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Comment by usr1106 | Hacker News Reader

I have never owned a printer. When my daughter got old enough to ask why don't we have a printer I said: Whenever you want to print, go to the library and I'll give you the money for printing, there is no limit. For some reason the whole family's printing budget has never exceeded 5 Euros per year in the last 20 years. Distance to the library cannot be the reason, it is 1 minute from school. I worked in a paperless company for many years, where the printer was locked to print only contracts and similar documents.

While printing is overrated, of course the library printer needs a driver, too. And preferably open source in true Stallman spirit (I'm not a big Stallman fan, but wasn't it so that the whole Free Software movement started because of a closed source printer driver?). But as a domain of little general importance, I am not surprised about the lack of a thriving community.

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I still find reading a long paper (the academic kind) in printed format is much more superior to any electronic screen in any form factor including e-ink displays.

Using pen on paper is much more natural, tactile and much more efficient in terms of concentration and uninterrupted work for me.

YMMV, of course.

I agree. I've been tempted by the Remarkable tablet though.

Might still not be as effective as having multiple pages of notes in front of you at once.

Though I did order one.

Being able to quickly flip and spread pages on a desk is always faster than a screen but, remarkable of course has its benefits for some scenarios.

While I love to read and write on paper, I don't buy any paper books anymore.

You might find that the ReMarkable (2) tablet provides a feel that is similar enough to paper that it works for you.

On the other hand, the second version costs $500, a luxury purchase for many people.

Remarkable is nice, e-ink is also nice. I live glued to my Kobo e-book reader and love reading novels and non-fiction from 300 dpi e-ink screen.

However, e-ink lacks speed and color. The papers I read use a lot of color in diagrams and waiting for e-ink screen to refresh, reduce its color palette to accelerate and re-refresh to return its previous mode is both distracting and flow breaking for me.

Also, I use a lot of colors for different things on paper. Different highlighters for different stuff (yellow for "further research", blue to "remember this part"), etc.

iPad with Good reader is almost as good as my workflow but this thing is heavy, backlit screens are eye-straining...

Since PDFs are not made for screens it's also distracting to zoom and scroll too.

So we need another format (maybe ePub) for academic papers to read them effectively on digital devices.

There are a number of occasions where I need to print copies of things that I wouldn't feel comfortable doing on a public printer (bank records, tax returns, 2-factor backup codes, paper copies of private keys for crypto wallets, gpg).

100% this. This is the main reason why having a printer is a must-have to me.

I found an interesting service provided by HP called "Instant Ink" [0]. You pay a subscription and get a fixed number of pages per month. Once the printer is low on ink, they'll automatically send you a new cartridge.

What makes it interesting is that there is a 100% free tier that offers 15 pages per month: perfect for infrequent use.

0: https://instantink.hpconnected.com/

I've been using Instant Ink for a couple years now and quite like it. No more late night runs to the store hoping they have the one random cartridge I need. And I have only once run through ink so fast that I found myself without a waiting cartridge that had been previously shipped.

We do a lot of printing in the home right now with virtual schooling for my youngers. Watching them try to complete math assignments (this is early elementary, mind you) on a tablet interface is a frustrating experience, and in my opinion hinders their ability to actually learn the relevant skills. Printing the assignments out on paper and having them use a pencil is both faster and gets them into a learning mode better.

Thanks a lot! I didn't know this existed! And luckily, not just in the US. Sadly, they don't offer something like this for Lasers, as it seems.

I see your point.

I don't remember when I needed to print anything for a bank or the tax office. Certainly not the last 10 years. That probably highly depends on the country. And I did not have any big transactions like buying a house during the last 10 years.

I don't even own crypto currency. Amongst other reasons I don't want to worry in my private life what can go wrong with shitty IT...

The question really is, should you trust presumably a lot of closed source software while printing on internet-connected systems at home? Or even unmaintained open source software. Or open source software that you have not studied. Yeah, I can see some risks, but overall my local library is not known for their cybercriminality skills. So as long as I make sure that I delete my sensitive files ASAP after printing I would not be overly worried.

If I print at work, I at least definitely know that there are several people on the same local network / with admin rights that would have skills to do evil. So even that could be considered risky. But still I do print stuff there (rarely, but it happens) that I would not be comfortable to share.

To elaborate on that, my local library has a pretty dumb laser printer. I don't think it has the memory to store many pages and no significant internet-facing functionality (apart from accepting files if they configued it badly). So I don't think there are significant risks sending my documents thorugh it.

But the city main library has some smart "document center" machine. Amongst other it can "print to pdf" for the paperless age. In other words scan. And send the results to an email address you enter on the touchscreen. Here I would be pretty worried what insecure operating system and software that machine is running. I wouldn't be suprised to read a headline on hackernews that the last 1000 pages printed/scanned on such type of machine are all publicly accessible on the internet...

