Online NDA's...
 

Anyone know what the legal validity of these are? I have seen a couple in the style of an online form that require a "digital signature..." but I don't see how these could really be taken seriously.

Using digital signatures is one way to authenticate who you are, but there is difficulty in being able to establish what you really signed.

you could type in your initals on a form and that could be construed as a signature by one of the laws that was passed called the Electronic Signatures Act.

Problem is that in a dispute, how can you prove that you "signed" the document, and that the document did not change?

Once way this can be done is that if the MD5 hash was taken of the NDA file, and that was used as a key to prove that you did "sign" the same document.

Then in a dispute, both parties could present their NDA file, and do an MD5 hash to make sure that the resulting value matched what you had on record when you "signed" it.

Electronic signatures are legal, you just need to have some comfortable to accept that since it is different than what we are used to when whe sign a doc, and you need to have a way to go back to the original document in case of a dispute.