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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

It is more secure in some senses. You can't get a PDF-borne virus from an old-school fax reception. My tax preparer only accepts mailed documents and faxed documents. It's sometimes a pain, but I have to admit that I'm a little bit happy that he's more paranoid than I am about my financial information.

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> You can't get a PDF-borne virus from an old-school fax reception.

How about a JPEG-borne virus instead? https://research.checkpoint.com/sending-fax-back-to-the-dark...

"not fax" doesn't have to mean "use one of the least secure digital formats in existence". If you're goal is to replicate a fax you should probably limit yourself to a basic bitmap encoding similar to group 3/4 encoded faxes and create a validated decoder (something many fax machines lack).

Funny, if somebody had told me they only accepted mail documents I would ask for their email. Not to be annoying or whatever, but because today I assume mail means e-mail, not snail or physical mail.

Actually, you can! There was a presentation at DEFCON this year (DEFCON 26) showing exactly this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLCE8spVX9Q

> "See for yourself first-hand as we give a live demonstration of the first ever full fax exploitation, leading to complete control over the entire device as well as the network, using nothing but a standard telephone line. "

Maybe it's time for you to find another tax preparer. Mine accepts encrypted documents with her public key.

I need my tax guy to be an expert on tax law way more than I need them to be on the cutting edge of computer communications and security.

If he wants to stick to his old-school fax machine and keeps me on the right side of the tax agencies, I can accommodate his preferences on tech.

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