The main use for my printer is maps for trail running. A custom map produced using OSMaps, some copy+paste magic, with some added notes (navigation hints, checkpoint cut-offs & other pacing notes, emergency numbers), printed on a couple of A4 or A5 sheets of "indestructible" paper, is much more convenient than carrying the full map of the area, or two maps if your route falls over a boundary.

Yes, most of us use GPS watches and have detailed maps on our phones too, but tech can & will fail and when it does while you are a little off course you'll be glad you have the paper map (and, of course, the ability to read it).

There is no need for everyone to have one though: I'm happy to print copies of my maps for others, I know a few people who don't have a printer of their own (they tend to use one at work if needed, or like your suggestion a local library).

I also like printing some things to read and scribble notes on away from the screen. e-ink implementations of this sort of thing are either expensive, so I've not tried them, or smaller than I'd like, or don't work well (big, inexpensive, works well, pick at most two).

What is this "indestructible" paper? (Or was it rather that a phone is anything but in comparison?)

Check out Rite in the Rain, for example. It's impressive stuff; you can write ink on paper while scuba diving, even.

https://www.riteintherain.com

I think the quotes are meant to suggest that while paper is not really indestructible, it's failure mode in poor weather is much more graceful than an electronic device. Put the paper in a plastic bag and I know from experience that it will out last your touchscreen device in a down pour in the middle of the woods :)

Plus you've eliminated battery anxiety when the last thing you need is more things to be anxious about.

You also can buy Tyvek-like paper if you're so inclined. If I'm doing any serious hiking, I'd never depend solely on electronics.

I currently use Xerox "NeverTear" (https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00JWLSZY6/) though there are several other brands readily available that I assume are pretty much the same thing.

I might try Rite in the Rain next time I need to restock (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rite-Rain-Unisex-Waterproof-Copier/...) as it looks about 50% the price-per-sheet and is thinner (75gsm vs 95gsm) which may be better for the maps-folded -into-pocket use case. I am amused/confused that one of the keywords in the URL is "unisex".

Though at only a few sheets per run and most organised runs being cancelled right now, I won't be needing to restock for a while...

The big use of a printer in my household is sheet music. Though some musicians have started using big tablets (with a pedal for turning pages), I expect widespread adoption to be slow and painful.

Musicians are not always particularly tech savvy, and even when they are, they may have little patience for futzing with technology. They expect things to just work, and to not detract from playing and working on the music.

Very well organized musicians and larger ensembles with a dedicated librarian have switched to the tablets, but when you're a bandleader trying to herd 19 cats who were all hired at the last minute, you don't want to add an hour to the time for performing or rehearsing to get them all up and running with disparate platforms, file formats, power cables, and so forth. You hand out folders full of "charts" and off you go.

A significant use of our printer is to print documents to sign, so we can scan the signed copy and email it to a solicitor or bank. Crazy.

MacOS has a "signature" option in Preview for that kind of work.

To add to that, At least on fedora Linux and likely everywhere else Xournal can open PDF files and you can type free form text or even scribble from within the app.

I use a pen because my Lenovo Flex 14 came with one but I imagine you could use a mouse pointer as well.

Replace "sign, scan and email it" with "hanko and fax it" and you are describing most of Japan.

In our company we copy-paste pngs containing signatures into documents. Crazy, too. We also use cryptographic signatures for engineering processes, but most recipients prefer the bitmaps resulting from the png...

I worked somewhere where documents were printed, then signed by one of these https://axidraw.com/ using the client's signature (with their permission) to be posted to a pension provider who required wet signatures.

Comic Sans in their website title. That's a bold move.

Very interesting machine, thanks! I wonder if it does an analysis on input to determine where the start/end marks on a stroke with a fountain pen are.

the drawing software is actually pretty simple and draws "plots", with each stroke being a single plot and the pen lifting after.

What that means is you cannot scan a signature and reproduce it, because the machine won't know where to start and where to lift the pen. We used something like documented here: https://wiki.evilmadscientist.com/Capturing_Handwriting#Capt...

This produces SVGs which have those individual strokes that the machine can reproduce.

jSignature looks interesting. I wrote something like that for capturing signatures on Android years ago, where you work out each plot until the user lifts their finger.

I wonder if you could recreate signatures by examining the depth of the ink where the person lifts their pen, since that typically has the largest deposit of ink at that point, particularly with a fountain pen.

I can't stop watching that video. If I had one of those machines, I'd never get anymore work done.

I once used it to plot the entire globe and didn't get much else done that day!

> If I had one of those machines, I'd never get anymore work done.

Hint: The entry level is at USD475. ;-)

That’s actually surprisingly cheap. If I had more space I might be tempted to get one.

You can get a laser engraver or 3d printer for half the cost of those devices that's much more versatile.

