Sunday, February 10, 2008

Authenticated Documents

The Government Printing Office has begun offering digital certificates of authentication with some documents. This basically means that a document includes a certificate that will check the document's authenticity when you open it (i.e. whether there is any chance that parts of the document are incorrect because it has been tampered with) and then display an icon showing whether the document has been validated.

The current Congress's Public and Private Laws are available with this technology in a beta version. And a fully-authenticated version of the 2009 budget, mentioned Thursday, is also available. One assumes that this has something to do with how President Bush was able to submit the budget without printing any copies.


Ernster, the Virtual Library Cat

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