My previous post about digital signatures, a web of trust, and certificate authorities has absolutely nothing to do with the electronic signatures bill that President Clinton is going to sign today. In other words, I’m a sucker. Apparently this bill is a nasty piece of legislation that allows lots of routine acts by a customer to be treated as electronic signatures that indicate consent to be bound under a contract. That sucks. A reader sent me a link to the article that pulled the wool from my eyes.

So, something pretty historic is going to happen today. President Clinton is going to sign a bill that gives digital signatures the same legal weight as written signatures. This law has been a long time in coming, and I think it makes perfect sense. The big question I have is how the signatures will be verified. In the PGP world, a Web of trust model is used, in the commercial world, certificate authorities are used to verify the identities of people using digital signatures. My question is, does this mean we’ll have to give money to (sleazy) VeriSign in order to digitally sign contracts and other legally binding documents? If so, hopefully this will lead to more competition in the certificate market. Right now, there’s virtually none.

Today’s top news item at Cafe au Lait is a reasonably detailed critique of C#. The writer actually read the language reference, and compared and contrasted the listed features with Java. He also points out the things that are missing from the document, like any mention of a class library, or the XML support Microsoft promised (probably part of the as yet undocumented class library).

Scott Rosenberg’s latest column takes on Microsoft’s .Net initiative, and provides a good overview of what it’s all about if you haven’t figured it out yet. The only problem I have with it is that it says that .Net isn’t a “me too” offering from Microsoft, which isn’t really the case. While the origins of the idea behind .Net are less obvious than those behind Windows or Internet Explorer, .Net is a rearticulation of concepts created by Apple, Sun, and others. Jaded technology watchers can see things like Jini and OpenDoc as the inspiration for much of what appears to be in .Net. Certainly using XML as application glue isn’t an idea that comes from within Microsoft.

I have to agree with FAIR on this one, repeatedly showing footage of the Central Park sexual assaults violated the victims nearly as much as the assaults themselves. I think that the depravity of the attackers could have been portrayed adequately without showing the victims over and over at all hours of the day.

Geeks will appreciate: Tivo’s Linux kernel modifications.

The Industry Standard’s cover story this week is the bizarre tale of Internet video company Pixelon. Its founder managed to start the company and attract 30 million dollars of VC money without so much as a drivers license or Social Security Number. The VCs, new at the game, signed an agreement with Pixelon that was outrageously in their favor, but in the end it was they who got played. Pixelon had no technology and no business prospects. They managed to spend 16 million dollars on an all day rock concert before flaming out.

rc3.org friend Joe Komenda wrote an excellent rebuttal to the awful essay by Michiko Kakutani that I linked to yesterday. It gets right down to the core problem, that slang is meaningless absent context.

LWN has a nice wrapup of the reasons behind MySQL’s move away from a proprietary license to the GPL.

I downloaded two browsers today, the final version of Opera 4.0, and Mozilla M16. Opera has improved a lot since the last version I tried (3.0 maybe), and Mozilla M16 is significantly better than M15, although there are still lots of bugs, and it still looks weird.