Why the hell is friedcat verifying shares anywho... people can just sign their div address....
I should probably know this, but can you explain what this means and how it's done?
ASICMiner dividend payments are public, since you can view them on the blockchain. So once you're certain that someone owns a bitcoin address that has received ASICMiner div's, you know that person owns the shares.
Using Bitcoin-QT (or other clients), you can take a message such as "I, username, control the address 1AddressBlaBlaBla" and sign it using your private key. Anyone can then take the message and the public address and verify (again using Bitcoin-QT or another client) that the signature is correct. So a person can prove that he owns a BTC address this way.
The caveat is that someone can sell (or trade away) his ASICMiner shares and then offer them up for sale again. He can show that he owns the BTC address that received last weeks dividend, but the shares have since been transferred. The window of opportunity for this is 1 week (until the next dividend payment), but there is room for scammers using this method. Which is why it's safest to have Friedcat confirm share ownership.