The absolute state of faxing in 2020
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@Gąska Even then, you would only need to shred the bulk spam with your birthdate and social number printed on it.
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@hungrier there's a surprising number of letters from my bank and my health insurer that I have absolutely no use of but contain very sensitive data.
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@Gąska said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@hungrier there's a surprising number of letters from my bank and my health insurer that I have absolutely no use of but contain very sensitive data.
It might be worth checking to see if your bank/credit union hosts shredding events -- mine does them every month or two.
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@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......
DocuSign can create an image of a signature based on the user's name in various cursive fonts. Or you can draw or upload your own image to use. I have a scan of my signature that I uploaded.
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@Gąska said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@Karla said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@Deadfast said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@Karla said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
I'm left handed, so I sign IRL with that hand. I mouse with my right hand so when I sign digitally I sign right handed.
I'm sure I couldn't make them match no matter how hard I tried.I can assure you that your handedness plays very little role in the disparity.
TBF, my written signature is pretty much a scribble as well.
I recognize that signature!
It's so exciting to get a personally signed letter from the president promising me money.
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@heterodox 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 and my health insurer that I have absolutely no use of but contain very sensitive data.
It might be worth checking to see if your bank/credit union hosts shredding events -- mine does them every month or two.
Are the attendees automatically enrolled for paperless statements?
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@djls45 Of course not. How could they attend the shredding event then!?
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@Karla said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
and couple hills.
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@Gąska said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
But then I moved to USA and there's never a week I wouldn't shred some pointless crap mailed to me.
A lot of houses in use this type of shredder for this
It's very efficient at permanently destroying the paper, and produce some heat as an added bonus
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@TimeBandit yeah but using it with modern "paper" is bad for environment.
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@Applied-Mediocrity
I first read that as Schwalbe Magic Marie a type of mountain bike tyre ... I might have spent too much time on a MTB forum
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@Gąska said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
is bad for environment
If it helps with global warming, it's a plus for
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@Gąska said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@TimeBandit yeah but using it with modern "paper" is bad for environment.
What isn't bad for the environment nowadays.
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@Luhmann said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@Applied-Mediocrity
I first read that as Schwalbe Magic Marie a type of mountain bike tyre ... I might have spent too much time on a MTB forumTake care to avoid extra pünctüres on your tires
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@Applied-Mediocrity
Only if you use the enforced versions.
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@Gąska said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@BernieTheBernie I've never seen a need for a shredder at home. But then I moved to USA and there's never a week I wouldn't shred some pointless crap mailed to me.
One of the few nice things of living in a house with someone of the same name as myself is that I don't really have to care for the spam.
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@Polygeekery said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
a 56k connection
You're being very, very optimistic.
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@El_Heffe said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
Even though faxing and e-mail are essentially the same thing, there is one crucial difference. Faxing results in the person on the receiving end having a physical paper copy of the document. E-mail doesn't.
I work in compliance. We have to think very defensively.
Here's an example of how I might come to be OK with receiving sensitive data via fax, but not OK with receiving the same data by email...
If I publish a document to my users that says "please email your most recent tax return to submissions@blah.com". I have to consider that a typical customer probably has a typical email set up... which means that email is almost surely not encrypted at rest. I just put them in a position where they are likely to do something risky at my direction. However, if I tell them to fax it, then the "default position" is for them to go somewhere that has a fax machine and pay to use it. Traditionally, fax machines haven't been devices with large storage capacity so they didn't leave any data behind.
In both the email and the fax case, it was assumed that data in transit was reasonably well protected. Faxes don't have transmission security, but it's pretty difficult for a random (especially foreign) individual to bulk intercept faxes, and it's not worth it to put the necessary effort in to get a single fax in most cases.
BTW, we accept documentation via fax at my company. We also have a mobile app and several web portals that all allow document submission. We don't accept email. Really, if you're an email type of person, make an account and upload it. It's much more secure and a lot easier for us to identify where it came from.
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@DogsB said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
The couple times they've sent on pdfs I've used one note to load it. Handwrite my comments in the margin and sent back an image. I actually enjoyed that experience more even if they were annoyed with the image.
A friend of mine creates fill-in PDFs (entry forms for dog shows). The person filling it in had to convert it to Word, fill it in, and then sent back the docx. My friend avoids Word (she uses Publisher for formatted things). I was just surprised that paper, wooden tables, and iPhone images weren't involved.
