flatten" needs to be replaced with "-alpha flatten". This way, multi-page documents are still handled correctly, and alpha transparency is also handled correctly. I just tried on this sample file with transparent images: https://tcpdf.org/files/examples/example_042.pdf
> convert: UnrecognizedAlphaChannelOption `flatten' @ error/convert.c/ConvertImageCommand/673.
Though personally I just use something like Xournal++ to edit the PDF (add text, add a signature image, etc.) and then use the following command to "fake scan it":
convert -density 150 input.pdf -colorspace gray -blur 0x0.1 -sharpen 0x5.0 -level 10%,90% -rotate -0.5 -sharpen 0x1.2 output-scanned.pdf
I hear you, fellow Frenchman !
Anyway, businesses still like to do it this way ("Signing" pdf by applying some pixels). I wonder if it is just an inconvenience to overcome both for businesses and consumers that just write this off and don't bother that it is such a weak binding. It is like some dirty workaround/hack to put those silly signatures on digital documents to get stuff done.
But yes, anything that's not a proper digital signature might as well just be a random png pasted into a pdf. No legal binding power whatsoever.
Yet Ford repeatedly insisted I print out the documents, sign them, and scan them. I tried a digital signature anyway - and they called me out on it.
Do you mean:
A) a cryptographic signature?
B) an image of your handwritten signature?
C) something else?
I think you and GP might be talking about different things.
I’ve had many instances where people insist I print, sign, scan, rather than e-sign.
I too have put an image of my signature on the pdf rather than printing; I have had those both rejected and accepted.
I don’t have a printer and have been annoyed by this insistence greatly. Enough that seeing this post filled me with glee.
edit: I see that I misinterpreted the parent comment. Sorry.
You could theoretically, in some cases, run a business on nothing but verbal contracts, but you would be foolish to do so because you’d have difficulty proving anything if it were disputed.
You just get away with it because the contract wasn’t binding so there was no fraud, right?
I bet those “non-binding” contracts are actually much more binding than you might think.
So within the EU a scanned document is valid though the law does say the method used needs to be proportional to whats at stake.
Another cool thing, the whole document itself does have a hash where you can go to the website of the ministry of justice and input the hash to verify the document. It was unexpectedly neat.
In the US from what I read[1] the situation is pretty much the same a scan of a signed document is binding as well as non cryptographic electronic signatures.
[1] https://resources.infosecinstitute.com/topic/legality-electr...
More seriously, do let us know what you find. I've heard both sides on this but the "verbal agreement is also binding (just gl proving it)" side is usually from better sources like an actual lawyer posting on a forum as opposed to a random boss making claims about signature requirements, for example.
Yeah, you're right. Please do not take me as an authority or lawyer on that matters. It's just what I think I know, but I may very well be wrong :)
What I read is that even informational documents are considered in court. However document that bears legal validity, must contain: document name, date, signature (with exceptions) and recipient.
However I did found a relevant quote:
> Section 5. > (1) A document shall be signed in one's own hand. A document of the organization shall be signed by the person whose position is indicated in the document. A personal signature reproduced in a paper document using technical means shall not ensure legal force of the document.
https://likumi.lv/ta/en/en/id/210205-law-on-legal-force-of-d...
But I'm not sure if print->sign->scan qualifies, as the signature itself isn't put there with technical means. But this rules out putting image as a signature on PDF.
This is not talking about e-documents. E-document states that it must be signed with secure electronic signature.
I know Latvian people are reading this too and this document is very helpful in that regard: https://www.tm.gov.lv/lv/media/7605/download
> Yeah, you're right. Please do not take me as an authority or lawyer on that matters.
Sorry I phrased my previous reply badly. What I meant is generally the two camps on this, that typically one of them seems to speak from a more knowledgeable position/perspective than the other. I did not mean to suggest that you are not knowledgeable!
Generally speaking in most countries the civil law does not specify how the contract is supposed to be made. You can buy from the shop with just a nod of your head. Only some specific agreements have to be written down (and even fewer made in front of the notary).
Would a business agreement concluded over email not be binding? Can you get away with fraud by just tricking people into agreeing to use docusign?
If (not cryptographically) esigned contracts are not binding in your country, how does that not cripple law enforcements ability to combat fraud involving such contracts?
