The absolute state of faxing in 2020
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@JBert said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@Polygeekery said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@remi said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@Polygeekery This gets even worse when you consider why some regulations still require fax (at least in the cases I was exposed to), which is because they want a document with an actual signature on it
In the past I have created PNGs with transparent backgrounds that look suspiciously like a person's signature. I don't know why they wanted me to do such a thing because I never asked and told them not to tell me what it would be used for.
On an entirely unrelated note, I bet you could scan your signature, convert it to PNG, use an image manipulation program to crop it and clip out all the whitespace and leave a transparent background and then you could pass that off as a physical signature and bypass all those shenanigans. If only such a thing were legal to do..... If only......
One of the products my employer sells is a PDF signing product (basically competition for what Adobe does).
While we always make sure that all the cryptography stuff is in order and that the name of the person who's signing is locked into the document, there's now a feature request which states that people are tired of having to use the mouse to add an additional scribble (can't blame them - it's tough to repeat the same scribble twice with a mouse, let alone make something which looks like the signature you would put on official papers).
Their proposal?
"Oh, just use a cursive font to make an image with their name"
"You know that's just security theater and that anyone could make such image?" "Yes. I expect it done by Thursday"This week I used adobe to sign something. It allowed a cursive font, and used a self signed certification key. I think adobe signing is as unsafe as it gets.
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@sockpuppet7 said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
I think adobe
signingis as unsafe as it gets.
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@Luhmann said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@sockpuppet7 said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
I think
adobesigning is as unsafe as it gets.FTFY. The whole idea that a scribble may uniquely identify someone might have had some weight when few people knew how to write and a signature looked like this:
But it's totally useless now that a valid signature may look like this:
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@remi said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
But it's totally useless now that a valid signature may look like this:
Hey, you stole my signature!
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@Dragoon No no no no, see, yours has the dot slightly more to the left, it's clearly not the same!
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@remi said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
But it's totally useless now that a valid signature may look like this:
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@Gąska said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@remi said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
But it's totally useless now that a valid signature may look like this:
Well, that does cause earthquakes in California...
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@Gąska I thought about it (mostly because you posted it before, you seem to have a particular fondness about it...) but as illegible as that one is, it's actually fairly distinctive (not necessarily hard to reproduce, but at least recognisable when you know who it belongs to).
I saw in Real Life some signatures that were more or less just a circle or a line, or some other pattern that was really not distinctive of even being a signature, and that was what I wanted to illustrate (but of course Google failed me, the one I found is not a perfect illustration of that).
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@remi said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
you seem to have a particular fondness about it...
It reminds me of my late grandfather. He had Parkinson's.
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Speaking of funny signatures:
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@Gąska said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
Speaking of funny signatures:
I bet he also uses "Password123" for his accounts.
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@topspin "Rz" is a digraph for a single consonant. It sounds like "J" in Jean-Claude Van Damme.
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@Gąska said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@topspin "Rz" is a digraph for a single consonant. It sounds like "J" in Jean-Claude Van Damme.
And I thought French was weird
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@Gąska said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
It sounds like "J" in Jean-Claude Van Damme.
So like the G in GIF?
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@loopback0 no, that would be dż.
Edit: not to be confused with dz. That's different sound.
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@TimeBandit said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@Gąska said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@topspin "Rz" is a digraph for a single consonant. It sounds like "J" in Jean-Claude Van Damme.
And I thought French was weird
Give me a sensible explanation of "-eaux" pronunciation and then we'll talk.
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@Gąska said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@TimeBandit said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@Gąska said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@topspin "Rz" is a digraph for a single consonant. It sounds like "J" in Jean-Claude Van Damme.
And I thought French was weird
Give me a sensible explanation of "-eaux" pronunciation and then we'll talk.
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@dcon said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@Gąska said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@hungrier there's a surprising number of letters from
my bank andmy health insurer that I have absolutely no use of but contain very sensitive data.And that's after selecting the 'please email me documents' option.
I've ended up with one year's worth of bills in a divided folder. Everything bill-like (or medical insurance explanation-of-benefits-like) ends up in that, and then I toss out one month's worth when it rolls over.
