Do you happen to know if German citizens can obtain a certificate to sign PDFs (from the government / for free)?
Several paid providers for X.509 certificates exist but document signing certificates cost around 80 € per year [0]. And if I want duplicate X.509 certificates for my redundant Yubikeys then the cost doubles.
Other providers require an initial deposit and then charge per signature [1], which leads to intransparent pricing. In the interest of open commerce, I strongly believe that securely signing an electronic document should cost the same as my manual signature, i.e. nothing.
A partial solution already exists because I can use my electronic ID card with the AusweisApp to prove my identity when interacting with German authorities. This feature is generally useful because I live outside of the EU, but I especially appreciate that I can have my OpenPGP key signed by Governikus (a government provider) to prove the key belongs to my name [2].
Technically, I should be able to use my certified PGP key to sign documents, but in practice most non techies don't know how to validate my signature. For the average user opening my signed PDF in Adobe Reader, I would need an X.509 certificate from a trusted Certificate Authority for users to see the green check mark.
Fascinating work and inspiring application of the underlying DINOv3 image segmentation model!
The blog post and paper [1] describe a promising approach to solving related problems at previously impossible scale and quality: I am currently exploring methods to better represent seasonal land cover changes that would improve wind power generation forecasting and this paper provides a great starting point.
I hope DINOv3 can inspire more work like this - and I would encourage any curious mind to play with that model! I was amazed by its capability to distinguish between fine object details. For example, in a photo of a bicycle, the patch embeddings cleanly separated the background from the individual spokes of the wheel.
This article discusses the DGX Spark GB10 GPU architecture from a hardware engineering perspective. The authors explain the trade-offs between datacenter Blackwell and consumer Blackwell chips, list key hardware features that evolved between GPU generations, and highlight some of the challenges that have resulted on the software side with incomplete support from Triton, Flashinfer, and various kernel incompatibilities.
Several paid providers for X.509 certificates exist but document signing certificates cost around 80 € per year [0]. And if I want duplicate X.509 certificates for my redundant Yubikeys then the cost doubles.
Other providers require an initial deposit and then charge per signature [1], which leads to intransparent pricing. In the interest of open commerce, I strongly believe that securely signing an electronic document should cost the same as my manual signature, i.e. nothing.
A partial solution already exists because I can use my electronic ID card with the AusweisApp to prove my identity when interacting with German authorities. This feature is generally useful because I live outside of the EU, but I especially appreciate that I can have my OpenPGP key signed by Governikus (a government provider) to prove the key belongs to my name [2].
Technically, I should be able to use my certified PGP key to sign documents, but in practice most non techies don't know how to validate my signature. For the average user opening my signed PDF in Adobe Reader, I would need an X.509 certificate from a trusted Certificate Authority for users to see the green check mark.
[0] https://shop.certum.eu/documentsigning-certifcates.html
[1] https://www.entrust.com/products/electronic-digital-signing
[2] https://pgp.governikus.de/wizard/requirements