Build Date: Tue Jan 13 00:10:08 2026 UTC
Thanks for all the hard work you folks are conducting at SMRL. It has enhanced and certainly shortened my life.
-- Yehat
President Himself Uses Shitty Password
2000-06-30 13:54:53
Okay, so my first thought about this is that I'm worried that some asshole is going to swipe the President's password and start forging e-signatures on e-bills. I mean, your dog's name? Dumbass. My next concern is that the evil robot AIs use these signatures to take over....
Actually, that sounds pretty good. Evil robot AIs are sexy. And maybe they can put my junior high gym teacher in a braincase for unholy experiments.
Okay, Clinton used a smart card and a crappy password to sign a bill that allows electronic signatures. It's a big pretty champagne-against-the-boat thing, and I'm sure we all love his lame duck ass for being the President Who Brought Us Onto The Steam-Powered Nanometric Retrovirus Freeway.
The problem is that electronic signatures can be foiled. Maybe it's not easy to steal someone's card and learn their password, but it's also not *that* hard - people get mugged all the time, and are often stupid about passwords, like, say, naming them after their dog, which runs the risk that the dog will sell the password out. Of course, handwriting can also be forged, and I wouldn't be surprised if retinal scanning forgery became common once anyone gives a shit about it. And, eventually, as we move forward into this Sexy New Millenium, better techniques will be developed for forging biometric typing analysis, voice printing, and so on. The fact is, Presidential bill-signers and other upstanding citizens don't stand a chance of protecting their identity from the fakery of Bad People.
In the end, the problem is that we cannot come up with irrefutable proof of identity, because there is no irrefutable proof of identity.
So, I propose that instead of having electronic signatures, we should have electronic Zen Buddhist monks, with 256-bit-encrypted mantras and e-prayer beads, meditating on the lack of Self in the new Digital Era. Once we all dispel the Illusion of I, we can be assured of safe, private transactions online!
Um, what was I talking about again? Oh yeah, President Clinton. Fuck you, you Communications Decency Act-signing motherfucker. You're not getting on my good side just for signing some incredibly obvious bill.
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