this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2024
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Are you in Germany? They’re still using fax, predominantly, here. My doctor wanted to fax my records, couldn’t email them to me. I said of course don’t have a fkn fax, it’s 2024. I asked if people still have pots lines for fax machines and she said they use e-fax. There’s your German efficiency!
Anyway, government passed some law saying they have to cease using them (for gov business) by end of 2024. In the meantime, don‘t throw that telegraph out just yet!
Nah, was mostly just making a joke about the other old tech that Japan was notorious for still using.
Also, I'm really confused WHY eFax is fine but email isn't? I mean, once you lose the verifiability of the phone logs that say your doctor called you at 2:15pm and send 3 pages of shit, uh, you might as well just email a PDF. (Note: I'm in the US and the 'verifiable transmission' thing was why/how we did it for a long time, but that died in about 10 seconds when someone figured out that email was cheaper.)
It’s crazy! The doctor said they weren’t allowed to use email because fax was more secure. I explained that using e-fax wasn’t any more secure. I also reached out to a guy I know who works IT for a small village and the way he laid it out is that Germany doesn’t want to have to upgrade and train everyone on email, buy all the computers, go through the growing pains of new tech.
This sums up Germany in general… if it’s not broken then shut up, there’s nothing to fix. You can’t even go grocery shopping or wash your car on Sundays. The rest of the EU runs laps around Germany on tech and progressive life.
(Transplant from USA, I should note. It’s been a journey.)
Here in Canada , fax is widely used in the medical field in the same way. One could not run a medical office or organization of any kind or size without a fax line. I have heard the legal sector is likewise reliant.
In a functional way I don't know it's wrong to say email is less secure. It's not that they don't want to buy computers. Everyone has freaking computers; gimme a break. Email (1980s tech) is almost as antiquated as fax machines (1970s) and has many vulnerabilities. There is no way in hell your dermatologist is getting to a PGP party anytime soon. They probably use the same password for every account and that password is probably their name or something and have been using the same one for 20 years. The password is known by perhaps dozens of current and former employees. The email is downloaded onto devices which may not use encryption for storage. They don't install windows patches but they do install random shit from the internet. And so on. OTOH, who is hacking fax machines?
The solution isn't to move to email, it's to hop past email to use a natively encrypted technology with security enforced by a service provider. If the public funders would step up to support a Free Software solution this could have been done already. But instead they fund this and that proprietary system that doesn't work out, then have to start from scratch in a few years. There hasn't been incentive to create interoperability. Just a bunch of privately-held companies frothing at the mouth to make all the $$$ they see in the health care industries competing with each other.
BTW I have heard that fax machines are still in wide use in the US medical field also, but it depends what system you are in. E.g "kaiser" system has it's own internal comms system they use and so on. But inter-system, fax will always be the lowest common denominator.