If I sell you a car and we use a contract like this, do I then get to keep both the car and the money? If not, how is that contract not binding?
https://www.handy-signatur.at/hs2/#!sign/single
When I tried sending such a document to a German insurance company, they refused to accept it. I ended up faxing the document :/
> Gemäß Artikel 25 eIDAS-Verordnung hat eine qualifizierte elektronische Signatur die gleiche Rechtswirkung wie eine handschriftliche Unterschriftund wird in allen Mitgliedstaaten anerkannt.
Doesn't work always, but the times it doesn't I usually find a competitor that does prove to be more cooperative pretty easily!
https://github.com/spapas/pdf-sign-check
It uses org.bouncycastle and apache pdfbox and is completely open source. I'd be happy to help anybody that wants to use it in his organization!
We use it sucessfully in my organization (public sector in Greece) for some years; notice that to be able to sign you need to have a proper certificate for your organization.
No professional service is really needed to sign a document; it all depends on the acceptance of the certificate you use for signing by your government/laws. I.e you may need to buy a certificate from a trusted organization or you may need to generate a certificate from a public sector organization of your country.
Other than that, it's awesome not having to deal with this crap, though, public notaries are very unimpressed by this stuff.
Tools like this will skew and degrade the image in a similar way to a scanner so that it fits this ridiculous requirement
i've never thought about replacing preview.
On feature that I use a lot in Preview is to combine pdf's. If you e.g. have a pdf invoice and want to combine that with the corresponding pdf receipt from the bank, I just open the two pdf files side by side in thumbnail view and just drag the pages (thumbnails) I want from one document to the other where I want to place them; rearranging the pages (thumbnails) later if I need to in the same thumbnail view. I am a huge fan of Preview! :-)
gs -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -o merged.pdf tobemerged1.pdf tobemerged2.pdf tobemerged3.pdf
I installed it with Homebrew, but the project home is yonder: https://www.ghostscript.com/
I wanted to convert XML to JSON. Well: Tough luck. Go download some app by some person from the store. We are sure it's completely safe!
Want to convert a video to a gif? Get another bloatware program.
There is so much command line stuff Linux users take for granted that Windows people struggle with every day.
It's funny to me to look at a company like DocuSign whose shares surged early on the in the pandemic because they expected a dramatic increase in need for digital signatures and then the price crashed when it turns out that signatures aren't actually useful and we can just live without them.
However something that is quite a separate matter is the question of whether one needs to actually be in possession of that piece of paper. A scan of an original serves as proof that the original exists. ...and this is usually all that anyone requires for practical intents and purposes.
But: You're not supposed to do print/sign/scan, and then just throw away the original. You're kind of supposed to keep it in case you're ever asked by a court to produce it. The document partially loses its forensic value if no original can be produced.
If the counterparty needs it, why don't they request you sign two copies and send them one? The idea that they would later want it for forensic evidence that you really did sign it seems odd: if it's in their benefit and you wanted it to not exist, and you're the one possessing that original copy... you can make it not exist.
But, to come at it from the other side: If you want to make sure you can actually rely on the document in court, it's probably a good idea to keep originals and definitely a bad idea to use this FalsiScan tool.
The lowly-paid administrator who deals with you might not be able to detect the FalsiScan that you submit. But if something goes to court and it benefits them to undermine the forensic value of the document, then you might well find yourself faced with a digital forensics expert proving to the court that the document came from this FalsiScan tool. This opens the possibility that, for example, a third party with access to your computer that contains all the digital assets to create FalsiScans (like a scan of your signature) could have created the PDF.
It's not obvious that you would want to respond to that by saying "but I definitely definitely did use FalsiScan myself, meaning the PDF to represent my signature on the document".
If the other party can make it look like you purposefully sent something that would make it past their administrative procedures but would have questionable forensic value so that you could later have it thrown out in court, then you can no longer rely on the document yourself and could even be liable to damages that resulted from their relying on it.
If they can clear a slightly higher burden of proof in the general direction of fraud, they could even come after you criminally: Fraudulent creation of digital assets of forensic value (like scans of paper documents) is a criminal offence. -- At least in Germany; I don't know U.S. law that well.
That also applies to your original suggestion about making a document not exist whenever it serves your purpose for the document to not exist. ...that too is kind of a criminally relevant thing that you probably don't want to do.