(I used to use a shredder, but then I realized that my work's Iron Mountain Secure Document Disposal trash bin was even faster. Yeah, I'm slightly evil that way, but I only use it for documents that have an account number. But now I'm not going in to work because Covid, so the shred pile is growing...)
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@PotatoEngineer said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
Yeah, I'm slightly evil that way
How so?
They are a document disposal company who your company is paying to dispose of documents, I highly doubt that their contract is per page, so you didn't cost your company any money. The document disposal company is likely doing the same work for 1 box as 10 boxes of documents, so it won't cost them anything either.
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@Dragoon said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@PotatoEngineer said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
Yeah, I'm slightly evil that way
How so?
They are a document disposal company who your company is paying to dispose of documents, I highly doubt that their contract is per page, so you didn't cost your company any money. The document disposal company is likely doing the same work for 1 box as 10 boxes of documents, so it won't cost them anything either.Personal use of company resources?
You're describing exactly how I justify this to myself, but I'm sure that if HR wanted to get me fired, they'd nail me for using company resources. It's less damaging than using the company postal meter, but there are parallels. Maybe it's similar to stealing pens. (Which I don't do deliberately, but I definitely have a few company pens at home.)
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@PotatoEngineer
How are they going to proof that? Sifting through classified and confidential paperwork?
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@Luhmann said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@PotatoEngineer
How are they going to proof that? Sifting through classified and confidential paperwork?If there's a camera near the disposal bin, they'll have nice footage of me throwing things into the bin (or, if the camera is badly placed, then they can't really prove that I'm throwing things in the secure bin vs. regular recycling). I do not deal with paperwork on a regular basis, and I really have no excuse to use that bin in the regular execution of my job. Or, y'know, my manager could walk in while I'm tossing papers in the bin.
I'm not seriously worried about this, but it's a plausible worst-case scenario.
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@PotatoEngineer
So you are not allowed to throw away sensitive stuff according procedure? But apparently it's ok for HR to shoulder surf sensitive paperwork? Do they use CSI zoom-enhance to read the text? Or is that only used on the camera's in the toilets and lockers?
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@PotatoEngineer said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@Dragoon said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@PotatoEngineer said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
Yeah, I'm slightly evil that way
How so?
They are a document disposal company who your company is paying to dispose of documents, I highly doubt that their contract is per page, so you didn't cost your company any money. The document disposal company is likely doing the same work for 1 box as 10 boxes of documents, so it won't cost them anything either.Personal use of company resources?
You're describing exactly how I justify this to myself, but I'm sure that if HR wanted to get me fired, they'd nail me for using company resources. It's less damaging than using the company postal meter, but there are parallels. Maybe it's similar to stealing pens. (Which I don't do deliberately, but I definitely have a few company pens at home.)
But it really isn't the same as either of those. Both of those consume a resource and that prevents someone else from using that resource. You have availed yourself of a service. As long as it is not egregious (bringing in trash bags of paper to destroy), you have not altered the service provided in any way.
I can't speak for your contract, but if it is anything like the one my last company had the disposal company came once a month for a flat fee as long as the amount to be destroyed was under a threshold (I don't know what the threshold was, but when we rearranged the office we had at least 5 additional boxes of paper shredded and that didn't incur any extra charges, so it was not a paltry amount that we were allowed). So unless you push over that threshold, your company isn't even getting all of the service that they are paying for.
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@Dragoon At the school I worked for, they had yearly (December) shredding events where the disposal company would be onsite. We were encouraged to bring in anything that needed shredding, personal or not. I think we were paying for time-onsite, not even amount (unless it was obnoxiously large, like semi-trailer obnoxiously large).
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@Benjamin-Hall said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@Dragoon At the school I worked for, they had yearly (December) shredding events where the disposal company would be onsite. We were encouraged to bring in anything that needed shredding, personal or not. I think we were paying for time-onsite, not even amount (unless it was obnoxiously large, like semi-trailer obnoxiously large).
BC our city had bi-annual shredding events. Not sure how many locations they did, but one was held at the school just down the street.
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@Gąska said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@TimeBandit said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@Gąska said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@topspin "Rz" is a digraph for a single consonant. It sounds like "J" in Jean-Claude Van Damme.
And I thought French was weird
Give me a sensible explanation of "-eaux" pronunciation and then we'll talk.