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@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.
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@heterodox 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 and my health insurer that I have absolutely no use of but contain very sensitive data.
It might be worth checking to see if your bank/credit union hosts shredding events -- mine does them every month or two.
My city
doesdid.
fake edit: fixed for covid.
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@TimeBandit said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
It's very efficient at permanently destroying the paper, and produce some heat as an added bonus
Problem is the heat sometimes is coming in from the outside because of those beautiful floating embers.
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@strangeways said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@Polygeekery said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
a 56k connection
You're being very, very optimistic.
Before DSL was available (here in silly valley), you're right. On a good day, I could get 33k.
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@remi said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
My own experience therefore started by printing out the PDF to sign it, then scanning it (or taking a picture of it to add the Wooden Table) and finally (!) going through what you describe. At the other end, the PDF is also very likely to get printed again because The Process requires a physical copy (I know that some administrations do that because some stuff still needs to be physically sent in anywhere between 3 and 7 identical copies...).
That's common process here too. My wife used it a lot. Now that she works from home and does not have a printer and scanner handy, she switched to just copying the once scanned signature to the PDFs directly. It's faster and effectively the same anyway.
Electronic signatures are legally equivalent to signing on paper here, but there does not seem to be any provision for companies to sign certificates of their employees, so everybody would need it directly from the certification authority and most companies only bother with that for the executives who sign contracts. Invoices and similar stuff is good enough with the copied hand-written signature and it's simpler (if one party signs electronically, the others can't sign & scan or paste their signatures as that invalidates the electronic one, so until everybody has certificate, it's easier not to use it).
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@Polygeekery said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
If only such a thing were legal to do..... If only......
It is. Well, not if you need the physically signed paper. But if you can sign&scan, you can scan&paste too.
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@dcon said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
A friend of mine creates fill-in PDFs (entry forms for dog shows). The person filling it in had to convert it to Word, fill it in, and then sent back the docx.
I did something similar once, on purpose. Officials at benefits agencies are a pain in the arse, and if they want my CV “in Word”, they can have an MS Word document whose only contents are the pages of a PDF of said CV. With headers etc. in a shade of blue that looks nice and is easily readable on-screen but, entirely by accident, of course, becomes very pale when the document is printed out in black and white.
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@Gurth said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
pages of a PDF of said CV
Included as images you mean?
Does it have a distinct wood finish around the edges?
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@Gurth said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@dcon said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
A friend of mine creates fill-in PDFs (entry forms for dog shows). The person filling it in had to convert it to Word, fill it in, and then sent back the docx.
I did something similar once, on purpose. Officials at benefits agencies are a pain in the arse, and if they want my CV “in Word”, they can have an MS Word document whose only contents are the pages of a PDF of said CV. With headers etc. in a shade of blue that looks nice and is easily readable on-screen but, entirely by accident, of course, becomes very pale when the document is printed out in black and white.
Paging @hungrier, why is this not an emoji?
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@JBert said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@Gurth said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
pages of a PDF of said CV
Included as images you mean?
As a PDF placed in the Word document. Meaning the text is not editable, not selectable, not searchable, etc. within Word.
Does it have a distinct wood finish around the edges?
That might be overdoing it slightly, I think.
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@topspin said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@Gurth said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@dcon said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
A friend of mine creates fill-in PDFs (entry forms for dog shows). The person filling it in had to convert it to Word, fill it in, and then sent back the docx.
I did something similar once, on purpose. Officials at benefits agencies are a pain in the arse, and if they want my CV “in Word”, they can have an MS Word document whose only contents are the pages of a PDF of said CV. With headers etc. in a shade of blue that looks nice and is easily readable on-screen but, entirely by accident, of course, becomes very pale when the document is printed out in black and white.
Paging @hungrier, why is this not an emoji?
Looking at this a bit closer, at emote size it looks kind of like the idol scene from Indiana Jones, but with a red Big Bird:
e:
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@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 (some are slowly moving to accepting e-signatures but the whole point of your post is when processes can't/aren't updated... so some still don't).
Where is this? In the USA, e-signatures have been legally considered just as valid and binding as ink ones for 20 years now.
