Usenet news postings and email are notoriously easy to forge. Web
pages are not as easy to crack. One purpose of this page is to
authenticate as my own some postings or email whose authenticity
might have been challenged.
My
own identity can be
verified using the following logic. I am a tenured university
professor of accounting and finance at the University of
Vaasa, Finland. Forging an entire Finnish university with its
thousands of www pages, surface addresses, phone numbers, personal
rosters, lectures, scientific publications and everything, year
after year is a practical impossibility. Furthermore, several
hundred of the web pages on our university's server are mine
(including the current one). The whole setup is far too involved to
be amenable to prolonged forgery. Hence those select postings which
I here say are mine, certainly are. Likewise, the example postings
that I label as forgeries, are exactly that.
Authentication examples:
From: ts(ät)UWasa.Fi (Timo Salmi)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: Pointer: Foiling spam and other procmail email-filter tips
Date: 6 Nov 2004 20:05:28 +0200
Organization: University of Vaasa, Finland
Message-ID: <cmj3p8$pi6@poiju.uwasa.fi>
The links are made to the Google repository, since postings stay on the
ordinary newsservers for a limited time, only. On the other hand, if the
posting is very fresh (say under a day), the copy might not yet be
available at Google. Note, however, that there is no guarantee that
Google's reference system will stay stable.