The pronunciation is straightforward, it's just "o".
(for fun: "oiseaux" is a word where not a single letter is pronounced like if it was an isolated letter. That might not sound like much in English where most letters have several ways to be pronounced (fish = ghoti) but it's not that common in French)
[achievement unlocked: nerd snipping!]
The explanation for it is... as far as I know/could find, as follows:The final 'x' is just a plural mark, and plural marks are usually silent in French (not always, there are obviously a few exceptions, and I'm not going to repeat this remark after every point but it does apply to every point...).
Why are plural marks silent? Well the question is actually more "why are there plural marks in writing?" As far as we can make it, spoken medieval French did not use plural marks, but they were added by writers when they wanted to fit closer to latin origins (btw this explains a lot of silent letters in the middle of words as well, in many cases those letters had been dropped for a long time in spoken language but were added back by writers trying to be pedantic and fit to latin! and the worst bit is that they sometimes got it wrong and added stuff that wasn't really how latin wrote it...).
Why is it a 'x' rather than the more usual 's'? (btw, the 's' as plural mark apparently comes from latin) Well, this is related to medieval writing. They used quite a lot of "weird" marks and abbreviations (I've done a tiny bit of medieval paleography and it's both awesome and awful because of that!), and in particular they took to writing 'us' with a sign that looked like a modern 'x' (there wasn't a letter 'x', although there was a symbol 'X' used for numbers, but it wasn't thought of as a letter). So words that end in 'u' in singular become 'ux' in plural (yeah, the 'u' should have dropped as well since it was part of the 'x' but then this would make the pronunciation less clear i.e. writing "carreax" when it was pronounced "carro" would have been even weirder, I guess).
(note that some words that entered French use more recently, such as e.g. "pneu" (tyre) end with 'u' but take a 's' as plural mark, because they entered French well after medieval writing was over)
Next, why is it 'eau' for 'o'? Most words in 'eau' come from latin words in 'ellum' (such as "castellum" for castle). The 'm' just got silent (it also varies with declension, so it's easy to get it dropped when stopping declensing) and the 'l' commonly (in many languages, not just French) ends up being "vocalised" i.e. turned into a vowel, in this case some sort of 'a'. This made a diphthong 'a-u', which simultaneously got into writing (so 'elu[m]' got written as 'eau'), but also morphed into 'o' when spoken (because that's how 'a-u' evolves). So roughly, "castellum" became "castell-u", then "caste-a-u" then "cast-o" (and the 'c' independently turned into 'ch' but that's another story).
Now I'm letting you decide whether that is "sensible" or not, and it probably isn't really. But I think that's at least fascinating to see how writing and pronunciation evolved in parallel, not independently of each other nor linearly but with twist and turns and interactions.
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@Dragoon said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
But it really isn't the same as either of those. Both of those consume a resource and that prevents someone else from using that resource. You have availed yourself of a service. As long as it is not egregious (bringing in trash bags of paper to destroy), you have not altered the service provided in any way.
But if everyone does the same thing, it might end the equivalent of your "egregious" case. Basically the company may have to shift to a more expensive contract if its volume to shred significantly increases. It is definitely consuming a company resource, which in this case is "part of the allowance that the company pays for." That no-one else is using that company resource (i.e. the company stays well below its allowance) does not make it less of a company resource (it just makes it less likely that the company will object to it).
I agree with @PotatoEngineer that it's definitely "personal use of company resources" and as such something that, in theory and in a perfect and ideal world, you shouldn't do (unless explicitly allowed to). But I also agree with most comments that in this specific instance it's so tiny that it's unlikely to ever be noticed by anyone, and it's even more unlikely to cause any sort of issue, if it's ever noticed (if it was noticed, it's more likely that it would just be thought of as some sort of convenience that the company offers and that contributes to keeping staff
happyless unhappy).
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@remi said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
e.g. "pneu" (tire)
Weird. To me, “pneu” is reminiscent of “pneumatic”, which has a far closer association with tyres than it does with exhaustion – I’ve heard of “pneumatic tyres” but never “tiring pneumatically” (?)
Clearly French is just that crazy.
