On 11/17/20 5:47 PM, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
Whether those dates are returned by http or ftp, they're going to be trivially foreable
So are the dates in old email and usenet messages. And yet, such dates are routinely cited.
(I don't claim to understand a court's or patent office's reasoning about what makes a date valid or not valid - their logic is different than those of engineers. )
I was also once involved in a case where the RFC Editor screwed up and the mod date on an RFC on their server was incorrect. The declaration was edited to omit mention of that RFC to support the argument, even though the RFC editor attested as to the correct date, fixed the mod date on the server, and verified that their copy exactly matched the original.
So basically - preserve the dates and make sure they're available via the protocol. It's not difficult.
Keith