These are based on the EBB board which uses a custom command set rather than the more common GCode command set which is the basis for most CNC machines.

If you're interested in CNC I'd recommend going with something that is based on GCode as it's much more transferable. GCode is used in everything from $100 PCB engravers up to multi-million dollar HAAS milling machines.

I appreciate the advice, but I doubt the laser engraver or 3D printer are going to hold a pen, so it wouldn’t really do what I wanted (of course they’re great to have in their own right).

There are countless examples on the internet of people adding laser engraver modules and pens to their 3d Printers. They're designed to be modified, they use an open source control language utilized by industry, unlike that pen device using a proprietary language.

The $150 laser engravers from Eleksmaker for example have an unused servo pinout on their control boards specifically for adding an accessory like an actuator for a pen. It would be trivially simple to swap out the laser module, which is held in by thumb screws, and replace it with a pen.

Maybe we could eventually use gpg keys to sign documents online. Within the next 50 years or so maybe when governments have caught up.

Not only governments but products that bring this to the masses. Encryption is complex and complicated, I understand why but while it is not simplified for UX, not in implementation, it will be, unfortunately, quite hard to become ubiquitous.

There is legislation in place in the EU to enable digital signing. I think it is currently only on the level of: 'signatures that meet these standards can be legally binding if the contract allows for digital signatures'. I also do believe there is a system to allow countries to do identity attestation. That is, countries will assert that, indeed, this key belongs to this name.

> I also do believe there is a system to allow countries to do identity attestation

not sure about the rest of the EU, in Poland there's a thing called Trusted Profile ("Profil Zaufany") where your bank serves as an "identity provider", i.e. you basically use your online bank account to verify your identity. it's kinda weird! but after that you can use your TP to sign and submit most (?) government forms/docs so it's pretty nice

I've successfully bought a home by self-GPG-signing and emailing documents (even in a country that has an official (albeit horrible) 'digital signature' solution).

I've found that even European bureaucracy is ok with me using MacOS "add signature" or similar feature.

A clerk told me they tell you to print/sign/scan because most people is not familiar or has that feature.

If it doesn't work, here's an app idea: an app to make a document look like it was printed and then scanned.

There has been a few such posts on HN in the past. eg:

FalsiScan – Make it look like a PDF has been hand signed and scanned

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22811653

Ah nice! Following a gist link in the thread you linked I also saw that someone made this website: https://www.scanyourpdf.com

I once wrote my signature on a piece of white paper and scanned it in. Then used paint.net to delete the white parts and save it as a transparent PNG.

Now I just paste that over the appropriate place on electronic documents and email it back.

PSA: For those on macOS, the Preview app has taken this exact concept and built it in for a while now, and I use it all the time. Clicking and dragging on my signature has saved me countless times.

Somehow I am always surprised when I use a new PDF tool and discover that it, like all the others, has failed to use transparency to make signatures look right. No real signature fails to cross something already on a document, but every time we get this stupid blank box around the signature...

I find this rather amusing, because the much maligned Adobe Reader handles this just fine.

I've been using a little app called Xournal on linux for years which does that just fine.

I have a 600dpi png file with black foreground and transparent background.

Xournal drops it anywhere right over the existing pdf image, resized and positioned at will, and the transparent parts are transparent.

Clearly I've been using the wrong tools... fortunately this isn't an extremely common task for me.

I did the same years ago. I've done everything from new job paperwork to buying a house to various government forms and I've yet to have anyone refuse to accept or even comment on the fact that my signature is a pixel-perfect copy on all documents.

I did that once while sitting in my car all right on my phone.

I was about to go in to something I couldn't blow off, and I couldn't blow off returning the mail as soon as possible either.

But I had a Note 4 phone and a working cell connection and managed to get it all done in a few minutes right there in my drivers seat.

I think I didn't even end up using the Note4's stylus but writing the signature on paper and taking a pic.

It was a while ago so I don't remeber exactly what I did or what apps I used. I probably tried a few different things on the spot before I found something that worked. Maybe the official adobe android app had signature support like the desktop app does now, or maybe I had to do it more manually with some other combination of apps, but I know that I went from receiving an email with a pdf attachment to returning that email with my own new pdf attachment all in about 15 minutes with nothing but my phone.

If only they would accept a detached PGP signature based on the contents of the document ...

A Galaxy Note device will permanently solve this use case. I love paper, and use it (and fountain pens), but my Galaxy Note with S-Pen made the process of signing and sending legal documents far more pain-free. Open PDF, sign, re-save, send back. Done.

Owning a laser printer instead of an inkjet changes the economics of home printing drastically. Also the time savings of not having to physically go to the library to print is huge.

It mostly changed the economics of my frustration. I’ve never owned an inkjet printer that didn’t infuriate me at least every other print.

The laserjet I’ve owned for 4ish years now has yet to infuriate me.

