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Comment by Hokusai | Hacker News Reader

I have a digital signature for all my online interactions with the government. In Sweden, for example, there is a system named BankID that is used to access your bank account or pay your taxes.

The last time I used a fax was one connected to a Windows 2000 server in a small company. So, I will use a scanner and use the shares fax printer. Thanks is almost 20 years ago.

I am surprised how low tech the USA is. I would have expected something like that in a small countryside town, but never in a major city.

What's the reason for such a sad state of technology? I do not find it reasonable nor cost effective.

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> What's the reason for such a sad state of technology?

I think being pioneers is one factor, so they are first to adopt some technologies and then there are procedures and backwards compatibility to maintain. For instance, a while ago I learned that charging using the raised numbers in credit cards can be done still in some places in the US. In my country credit cards arrived much later, skipping that phase, and so we didn't have technical/procedural debt when transitioning to NFC credit card reading/mobile apps.

Similar things happen in many other fields, I think it is one of the hidden costs of being first adopters. For instance banks and airliners where pioneers in the use of IT, and now many are stuck with obsolete mainframes, languages and GUIs. The grocery shop around the corner adopted IT just a few years ago, and they have a shiny, modern tactile system instead of a green phosphor GUI done in COBOL.

>For instance, a while ago I learned that charging using the raised numbers in credit cards can be done still in some places in the US. In my country credit cards arrived much later, skipping that phase, and so we didn't have technical/procedural debt when transitioning to NFC credit card reading/mobile apps.

What technical debt? Having to put raised lettering on credit cards?

I don't remember the details since it was a while ago but apparently for instance they couldn't have virtual/multiple accounts in one physical card because raised numbers for the account were desired, in line with: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/03/embossed_credit_car...

>they couldn't have virtual/multiple accounts in one physical card

why would you want that?

The idea was, IIRC, that the card would be writable through NFC or BT so you could select which account you preferred without carrying several cards in your wallet.

> I am surprised how low tech the USA is.

In the U.S., many important official dealings (e.g. IRS, DMV) are still done over snail mail, and certain payments still require mailed checks. Coupled with the absurd amount of marketing spam received over snail mail (think 1 out of 100 pieces of mail is legit), it’s a terrible bore having to sift through mail regularly, and very easy to accidentally throw away important mail. The inconvenience of having to use fax for a vanishingly small number of tasks pales in comparison.

s/are still done/can be done/

I don’t think I’ve mailed an IRS return this century. My DMV allows me to renew registration and print temporary plates from their website. They even send me an iCal file to remind me of my next renewal date.

I didn’t say all IRS/DMV businesses are conducted via snail mail. Some are. E.g. ever been audited? Also 1040NR couldn’t be e-filed at least a couple years back. As for DMV, this obviously varies by state (and again, the nature of the business).

I'm in the middle of this right now. I need a copy of my W-2 transcripts from previous years, the IRS is backed up for the "official" interface to do that, so they want me to pull my own papers manually.

To do that online, you need to create an account. They want SMS verification, but refuse to allow pay-by-the-month plans, so you need to have a postcard physically sent out with a verification code.

(incidentally, the "password complexity verification" was broken on Firefox, even with ublock completely disabled. It required a special character but would never accept that I actually had put one. Also, when I cancelled out and tried it on a different browser it locked me out for 24 hours.)

I just did a "request a copy by mail", that will probably show up sooner than the postcard given that it took another 24 hours to clear the lock and create an account on Safari to get the postcard sent out.

Fax is often used in healthcare. As bad as it is, it has the advantage of being universal - there is no vendor lock in. When the alternative is lots of separate systems with their own incompatible file formats and terrible user experience, faxing a document (which produces a paper copy on the other side) might be the easiest way.

I wish there was a universal paper to OCR protocol.

Email is also universal. The difference is that fax has a legal exception carved out for it that permits HIPAA-compliant systems to consider fax as secure while email is considered insecure and thus non-compliant.

Of course fax is horrendously insecure. But the legal exception stands, and when your security posture is dictated by regulatory compliance and not by results, then it's the best solution.

That is technically correct, but it does not answer the actual question. Why is there such exception? Why is nothing changing?

Email isn't universal when it comes to HIPPA.

There's a hundred different companies offering ways to exchange encrypted emails to the medical market, and they're all pretty bad.

This legal extension is valid also in finance, I was doing production support of a fax digitising service in a financial institution around 8 years ago. AFAIK it's still there, creating a fake alert about one of the 8 lines down every week.

I think this is true. The only time I fax, is annually, to renew my insurance. The 'binding letter' requires a physical signature, and they reject a 'digital signature'. Yet, a fax is digitial. All righty then.

Our nation is pretty much run by and for older Americans who don't like change and don't value technology.

> I do not find it reasonable nor cost effective.

How do you convince a manager twice your age that you know more about tech than them and can get it to work in their favor but their so scared of technology that they still force you to do all your work in paper?

That is the workforce in the US right now. It's old people in management that are too scared to learn tech and don't trust younger people who do know how to make things efficient.

I can only chalk it up to a combination of misaligned incentives, cost cutting, and legacy technology. These vary with locality but wear the same veneer. Some aspects are surprisingly seamless. Some are seamless but hidden behind unnecessary complexity. Some are just downright archaic. It's like a tired beast that exists because its heart won't quit.

Mostly politics. During the 90s and early 2000s there were initiatives to build national IDs tied to biometrics. The initial response from the reactionary element was that it was the mark of the beast, etc. it would also make it harder to exploit undocumented labor.

In the 2010s, that shifted with demographics and those folks saw ID as a tool suppress voter turnout and advance the immigration policies.

One weird thing that I often see is that "technological progress" indexes by various agencies (Facebook's comes to mind as the first one) gives the US a good position. Yet we hear these horror stories. There seems to be a massive dissonance between different areas and professions in the US.

Can anyone confirm or correct me and explain why these indexes are like that?

> I have a digital signature for all my online interactions with the government.

I really wish we had something like that in the US... I actually have a scanned image of my signature that I use to "sign" documents digitally. Feels ridiculous, but it works, and prevents me from having to print out / scan in documents.

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