this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
446 points (99.6% liked)
Programmer Humor
33569 readers
40 users here now
Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
Rules:
- Posts must be relevant to programming, programmers, or computer science.
- No NSFW content.
- Jokes must be in good taste. No hate speech, bigotry, etc.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I told this story before. I was migrating an old system to a new one and we discovered that we were still sending faxes to some companies. Our system would create a PDF and send to a server that was connected to a phone line. So we called those companies to ask if we could find another way to send the documents. We learned that they too had a server with a software that would receive the fax and transform it in a PDF.
I work at a bank and it's mind boggling how often I encounter systems very similar to this. A signed PDF isn't good enough but send it via fax and suddenly it's secure ๐
I worked at an MSP for years and had clients who would send it back and forth that way to each other. The most common were medical practices, but banking wasn't far behind.
Fax was considered secure because you could lock up the fax machine physically.
My favorite setup was a medical practice that dealt with stomach issues, including colon cancer, and their neighbor in the same building who was a pathology lab. They both had the PDF to fax and fax to PDF servers set up to send back and forth when someone could just walk 50 feet and hand over paperwork.