magick -density 150 input.pdf \ -colorspace Gray \ -virtual-pixel White -background White \ -rotate 0.7 +repage \ -attenuate 0.45 +noise Gaussian \ -blur 0x0.4 \ -brightness-contrast -5x12 \ -compress jpeg -quality 78 scanned.pdf
The only tell tale sign is that the text still has this aliasing like texture that doesn’t happen in real scanned pages.
From my bookmarks (found on HN originally!)
https://gist.github.com/andyrbell/25c8632e15d17c83a54602f6ac...
So I moved my money out of the account. That worked fine.
Without diving into too much minutiae, a legal signature can be any mark the signer intends to act as a signature. It could be a bird you've trained to poo on command onto signature lines.
In my case, this instance with Schwab was the first of a lot of similar paperwork I was going to have to do, so I pulled the ripcord when I saw how they were going to approach it.
"However, many jurisdictions still require a wet signature. For instance, in the US and Canada, notarized documents require signatures in wet ink. Similarly, documents in areas such as family law, wills, trusts, or banking also require physical signatures. In the UK, tax authorities require a wet signature for any tax documents filed by a British resident."
https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/business/resources/wet-signatu...
But for the other 99.99% of signatures in the world, any mark at all is fine, and insisting on more is wasteful bureaucracy.
The description however seems like the creator just likes how scanned documents look. They describe it like how analogue music fans describe vinyl records. I guess everything is nostalgic to someone out there eventually.
Poland is also strong on that, requiring "readable handwritten signatures".
This will end when the dinosaurs that still feel it is important go away.
I am not asserting the authors intent is to facilitate fraud or there isn’t any other practical use, but let’s not be naive and act like fraud isn’t a likely use.
Before you downvote at least respond with why you think my analysis is wrong.
My bank demands that I perform this ridiculous hoop-jumping. Like others here, I use ImageMagick hocus pocus to defeat them with trivial ease (a couple of times they complained so I tweaked the algo a bit and they were happy). The whole situation is beyond absurd. It's security theater in place of security.
Just because you don’t like the security theatre does make it acceptable to misrepresent the origin of a document to satisfy the security requirements.
And I gave a specific example, slipping a page into a document that wasn’t in the original and making it look like it belongs by making it look scanned.
Imagine I changed the purchase price on your home to 10% of its value rather than the original agreed price and took it to court to enforce the purchase. This tech would make that appear more credible.
As a preamble, I have zero moral qualms about technically committing fraud in order to access my own money (almost nobody would).
More important, I choose not to respect a law that upholds an insecure and broken system. A parallel with traffic regulations come to mind: as a cyclist I regularly break rules when I consider that they do not best serve my safety. All things being equal, I follow the law. But all things are not always equal and bad laws are there for the breaking.
The correct outcome here is that the law is tested and amended. That is the way to end the perverse situation of the precise example you raise, where anybody with technical skills can fake a document and then win in court.
I’ll give a concrete example. In law school I was hired to write a memo on a traffic circle. There was a very deliberate and effective approach to identifying where pedestrian crossings were the safest. And the cross walk itself is an attempt to encourage people to go to the safe areas for crossing.
Cross walks also create a clear zone of liability. If a driver hits a pedestrian in a crosswalk they are deemed at fault. Outside the crosswalk the pedestrian is deemed to have contributed. So the law incentivizes both driver and pedestrian behavior to converge on a known safety pattern in the safer section of the road. So you can jaywalk based on your analysis that it isn’t really that big of a deal or necessary for your safety but at the scale of society the law encourages the safest behavior.
As far as signatures. I would agree there are better systems. But they still serve a valid function.
I had ATT forge mysignature on a contract to try to get me to have to pay an early termination fee. But because I had other documents with my signature I was able to demonstrate that the forgery wasn’t even close to mine. I would honestly rather have that rather than a digital stamp or Docusign.
I’ll give a more concrete example. If you bill the government for Medicaid home health services they required an ink signature. And in fact it had to be black ink, no other color was acceptable. When I was building software for electronic visit verification it was actually a formal legal block and required several states passing law to make digital signature images legally acceptable. If I had used a library like this to make the document digital signature look like they had been analog at some point it would have been a crime.
So just because you think it’s reasonable doesn’t mean the act of misrepresenting the origin and nature of the signature isn’t illegal.
I said that process would be used in other fraudulent acts.
Yes you did. Verbatim.
I think a library like this could be used for art or literature. For example, to make a document look like an old artifact in lord of the rings or a Sherlock Holmes mystery.
The fraud isn’t in the conversion or appearance. It’s in the intent behind it and how it’s used.
The real problem is that written signatures are a poor form of authentication.
I own home care agencies in 13 states and in the early years had to collect timesheets with physical signatures for medical billing. I know the work involved in printing, collecting, scanning, organizing and retaining/archiving physical signatures at scale. We lost real money when signatures weren’t collected or were lost because there were times we couldn’t collect a replacement for various reasons.
I then built the digital system to collect signatures and had to get legislation passed to make them legally valid. We were literally blocked for several years because digital signatures were not permitted. So this isn’t a hypothetical I am throwing out just to make an argument and be annoying.
That is an example of a flawed argument named false equivalence. And it ignores that the this library eliminates the friction of printing, and enables the ability to scale the process.
I've also never had someone refuse my too-perfect digitally inserted signature, but I could totally see it happening.
Oh and I don't like signing stuff anywhere, so I also used my scanned signature and got a custom stamp made. :)
I don’t know whether this tool enables that, but the idea is in the neighbourhood of “make it look scanned”.
There might be extra stuff that can be done to remedy that with this tool, but I'm not sure I'd ever use this anyway.
Adds your signature and makes it look scanned. Previously discussed on HN. Came in handy once in a while.
There are too many PDF tools that are unnecessarily paywalled, or have a paid tier that don't make any sense.
We need more tools from paid ones that should be completely free and OSS.
