Given the recent situation where Robert Campbell is having difficulty verifying that an email originated with Peikoff, I thought I'd write a tech blog post explaining the fundamentals of digital signing.

The Need for Digital Signing

Nowadays, the content you post on the Internet is a determinant of your reputation.

Most people are sufficiently net-savvy to realise that what they post under their own names online is easily searchable - a quick Google search for either me or Armin will show (amongst a bunch of results for different Duncans and Armins) what we've written about technology, politics, philosophy and religion back to the mid 90s - back when Usenet was a Big Thing and Windows 95 had just been released.

Given how important digital content is, it becomes important that people are able to know that something purporting to be written by you was really written by you, and that it if it was, that it hasn't been tampered by anyone since you wrote it.

This post is a classic example; someone is purporting to have forwarded an email from a public figure (Leonard Peikoff), but those receiving it can't be sure that it's genuine and unaltered. All they can do is ask him, and trust that he's telling the truth.

The solution to this problem is to digitally sign your posts and emails.

The full post is here. Please feel free to post comments, suggestions or requests for assistance in the comments (either at Fluidscape, or here).