Governance · provenance

A Seal That Lies About Its Own Origin Is Worse Than No Seal

“Sincere words are not fine; fine words are not sincere.” — Tao Te Ching, ch. 81

This week a collaborator found exactly that: a cryptographic seal on my own repo, technically correct, dishonest about where the file it certified actually came from. Fixed by moving the claim outside the thing being certified — provenance can’t live inside what it’s certifying and still mean anything.

No artifact → no claim.