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@Mason_Wheeler 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 (some are slowly moving to accepting e-signatures but the whole point of your post is when processes can't/aren't updated... so some still don't).
Where is this?
France, I presume.
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@Mason_Wheeler 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 (some are slowly moving to accepting e-signatures but the whole point of your post is when processes can't/aren't updated... so some still don't).
Where is this? In the USA, e-signatures have been legally considered just as valid and binding as ink ones for 20 years now.
This law says that e-signatures and electronic documents MAY be used if you want, not that they SHALL be used by everyone. I'm sure the various governments will get around to changing their procedures any day now.
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Maybe you guys should implement vote by fax
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@Luhmann actually : I heard that voters abroad could choose to mail or fax. As millenials don't know what either is these days, apparently it was ok to use a fax app on your iPhone (which goes back full circle to @Polygeekery 's point)
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@robo2 said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
millenials
WTF, those are old enough to vote already?
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@Gurth said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@robo2 said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
millenials
WTF, those are old enough to vote already?
Don't the years fly by.
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@Gurth said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@robo2 said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
millenials
WTF, those are old enough to vote already?
Millennials, also known as Generation Y (or simply Gen Y), are the demographic cohort following Generation X and preceding Generation Z. Researchers and popular media use the early 1980s as starting birth years and the mid-1990s to early 2000s as ending birth years, with 1981 to 1996 a widely accepted defining range for the generation.
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@topspin Yeah. Like, some of us millennials are getting old...
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@robo2 said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
As millenials don't know what either is these days
Kind reminder that millenials were born in the 80s and early 90s.
Edit: multi-
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Sorta on-topic, spotted over at AAM:
- The fax machine
My very first job out of university was in the IT department of pretty large company. The department was a lot of fun, think the IT crowd.
Our network admin had been there forever (and still works there 12 odd years later). He had been trying to get rid of all the fax machines for a couple of years already when I started working there, but there was still one left. A few people insisted they still needed it.
After another meeting where this one fax machine came up and being told that the fax machine could not go, he had enough. Once everyone was gone, he unplugged it.
About half a year later, he brought up the machine again. “No,” people said, “the machine cannot go. We use it quite often.” “How is it possible then,” our network admin asked, “that none of you have plugged it back in?”
And that was the day he was finally rid of the last fax machine.
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@Parody said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
I'm sure the various governments will get around to changing their procedures any day now.
My week is going to be a fucking madhouse, but someone (@TimeBandit comes to mind) keep on me to explain a that's been relayed to me about that subject.
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@Polygeekery This is your friendly reminder.
The week is done, it's technically the weekend now.N.B.: The bill for the service will be burned as soon as it's printed, so it won't be mailed. No need to cross the border
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@Polygeekery said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
Surely they don't place a call from one modem to the next in the same datacenter? Right? If we assume that they do, then things are even more retarded.
Not sure if things have changed in the last 13 (approx) years, or if it is different outside the USA.... But at that time, they absolutely had to use actual hardware to do a proper (paperless, electronic only) faxing with retaining (internally for a service) the fax transmission and reception reports.
That specific step was what made it "legal". One company (mid-range player, I can not legally reveal who, but some research may resolve it, the charges were public and filed in New York) cut out that step, and was bankrupted (though the executives escaped criminal convictions IIRC - it has been a while)
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@TheCPUWizard true shit? I know you can't legally reveal who it was and all of that. But perhaps this has happened other times and you could just PM me a random related article similar to it?
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@TheCPUWizard said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
but some research may resolve it
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@Polygeekery said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@Parody said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
I'm sure the various governments will get around to changing their procedures any day now.
My week is going to be a fucking madhouse, but someone (@TimeBandit comes to mind) keep on me to explain a that's been relayed to me about that subject.
Got more time now to stop this teasing?
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@TimeBandit said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@TheCPUWizard said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
but some research may resolve it
I tried. Couldn't find shit. Gave up.
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@Polygeekery said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@TheCPUWizard true shit? I know you can't legally reveal who it was and all of that. But perhaps this has happened other times and you could just PM me a random related article similar to it?
60 seconds on google turned up this article about two similar cases in the last couple of years, Amerifactors and Ryerson: https://www.natlawreview.com/article/fcc-reconfirms-document-transmittedreceived-digital-electronic-file-not-tcpa-covered
Not sure about the one from 13 years ago, though.