Just bought another rental and it was an ordeal trying to find a scanner. Tried the college near me, was denied as you have to be a student. The library is closed down apparently. FedEx didn't have one. The one at the Office Depot was broken. I ended up driving 30 miles to a friends house to use theirs, which required driver upgrades since nobody had used it in a year. I don't understand the point of jumping through all these hoops.
I feel the same with credit card signatures, completely useless and has never once helped me with identity theft or fraudulent transactions. Now I just draw a horizontal line or smiley face.
I'm not an app developer. Probably for the best.
Since we accept signatures as proof of identity, we are really stuck in 3,000 B.C. [0]
[0] https://blog.thegrizzlylabs.com/2020/11/history-of-signature...
Sounds like what you really hate are mobile device displays.
If mobile devices required zooming and panning to read anything, they'd not be popular at all, so they're apparently not where the problem lies.
So this really isn't any worse than the alternatives, at least for PDFs...
I think the goal is to minimize the risk of someone rejecting your document because it looks photoshopped.
In others (e.g. Denmark), you don't even need to sign - merely stating your intent to accept a contract, and having a clear record of that intention, is enough. In this case, again, "looking real" is a non-issue; you can even send an email in some cases.
In yet others, you will definitely be asked for a "wet" signature, and a digital signature is not considered legally acceptable. Here looking real could matter; if your signature is obviously non-physical, it may be refused.
This also varies by situation. In some places, banks want to see a wet signature, _and_ will compare it with an existing wet signature they have on file. In this case, it very much matters how real it looks, where "real" means "matches this other real signature". (Does this make sense? Arguably no, but that's the way it currently is.)
I'm no way affiliated to foxit but that functionality there works. And saves trees.
Makes me actually like signing things. And it's also wonderful for sending feedback on stuff.
Ah yes, all of it is a joke, the example text is too. Which is fitting for the problem it is intended to solve.
https://www.cogencyglobal.com/blog/getting-document-signatur...
You can even sign your life away like this, especially as most notarization has now been replaced by systems like Verification by Certification.
https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/documents/073500050k1-...
First comment posts a way to achieve something similar with imagemagick, which I've been using flawlessly since.
There are so may options, e.g.:
convert -density 100 -blur 0x0.1 +noise Gaussian -colorspace gray -rotate 0.5 -attenuate 0.2 mypdf.pdf scan.pdf> convert -density "${DENSITY}" "${PAGE_IN}" -linear-stretch 3.5%x10% -blur 0x0.5 -attenuate 0.25 -rotate "${ROTATION}" +noise Gaussian "${TMPDIR}/${PAGE_BN}-scanned.pdf"
I would be very tempted to use something like this next time, however I have a feeling that the same people who think this is sane would accuse you of fraud if they ever found out. Not sure if it's worth it.
Note defraud.
Create an array of signatures on paper.
Use photoshop to make it transparent.
Take transparent images of signatures and make pdf stamps out of them.
Use pdf stamp to sign docs.
Print pdf with stamp markups as image to pdf printer.
It is even easier now with Shortcuts in the latest macOS releases.
Would be neat to have this take a rubberstamp image and do all that work too.
Worked like a charm.
Does it matter, given its intent?
The image conversion might be a separate feature in your PDF editor.
1. Photograph your signature
2. Add to a pdf in Acrobat Reader using "Fill & Sign" function or paste into a docx file.
3. Use https://makescanned.com to give the pdf or docx a scanned effect.
When I need to sign something & print, I use that font in pdf; or use Rand & Char formula is excel.
Question: Is the signature done by FalsiScan and Adobe Sign equivalent legally?
Why -z and -t for the x and y coordinates of the initials?
(More seriously: nice work. I'll probably use this myself someday.)
Tools->Annotate->Signature
When including a signature you can position and resize it, e.g. to adjust for layout, font size, etc.
Am I missing something?
Great work though.
I love that penis ahhahha
I hate bureaucrats, and now that they lost some power due to web forms/applications they are tempted with some stupid requests, like this one :)
Signing documents with visual signatures instead of cryptographic ones is already extremely archaic, but having to make them look like being signed by hand is absurdly so.
> For bureaucratic reasons, a colleague of mine had to print, sign, scan and send by email a high number of pages. To save trees, ink, time, and to stick it to the bureaucrats, I wrote this script
This would be helpful in that case.
