The label "digital signature" for
nonrefutable cryptostrong sigs
is going down in flames. A DTMF
pulse counts as a signature Oct 2.
Tuesday September 26 09:15 PM EDT
E-signatures for 30 million laptops
By Ben Charny, ZDNet News
Touchpad maker Synaptics Inc. will bundle digital signature
software with its newest products and make updates
available to existing users.
Touchpad maker Synaptics Inc. has announced a deal that could
create electronic
signatures for more than a third of the laptops on the planet.
The company said Tuesday it will begin to bundle its touchpads,
which are used on roughly
40 percent of the worlds laptops, with digital signature
software from Silanis Technology
Inc. of Montreal.
Owners of an estimated 30 million laptops that
use Synaptics
touchpads can also download a free version of
the Silanis ApproveIt
software from either the Silanis or Synaptics
Web sites.
The deal is one of the first of several product
announcements
expected prior to Oct. 1, when the Electronic
Signatures in Global and
National Commerce Act takes effect. The new
federal law makes
electronic signatures legally binding.
Jupiter Communications senior analyst James Van
Dyke said the deal
answers a piece of the electronic signature
problem, including
distribution.
Van Dyke said a bigger problem is the current lack of standards
for electronic signature
makers.
"Its a good move for Synaptics, it will only cost a little and
it puts them in a good position,"
he said. "But, we are going to be in standards hell for a
while. You can feel the flames."
Shipping in 2001
The first e-signature enabled touchpads will be shipped to
Synaptic users such as Apple
Compaq, Dell, Gateway and Hewlett Packard sometime next year,
said Synaptics
spokewoman Mariel Van Tatenhove.
The software embeds a signature token into a document. Inside
the token are the guts of a
digital signature, including a time stamp and the public and
private keys. It also will include a
digitized version of a users handwritten signature. The
signature will appear on the
document.
The software to be bundled on Synaptics touchpads is a stripped
down version of
ApproveIt, which normally allows from multiple signatures on
the same document. But the
bundled software will only allow for a single signature on
Microsoft Word and Excel
documents.
The software available on the websites is called OnSign, which
Synaptics introduced in July.
It works for Word documents. It too only lets one signature per
document.
The OnSign software has been downloaded more than 65,000 times
since its introduction
July 5, said Silanis spokesman Mary Ellen Power.
By years end, she expects more than 100,000 downloads. The site
is averaging a download
every two minutes, she said.
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/zd/20000926/tc/e-signatures_for_30_million_laptops_1.html
