Some fun fax about Germany

[Hitcore]

Germany still relies a lot on fax machines. Not mentioned in the article, but I happen to know that to the otherwise high-tech Japan the same applies. Often it is for legal reasons. Still, always cool to see when old tech still prevails, in some way!

Germany, the land of tech pioneers, still relies on fax and paper for basic public services. Why is digital government stuck in the slow lane while Denmark and India race ahead?

Why Germany struggles to go digital

Germany still leans on fax machines and paperwork for basic public services. How can a nation of tech pioneers be so slow to adopt digital government?

www.dw.com

 

[Retro]

That's crazy and I believe the legal profession in the UK still does this too. It beats me why they consider this more secure than modern methods of data transfer. Perhaps it's to show a human signature on contracts? That's definitely an issue with digital only documents that must use a different system to sign.

Interestingly, the article talks about digital alternatives, but faxes are actually digital, just a very antequated form of it, kinda like computers of the 1980s compared to those of today.

If one reads a scanned document, it looks quite the mess, however, if it's text generated by the fax machine itself, or fax software, it looks pristine, if blocky. The difference is due to the low resolution of the fax scan and that it's strictly black and white text, no shades of grey, so computer generated text fits properly into the pixel matrix, just like you see in this post, for example.

 

[Hitcore]

Perhaps it's to show a human signature on contracts?

I once had to fill out a form in PDF format, and sign it. I guess they expected that people would print out the form, fill it out by hand, then just put a little scribble like normal, scan it, and then send the scan back. But I did not have a working scanner available at that moment. Or a printer for that matter. So I ended up using a PDF editor and simply typed into the form. My signature I made with literally MS Paint by mouse (it was awkward to do and it looked dumb) and pasted that in. It got accepted.