Criticism of paper-and-fax coronavirus infection reports spark change in Japan
mainichi.jp
mainichi.jp
I've seen other things like it, but this was the most remarkable to me. The government seems to randomly put up signs like that to see if they take hold. It never seems to go gradually -- with early adopters, etc, etc. Either everybody goes with it or nobody does.
I'm trying to think of something that is easy to verify, but it's nearly midnight here and I can't think of anything off hand. If I remember I'll try to post back later.
For another one - bubble tea. A year or so back it went from not popular at all to lines over an hour long outside most bubble tea places, and the word 'tapiru' from tapioca and suru - roughly 'to bubble tea' was one of Japans hot phrases for the year [1]
[1] https://japantoday.com/category/national/nominees-for-japan%...
The next year when I came back, everyone had an iPhone and a Facebook account.
So that was another one of those almost overnight changes, when the population migrated from emails to online messaging almost immediately.
Even here in Canada, and I'm sure in much of the world, fax is a common tool used by doctors' offices on a daily basis. It has some definite downsides, but at the end of the day when you replace it, you should have to provide an alternative that doesn't compromise workflows, interoperability, or standards.
In fax-based systems, anyone who can prepare the paper document can, in principle, participate; because the fax protocol is built on long-expired patents and widely-published standards implemented by many vendors.
When it comes to other forms of document filling and transfer, the standards now vary widely; when they say the fax system is outdated, are they imagining the replacement is a straightforward cookie-based html form website backed by a database, or do the want something more "up to date" than that?
The thing is that it's absolutely trivial to set up a workflow that from a user standpoint operates identically to fax, but it still doesn't happen because of institutional inertia.
Standalone fax machines almost don't exist anymore. You can still find one if you look for it, but the majority of them these days are multifunction print/scan/copy/fax devices. Almost all of these devices can be given credentials to an email account and configured to automatically print messages and supported attachments received in that account. Likewise, they can almost always have a "speed dial" button configured to scan a document and email it to someone as an attachment in some standard format.
Put those two things together and as far as the users on each end are concerned the icon on their speed dial button might have changed but everything else appears to operate the same. One end sets a document on a machine and presses a button, the document feeds in, and a short time later it spits out at the other end. It's more reliable, higher quality, and potentially even faster if it's a large document.
It's equal or better in every single way, but if you actually try to implement this you'll almost always get pushback from one end or the other, if not both.
I say if an organization requires fax for anything in 2020, not just as an option but as the only way to do a specific thing, that organization should be considered unfixable and just thrown away to be replaced wholesale. Even if they default to fax for anything, that should be a huge red flag that things need to change.
Fax is evil and should have been dead a decade ago.
what?
> Fax is evil and should have been dead a decade ago.
why?
Paper document facsimile is a useful facility basically as long as people fill or sign things out by hand or with stamps, and with Japanese even just coding people's names correctly into a computer is a task that requires both specialized skills and tools.
These sweeping statements just strike me as ignorant and devoid of empathy.
You're skipping the key part: "I say if an organization requires fax for anything in 2020, not just as an option but as the only way to do a specific thing,"
If they haven't bothered to provide a non-fax option for submitting data by now what would make you believe they ever will unless forced? If you don't understand how that's a problem then we don't exist in the same universe. I can't explain it to you.
> Paper document facsimile is a useful facility basically as long as people fill or sign things out by hand or with stamps, and with Japanese even just coding people's names correctly into a computer is a task that requires both specialized skills and tools.
That's what scanners are for. Scanning documents to store or email is perfectly fine.
I'm talking about the specific act of using facsimile technology to transmit said document at low resolution in pseudo-realtime (but not really in most modern implementations) over telephone lines.
There is no situation where there's not a better answer unless one party refuses to use more modern technology.
> These sweeping statements just strike me as ignorant and devoid of empathy.
As someone who has to support fax users, yea, I'm devoid of empathy for them. Entirely. Faxes have all kinds of problems that are a pain in the ass to prove to the user that it's just the horrible ancient tech they insist on using.
The fax in general will, I'm afraid, still hang around Japan for quite some time. My mother-in-law doesn't have a mobile phone but she does have a fax.
So yes, I think it's an actual fax machine in those cases.
I wonder how quickly the cost of the boots-on-the-ground-based security system would pay for a robust electronic infrastructure to replace it.
* Plain Old Telephone Service
Covid is forcing many of these companies to transition to electronic signatures like Docusign.
Electronic signatures should have a lower level of trust than those performed in front of notaries and other officials. There is no way to check for coercion and many other ways in which the signature would normally be invalidated.
It's not an uncommon thing for people in Japan to be divorced without even knowing it. Their spouse secretly grabs their hanko for 5 seconds to do a quick stamp, goes to the city office alone, hands in the divorce form with both names stamped, and it's finalized. There's actually a separate form called a fujuri todoke that you can do in advance to block these one-sided divorces, showing that the whole stamping system is flawed if you need to do separate forms to block potential events of it being used without your knowledge.
Nearly anything works better than stamps.
They could just have you stand in front of the notary and swear (after the notary checks your identity), for similar effect and security.
The signature is only a small part of the whole procedure.
In most routine transactions, it really only shows everyone involved that This Is Serious.
As a little experiment, I once looked up the legal ramifications of 'faking' your own signature. Ie signing with a signature that's completely unlike your normal signature. Or changing your signature around every day.
Exactly. The level of trust of the electronic signatures should be as low as it can be, as computer security is really, really hard, especially outside of military settings: it should only be used to prevent the flood of login attempts and to allow to get or submit some less critical information, not to be legally equivalent to notarized signatures.
Unfortunately some administrations swallow the propaganda of the companies selling the electronic signatures and promote them as "solving everything" then they are "surprised" that the citizenship is skeptical.
And we know how unreliable "Certificate Authorities" are, and how hard it is even for big and very rich companies to maintain their certificates.
It's not that the cryptography behind the signature is the problem: it's everything around that is the problem that needs a lot of care.
Of course, you can only check for immediate coercion. You can make sure nobody has a gun to their head, but you can hardly check that nobody has a gun to their children in the car outside, or their brother that lives on a different continent.
At the end of the day, a contract is just a piece of paper and your signature is just some ink. Contracts only have power if courts enforce them. (At least for private entities. International law and sovereign entities are a whole other ballgame)