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Record verification

How to check a note has not been altered

Each note's body is hashed with SHA-256 at generation time and the hash is written into the note's header. The record of all notes is linked in a chain whose head hash is shown below. The calculation runs in your browser on this page; nothing you paste is sent anywhere.

Record chain
before_first_run

The record chain has not run yet. Notes published now can be verified only by each document's own SHA-256; the chain head will appear here after the first run.

Procedure

Three steps

  1. 1

    Open the note page and copy the SHA-256 shown in its header. Use the "Download the original (.md)" link on the same page to get the original file.

  2. 2

    Paste the entire contents of the downloaded .md file into the box below. The calculator strips the front matter (between the first --- and the closing ---) automatically and hashes the body only. Leading and trailing whitespace is ignored and line breaks are normalised to LF.

  3. 3

    If the computed value equals the header value, the body has not changed since generation. If not, first check that you pasted the downloaded original, not the rendered page.

The original file is served unchanged from the original (.md) link on each note page (/research/<slug>/raw.md). Copying the rendered page will change table and formatting characters, so the hash will not match.

In-browser calculator
Computed
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