Yes, it is an odd combination of legacy (sometimes regulatory) requirements and modern technology, but there are numerous situations where only wet ink signatures are accepted, and “digital signatures” are not accepted—even though the document is stored in a digital format.
Wet ink signatures are most commonly required in finance / investment / banking transactions. They are sometimes required for B2B transactions. While not as common in the US as in other countries, you can also run into requirements where documents must be signed via wet ink signature under seal (or stamp). Scanning a document with a signature line that has been embossed with a company seal looks somewhat comical and arguably legible (especially if the scan is done with a feed-through scanner) but is required to get business done sometimes.
I don’t disagree that the whole “signing and scanning” is dumb, though.
For historical reasons, we still need to allow signing things by hand, which has a number of challenges in proving the authenticity of any such signature and preventing falsification of signatures (especially if you don't have the original document with the ink but rather a scanned copy).
Then, there are digital signatures, though instead of one large standard for all of the world, we have a whole bunch of regional ones. For example, in Latvia we have eParaksts (translates to "eSignature"): https://www.eparaksts.lv/en/
It is a largely commercial venture, which allows signing documents with either data in the chip that's embedded in our national ID, or i guess mobile solutions as well and also gives you the ability to verify these arbitrary documents in a centralized manner as well. The good thing here is that it supports signing arbitrary documents and storing them in an .edoc container or even embedding the signature inside of PDFs or whatever, but it still feels very regional, is still centralized and most of the software for reading PDFs directly doesn't recognize their CA or intermediate certs as trusted and therefore gives you errors, so you need to do verification on their site.
But what happens when you need to somehow indicate within a document that you're signing it digitally? You just put the text: "THIS DOCUMENT IS SIGNED WITH AN ELECTRONIC SIGNATURE AND A TIMESTAMP" in text at the bottom, which seems silly and doesn't really mean anything - how are you supposed to examine that if you ever need to print it? Furthermore, this kind of locks you in to using the .edoc container and keeping it around and perhaps even think about how to quickly get and display its contents. Sure, they have desktop software for that, but it's not like you can automate that super easily (not saying that working with digitally signed PDFs is a walk in the park, either).
In some parts of the world, an electronic signature just means taking a JPEG (or an equivalent) of your signature and embedding it in a particular spot of your PDF or whatever, which is plain nonsense in my eyes - sure, it looks pretty, but there's no actual cryptographic protection or benefit to doing so, since it's laughably easy to reproduce by anyone who wants to fake your signature. It actually surprised me when digitally signing a PDF came up as a Linux challenge on Linus Tech Tips and Luke thought that this approach is what was intended (whereas Linus interpreted it more or less correctly but searched for the wrong thing, more or less): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtsglXhbxno&t=257s
So, here's my questions to all of you, maybe you have some thoughts to share:
- why don't we have one centralized format of signing any and all pieces of data, with a focus on documents? (think GPG but actually used and internationally recognized)?
- why don't we have one centralized, yet distributed CA infrastructure with intermediate certificates by country and then further nodes for each institution with people's certs being the leaf nodes, so that we can validate any signature globally?
- why don't we have a format that involves representing this data both in digital and printed form, say, when you want to print a document, it essentially gives you this picture of your signature with a QR code besides it, that either involves enough information to validate this signature (be it crypto data or just an URL in the case of a web based solution), as well as the parsing logic to go the other way when scanning signed documents?
- how did we get to the point where the above is not our current reality? why didn't document signing ever get the love that something like SSL/TLS did?
- any ideas on how these things could possibly be improved? thoughts on fully decentralized solution (everyone has a private/public key) vs something that holds one's hands more and provides an easy to use interface or even lets you sign things on your behalf (e.g. like eSignature), ideally behind 2FA?
- could any such initiative ever be fully free and open source, possibly subsidized by the governments of the world? i mean, (almost) everyone has a pen, but not everyone should pay for DocuSign or whatever, right? .md img {
max-width: 100%;
height: auto;
}
img {
max-width: 100%;
}Anyway I agree, and have that present on all projects.
Image in question is missing those values. I personally think README images should be be lazyloaded (making those inlined aspect ratios important) but I guess that's down to the maintainer.
A change based on your comment was merged earlier today (with a link to your comment in the description): https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/78933