Markus Kuhn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > I still think, there is a philosophical missunderstanding here about how > digital signatures are to be interpreted in cases of legal dispute. What > in most countries that have thought about the issue would count is what > the human end user has seen on the display component of the device where > the signature was generated. The actual bitstring signed is actually not > as relevant here as you might believe. You do not need any > reversibility, you just need a tightly standardized rendering process > that produces the same readable text each time from the same bit string. > That standardised rendering algorithm will be used as well in court to > inspect the bitstring you have signed, not your hexdump editor or > whatever alternative displaying process that you might come up with to > provide a different text.
This can't be right, or blind people would not be able to communicate in a legally recognised way. Also, a document might be passed round a company and inspected by a large number of blind and seeing persons, using a wide variety of different software, before it is passed to another company to form part of a contract. The "device where the signature was generated" might be a server with no display component. I don't think you can get away from the bitstring being the authoritative text. If different software displays bidirectional text differently, then you have another kind of potential ambiguity to add to all the kinds of ambiguity that already exist in any communication between people. (But thinking about a blind person listening to the text through a speech synthesiser probably gives a good idea of what the "correct" interpretation should be: words should be spoken in the order they appear in the bitstring, regardless of writing direction.) Edmund -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
