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A day or two ago I silently released a new update to TimeCert. It features amongst other things a new javascript that you can use in your own blog or other application by modifying your template.

TimeCert is a simple service to prove the existence of something at a certain time. Many writers, inventors and musicians have traditionally sent themselves sealed envelopes of their work so the postal mark provides a third party time stamp of their work incase of future dispute. TimeCert is just like this. Rather than send a sealed envelope you calculate a digest or fingerprint of what it is you want timestamped and send it to TimeCert. TimeCert will tell you the first time it was presented said digest.

These digests are pretty easy to calculate in server side languages such as Ruby, PHP and Java. You just calculate it and make a request to the server with it such as:

http://timecert.org/a94a8fe5ccb19ba61c4c0873d391e987982fbbd3

I provide a bunch of both human and machine readable formats, to make it as easy as possible to link it into your application.

What about blogs and other application where you might not be in control of the source control?

Now there is a fairly simple way of integrating TimeCert into your blog using javascript. This means you just have to modify your template 2 or 3 places to use it.

You basically load the timecert javascript and call a function on a element within your html page. This calculates the digest on the fly in the browser and inserts a TimeCert link in the page. For full instructions see the TimeCert home page

I have to say though that there will be problems with Typo based blogs like this one as it dynamically modifies the timestamp of the blog entry. But I’ve been testing it for a while on my blog Neubia and it seems to work fine.

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One of the applications I had in mind for TimeCert was 3rd party timestamping of blog posts.

I have updated the TimeCert code to make it easier to do so.

For example see the time stamp below this post. This is an embedded timestamp that should currently be relatively easy to integrate by programmers in their blogs.

I am working on some tools to make it easy to integrate for non programmers as well.

In the mean time what you need to do is simply create a SHA1 digest of your blog post. There after insert that into the snippet found at the TimeCert home page.

# put this next line at the top of application_helper.rb
require 'digest/sha1'
#
# and the rest within the module
  def digest_for(data)
      Digest::SHA1.hexdigest(data)
  end
  def timecert_iframe(data)
     %{<iframe height="16px" frameborder="0" scrolling="0" 
src="http://timecert.org/#{digest_for data}.iframe" width="100%"></iframe><br/>}
  end

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I am now officially launching TimeCert which is a trusted third party service for proving the existence of a file, object or document at a certain time.

Applications

Lets say your application managed confidential documents or emails. You could use TimeCert for maintaining a proof that a document or email existed at a certain time. As this timestamp is generated outside your own server, it is evidence that you did not manipulate say a contract after the timestamp.

You could also use it to timestamp a sourcefile to help out with Intellectual Property issues.

Technical details

It was written in about an hour the other morning using the new Camping micro web framework and the Mongrel.

There are full open API’s. You can read all the nitty gritty about how it works over on Neubia my tech blog

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