To Make Progress We Have to Accept Life Has Moved On
I am coming close to finally being in a new (albeit temporary house), kids in a new school and finally living again in the country in which I grew up. It’s been a long haul. As anyone who moves house knows, there is a lot of paperwork and bureaucracy to deal with in order to setup new bank accounts, get bills closed, new service opened and so on. Luckily my wife does most of it.
It never seizes to amaze me about how antiquated forms and methods of ID are still considered “trusted” by the vast majority of the public at large.
Use of Fax - According to the letting agent, I can not sign a contract using my Tablet PC and email it, but I can sign the paperwork and then fax it. No original required. In practice I could of course sign the contract using my Tablet PC and send it via email and a fax transport. Apparently there is a difference!
Handwriting Signatures - I think handwriting signatures are largely irrelevant these days. In practice today they are usually nothing more than an unknown person writing a name or string of characters. A signature is only useful if you can compare it against a known good signature. In the old days this is indeed what the banks used to do; they would have someone trusted vouch for a person and witness their signatures in person. This base signature would then be used to compare new signatures on cheque’s etc. Signatures became so prevalent that people forgot that comparing them to a known good signature was the basis of the scheme and as a result today a squiggle is usually all that is required. The letting agents on our temporary house have literally no idea if I have rented a house or someone else who can spell my name. All I needed to do was scribble my name on a contract and pay some money. I didn’t need to prove it was me accepting the terms of the contract!
Need a Utility Bill - To get a mobile phone and open a bank account you need to have a utility bill in your name. It apparently proves you live at an address. Getting a utility bill is really easy. You simply call BT and ask for service. You only need to know the phone number of the house and the address and a conformation letter is sent out to the letter box the next day. It would not be hard to socially engineer any British postman into giving you mail for a house if you happen to be loitering outside. I was handed the mail for our house while unloading my car in the road last week for instance.
It strikes me that in order to move society to a place where we can perform the types of transactions that we need to “power” our modern lives we need to accept life has moved on and develop / accept modern identity management schemes for the real world (not just computer systems access).
