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Comment by actionfromafar | Hacker News Reader

For some things, you must use paper (or as it turns out, USB).

Why the bank decided to use USB for this purpose, instead of paper, is very strange.

Here in Poland, I've already had several banks and at least one insurer send me CD-ROMs. Never heard of anyone sending USB sticks before, but I'm not surprised. The problem is, approximately no one owns a CD/DVD reader anymore, and there are no modern read-only physical media. With SD cards also going the way of the floppy, USB stick is just about the only medium you can hope most customers have means to read.

SD cards are really neat. Theoretically they could have been made with a fixed notch so they would always present as read-only.

Since SD cards and USB sticks are both just computers you plug in to a network port on your computer, they could definitely make write-once SD card controllers.

AFAIK notch is just declaration of intent, like with floppies and magnetic tapes - it's politely asking the reading device to not write to the medium, and it's up to the device to respect it (or up to user to not bridge the notch with a piece of tape).

Still, actual write-once (or read/write until hardware fuse is triggered, read-only afterwards) SD cards should be possible to make.

It depends on the card. Sometimes it is just a suggestion to the firmware, sometimes it physically prevents writes.

I've definitely encountered read-only SD cards which I couldn't figure out a way to set it back to RW mode.

> For some things, you must use paper

Do you have a source backing that up?

Aside from the local tax collector, which insists on snailmailing me a copy of all correspondence even though they also sent everything to me digitally, I can't even remember the last time I received any documents on paper, and I'm in the EU.

5 words: Google search eu durable medium.

https://www.fca.org.uk/firms/durable-medium

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=788714a1-d7b6...

Why did you need a source for this?

From your link

"A PDF can therefore meet the definition of a durable medium."

Neither of those sources back up your claim that paper (or a USB drive, for that matter) is required in certain cases. The court case cited in your second link even lays out the conditions under which a website can be considered to satisfy the requirements.

Danish institutions (including banks) seems fine with PDFs.

I think that's shown by the post statistics: around 25 letters received per resident, per year.

I can't remember the last letter I received which only contained papers.

I'm asking for a source. You're just reformulating the statement I asking a source for.

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