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@kazitor said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@remi said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
e.g. "pneu" (tire)
Weird. To me, “pneu” is reminiscent of “pneumatic”, which has a far closer association with tyres than it does with exhaustion – I’ve heard of “pneumatic tyres” but never “tiring pneumatically” (?)
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@loopback0
Deliberately misinterpreting stuff? Doesn’t sound like anyone I know.For such a well-adjusted and serious forum as this, the idea almost seems unprecedented.
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@kazitor IKR
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@kazitor said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@remi said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
e.g. "pneu" (tire)
Weird. To me, “pneu” is reminiscent of “pneumatic”, which has a far closer association with tyres than it does with exhaustion – I’ve heard of “pneumatic tyres” but never “tiring pneumatically” (?)
Clearly French is just that crazy.
Hey, will you stop misquoting me just for the joke?
(what? no, I didn't edit just for the joke,
no, not at all, why are you even asking?)
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@remi said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
Why are plural marks silent? Well the question is actually more "why are there plural marks in writing?" As far as we can make it, spoken medieval French did not use plural marks, but they were added by writers when they wanted to fit closer to latin origins (btw this explains a lot of silent letters in the middle of words as well, in many cases those letters had been dropped for a long time in spoken language but were added back by writers trying to be pedantic and fit to latin! and the worst bit is that they sometimes got it wrong and added stuff that wasn't really how latin wrote it...).
Well, that does it. Language (especially "old" written language!) is just about trying to look like the smartest guy in the room.
Why did the Romans steal so much from the Greeks? Because the Greeks looked smarter. (Too many philosophers, not enough armies to resist the Romans.)
Why does French have an X? Because medieval writers wanted to look smart, and because "smart" and "Latin" rhyme (in medieval times, anyway), they tried to make French look like Latin.
In English, we have the term "Frenchification". Because England was some kind of backwater, and France was the pinnacle of culture (or, at least, the closest "high" culture to England), scribes started inserting random "s"es in words, especially before an "n". Like the word demesne: it's pronounced like "demain", and the meaning is pretty similar to "domain". So why that s? Because the French do it, and writing like the French makes you look smart.
It's turtles trying to look smart all the way down.
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@PotatoEngineer said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
Well, that does it. Language (especially "old" written language!) is just about trying to look like the smartest guy in the room.
In today's world, "smart" is no longer what counts. It's got to be cool, hip, or for teenagers probably "edgy".
That's why over here every stupid product has a stupid English or
English name, even if the target audience doesn't really know what that means. Trying to sell my grandma "Vanish Oxy Action", or some shit like that, because 
.
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@remi said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@Gąska said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@TimeBandit said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@Gąska said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@topspin "Rz" is a digraph for a single consonant. It sounds like "J" in Jean-Claude Van Damme.
And I thought French was weird
Give me a sensible explanation of "-eaux" pronunciation and then we'll talk.
The pronunciation is straightforward, it's just "o".
(for fun: "oiseaux" is a word where not a single letter is pronounced like if it was an isolated letter. That might not sound like much in English where most letters have several ways to be pronounced (fish = ghoti) but it's not that common in French)
[achievement unlocked: nerd snipping!]
The explanation for it is... as far as I know/could find, as follows:The final 'x' is just a plural mark, and plural marks are usually silent in French (not always, there are obviously a few exceptions, and I'm not going to repeat this remark after every point but it does apply to every point...).
Why are plural marks silent? Well the question is actually more "why are there plural marks in writing?" As far as we can make it, spoken medieval French did not use plural marks, but they were added by writers when they wanted to fit closer to latin origins (btw this explains a lot of silent letters in the middle of words as well, in many cases those letters had been dropped for a long time in spoken language but were added back by writers trying to be pedantic and fit to latin! and the worst bit is that they sometimes got it wrong and added stuff that wasn't really how latin wrote it...).
Why is it a 'x' rather than the more usual 's'? (btw, the 's' as plural mark apparently comes from latin) Well, this is related to medieval writing. They used quite a lot of "weird" marks and abbreviations (I've done a tiny bit of medieval paleography and it's both awesome and awful because of that!), and in particular they took to writing 'us' with a sign that looked like a modern 'x' (there wasn't a letter 'x', although there was a symbol 'X' used for numbers, but it wasn't thought of as a letter). So words that end in 'u' in singular become 'ux' in plural (yeah, the 'u' should have dropped as well since it was part of the 'x' but then this would make the pronunciation less clear i.e. writing "carreax" when it was pronounced "carro" would have been even weirder, I guess).
