Proof of time of publication
Simple ways to prove you said x on yyyy-mm-dd at hh:mm:ss.
Lately @DocNetyoutube on Twitter (X) has been attempting to relay information from a purported sexual assault victim of vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, poorly documenting his efforts to notify the Harris campaign of the allegations with screenshots and screen videos. There are numerous textual anomalies in the screenshots which call into question the authenticity of the documents, and there is no easy way (or way at all until the Presidential Records of his submissions are released) for the time and date of his publications and emails to be verified.
For such proof, one can simply get the sha256sum of the document and post it to social media such as Twitter (X) or Facebook, trusting that their timestamping will encapsulate the checksum for eternity; then when you later publish the document, anyone can likewise sha256sum it and see that you posted the text with the same checksum on the date that you claim you did. For example:
$ echo 'jc said ex why zee on 2024-10-15 at 15:09:30 PDT' | sha256sum
240073d196cb8411f53ed99181f4de90702e1b4b3d705238c377ef13da4ff9ba
For a more robust method, see OpenTimestamps.
As usual, after discussion and the inevitable corrections, I may republish this at Best Practices.
😂 One does not “simply get the sha256sum of the document.”
For most of us, that might as well have been spoken in Sumerian. I know I have no clue about where to even start—but then again, I’m not a code monkey.
Here’s an oldie but a goodie: email the link to what you posted to yourself. The email time stamp should suffice for most purposes, and it’s much easier for more people to use.
Back in my day, we mailed ourselves important stuff like that via USPS, using the post mark for the same purpose.