The register
Provenance
An AI drafts this paper and a human edits it. That is printed on the front page, and the honest follow-up question is: says who? So beside every locked issue we commit a second file — a record of what we actually read before we printed it.
It stores hashes, never text. A hash proves we held a document; it reveals nothing of what that document said, which is how this stays on the summarise-and-link side of a publisher's copyright.
Ring 1 · Built
A public, attested history
What it proves. That an issue existed, unchanged, at a given moment — because the commit that published it sits in a public repository GitHub timestamps and the GH Archive mirrors, where backdating is detectable by someone who is not us. The follow-through ledger lives in that same history, so a promise we made cannot be quietly improved after the fact.
What it does not. It proves nothing about whether the reporting is right — only when we said it. And it rests on GitHub: a reader has to trust that those timestamps are honest, which is exactly what Ring 3 would remove the need for.
Ring 2 · Built — this is the one
What we actually read
What it proves. That before we wrote about a story, we held a specific document at a specific time. Each entry records the source URL, when we fetched it, and a SHA-256 of the text we checked our sentences against. If a publisher later edits that page, the hash stops matching, and that is visible to anyone.
What it does not. It does not prove the source was true, or that we read it correctly, or that we did not misuse it. It also does not cover every story: where we linked a source without fetching its body, the entry says “linked” and carries no hash, and the file counts how many of each.
Ring 3 · Not built
Anchored without trusting anyone
What it proves. That the lock time is real without taking GitHub's word for it — an OpenTimestamps anchor in a public blockchain, verifiable by a stranger with no account anywhere.
What it does not. It proves when, never what. A timestamped lie is a lie with a date on it.
One of the three is not built. We would rather say that here than let a JSON file imply otherwise — the same reason the sample issue carries its own disclosure and the corrections sit at the top of the page instead of the bottom.
Rings 1 and 2 are not a promise you have to take on trust. Go and read the archive — every issue, every source record, every correction, and the order they happened in.
How an issue gets madeThe follow-through recordFork the paperEvery Sunday in the archive