Bruno Lowagie's Online Gazette

I'm sorry, but I don't understand. Apple wins the law suite against Samsung because Samsung copied the look & feel of the iPhone. A while ago, Oracle lost the law suite against Google after Google copied Java interfaces. Does this mean that we value graphical designers more than we value software developers? Does this mean that the development of a good programming interface is valued much less than the development of what a device looks like on the outside?

I must have unlocked something when I selected the preview. Right after I wrote my previous blog, I went back to my dashboard, and it looked completely different:

I no longer have to compare myself with somebody else to see how much each social media service influences my score. On the downside: I can no longer see how somebody else's Klout score is composed (or maybe I didn't push the right button).

I was really curious about Klout's new feature, named 'Moments'. Moments allows you to see which topics were taken into account, and shows your influence. See for instance:

I posted this on Facebook right after my son was back from the recovery room. He had surgery on his birthday, and the surgeon had made a balloon out of a plastic glove for his 16th birthday; one year to go, and we can consider him to be 'cancer-free'!

Half a year ago, I talked about some blogs written by the iText developers. One of these blogs was iText on the JVM by Michaël Demey. Michaël tested iText on Jython, JRuby, Groovy, Scala and Clojure, and he really liked Groovy. Nowadays, whenever he has to do a quick test of some iText functionality, he write a small Groovy script instead of a Java app.

I've just released iText 5.3.2 and XML Worker 1.1.6. We've fixed some minor bugs in XML Worker, but the main reason for this release is iText's digital signature functionality.

Yesterday, I've left you with a thought-provoking question: "The government already owns a large part of you personal information, such as your name, birth date, etc. Do you really want to give all that information to one or more private companies just to be able to sign a document?"
You may wonder why I'm making all this fuss. One reason should be obvious: I want to promote the white paper I'm writing:

Click on the image to see the TOC. This white paper will be available for free by the end of September. A preview of the draft of the first 90 pages is available for the subscribers of the iText newsletter.

But that's not the only reason why I'm not happy with some of the things I've been discussing in the last few days.

Another day, another blog about digital signatures. Let's take a look at a white paper entitled "Authentication of Primary Legal Materials and Pricing Options" from the US Office of Legal Counsil:

The debate I started the day before yesterday is problematic because the people who are with me and the people who are against me compare apples with oranges. I say: 'the signatures created by most online services are not legally binding.' Vendors say: 'the signatures we are creating are legally binding.' We are both right, and we are both wrong.

After yesterday's blog post explaining how to forge an esignature, some people contacted me, saying: We're not technical people, we don't understand your examples, but are you saying that somebody can abuse our signature if we apply an esignature? And also: Don't you have a short demo for dummies?

That's why I made this short video:

Yesterday, I saw a video announcing that a company named DocuSign raised $55.7M for a solution that allows you to easily sign a digital document. DocuSign isn't the only company offers a so-called signature service. There's also EchoSign, a company that was acquired by Adobe about a year ago. DocuSign's CEO claims to have 60,000 unique users a day. That's 60,000 signed documents a day. Wouldn't it be great if you knew how to forge those signatures? Read on if I've caught your interest.

Aha, the first updates are available, and my Klout score has improved:

I've gone through the update announcements, and I'm very curious about the 'moments' functionality. Klout has removed the True Reach, Amplification, and Network Impact subscores in order to make room for a new feature. Moments will show us how our posts from the past 90 days have impacted our Klout Score. That could be interesting!