(note that some words that entered French use more recently, such as e.g. "pneu" (tyre) end with 'u' but take a 's' as plural mark, because they entered French well after medieval writing was over)
Next, why is it 'eau' for 'o'? Most words in 'eau' come from latin words in 'ellum' (such as "castellum" for castle). The 'm' just got silent (it also varies with declension, so it's easy to get it dropped when stopping declensing) and the 'l' commonly (in many languages, not just French) ends up being "vocalised" i.e. turned into a vowel, in this case some sort of 'a'. This made a diphthong 'a-u', which simultaneously got into writing (so 'elu[m]' got written as 'eau'), but also morphed into 'o' when spoken (because that's how 'a-u' evolves). So roughly, "castellum" became "castell-u", then "caste-a-u" then "cast-o" (and the 'c' independently turned into 'ch' but that's another story).
Now I'm letting you decide whether that is "sensible" or not, and it probably isn't really. But I think that's at least fascinating to see how writing and pronunciation evolved in parallel, not independently of each other nor linearly but with twist and turns and interactions.
Artists: making life harder for everyone since forever.
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@PJH said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
And that was the day he was fi..,
Actually, I expected the word "fired"...
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@Dragoon said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@remi said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
But it's totally useless now that a valid signature may look like this:
Hey, you stole my signature!
No, that's mine! You identity thief!
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Let's take a look into the past:
What would Dogbert call his "natural enemy" nowadays? An email server?
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@BernieTheBernie said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
Let's take a look into the past:
What would Dogbert call his "natural enemy" nowadays? An email server?Printer. The answer is always printer.
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Also, I read today in a newspaper that Greek government just this weeks abolished the fax, and now finally officially/legally accepts email.
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@MrL said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@BernieTheBernie said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
Let's take a look into the past:
What would Dogbert call his "natural enemy" nowadays? An email server?Printer. The answer is always printer.
Obligatory:
Office Space - Printer Scene (UNCENSORED) – 01:38
— RP
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@remi said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
I saw in Real Life some signatures that were more or less just a circle or a line, or some other pattern that was really not distinctive of even being a signature
When delivery people began requiring a signature on their little handheld device, I quickly found it awkward to do so because it’s hard to write on it. I began putting an X instead, as much for a joke as because that is easy to write on that little screen.
After years of doing this, one of them told me it wasn’t valid and I had to put an actual signature. Later still, I began noticing that some, after I put an X, had to fiddle with the device to (apparently) say “Yes, this is what the guy signed.”
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@remi said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
in many cases those letters had been dropped for a long time in spoken language but were added back by writers trying to be pedantic and fit to latin! and the worst bit is that they sometimes got it wrong and added stuff that wasn't really how latin wrote it...
Like English “island”, which is a cognate of Dutch “eiland” and German “Eiland”, with all three being pronounced much the same.
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@Gurth said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
After years of doing this, one of them told me it wasn’t valid and I had to put an actual signature. Later still, I began noticing that some, after I put an X, had to fiddle with the device to (apparently) say “Yes, this is what the guy signed.”
"So that's why I can never get my deliveries!"
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@robo2 said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
"Buurman en Buurman" - thought that it si dutch, but actually it's the dutch translation from czech. They still seem to have the odd humour they had during communist times.
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@Gurth said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@remi said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
I saw in Real Life some signatures that were more or less just a circle or a line, or some other pattern that was really not distinctive of even being a signature
When delivery people began requiring a signature on their little handheld device, I quickly found it awkward to do so because it’s hard to write on it. I began putting an X instead, as much for a joke as because that is easy to write on that little screen.
After years of doing this, one of them told me it wasn’t valid and I had to put an actual signature. Later still, I began noticing that some, after I put an X, had to fiddle with the device to (apparently) say “Yes, this is what the guy signed.”
Just put 2
Xs.edit: Wait, 3 would be better.
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Especially if your package contains alcohol, pornographic stuff, or both.