Yeah laser is overwhelmingly the way to go. The only problem Ive encounteres is that the costs for wide format go through the roof. I need to print 11x17's regularly but infrequently. The solution i figured out was to get a good consumer all-in-one laser for normal size paper, and then a wideformat inkjet. I hate havung two printers, but the total cost is like $600 instead of $2500+.

I have not one but two inkjet printers at home. One's an all-in-one, the other is a large format photo printer. It's been so long since I've used either that the ink is probably dried up.

On the other hand, I have a cheap laser printer and it just works. I don't print a lot. I've gotten out of the habit of printing and filing most things and just keep a PDF. But there's still a bunch of random stuff: recipes, trail maps, various things I do need to send as physical copies, etc. I don't need to print it all and could take 30 minutes to print the things I do need at Staples or wherever, but I have a home office and it's a lot easier to just print out a few pages every now and then.

My last printer was from 2 decades ago and was only used to print documents.

I kind of miss reading source code written by others on dot-matrix long sheets, you can reason around existing code in a different way than navigating through a text editor or IDE. Still not indispensable, though.

Haha I thought I was the only one. When I started being interested in coding, I remember printing the code of some mIRC scripts, and later on printing, html/css files.

Everything I would learn was because it was in the source of some other program,and finding something I never seen before was a thrill.

Fun times!

Yes, being able to scribble on a source code listing has its advantages in the case of truly obfuscated code.

I have done it once in the last 15 years or so, only 2 years ago. Imagine the faces in the office when I worked with that source code listing in front of me :)

Absolutely! No better way to consume other's code than going through it on a printout!

This was the very reason I looked out for a modern dot-matrix printer, last year, only to find, that they have gotten pretty expensive (at least when compared to the InkJets and Lasers and in color, you also want more than 80 columns, etc.).

Also, what I did not find was a printer utility, that would print as many pages as still readable onto the paper, with a special emphasis on source code (hilite, etc.)

I did not purchase, however, since it is not so often, that I have to go through somebody else's full source-code.

no thanks. I'll take one click to find a reference over paper any day.

It's not about finding references, it's about the general structure of the code and annotations on the printout.

Granted, I guess this is a preference of people who cut their teeth in another era of 80x25 displays before modern editors so to each their own.

> it's about the general structure of the code and annotations on the printout.

This! It's like "wading" through the code, being able to jump forth and back and setting remarks.

Re: utility, how about enscript? E.g. enscript -E -2rj *.c

Cool, thanks!

I used to print some very long shell scripts at my previous employer when I was newly hired.

I sat there most of a morning with a rubber, a mechanical pencil and a highlighter and worked my way through the code.

It felt very good to have made sense of the whole thing to a reasonable level of detail.

I highlighted the key tokens, variables and function names and took notes on the side of the pages (sometimes in the back too).

It felt very very good.

Some of my colleagues where true masters of shellscript, some scripts were remarkable for what they achieved, along with both error checking and error recovery. I've learnt a lot that morning just by looking up commands and syntax I didn't know at the time.

“Where’s your chain printer?”

— Sid (http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20001002)

It seems to me that a lot of people print at work/school whenever they need to, rather than own a printer. At least that's the most common around me. Employers generally don't mind as long as it's only a few pages sometimes.

Sheet music is the one area I haven't found a good replacement for in terms of printing. All contracts and important docs I do in PDF or DocuSign or some such. But there is just no good replacement for printed sheet music.

I’m not a classically trained musician but have you tried an iPad? I use mine for guitar tabs and have found it way better than paper songbooks.

No big enough I find. A4 sheet music is just what I'm used to. Being able to write extra notation in (finger markings for piano or practice marks) with a pencil is just so easy. Also being able to have two sheets side by side. On an iPad you're limited to one. Sure, you could buy two, but then what if your score is 4 pages long? You have to either do split PDFs or swipe multiple times on the other one or something.

Edit: I'm sure an iPad pro might be good size and resolution wise but I couldn't justify the cost just for sheet music. Plus the multi page issue.

I once bought a scanner/printer combination for my home office. Not having to go to the print shop for every letter saves so much time, 5 euro per month is nothing compared to that.

Moyer's Law - when you can reliably print any document on any printer there will be no more computer science problems left to solve.

Corollary to Moyer's Law - The timestamps will still be wrong.

Printing is not overrated. I like paper, its reads that much easier. These days all in one laser printers are cheap, of good quality and they print for low €/sheet.

Personally I have great experiences with Brother on Linux. Brother has well-maintained Linux drivers, recommended.

You’re at a disadvantage today if you prefer reading on paper, it’s too slow. I’ve tried to go back to paper and I can’t. The information density is low and it’s too hard to maneuver paper quick enough to make up for that. Computers create a “Mary Poppins bag” of information that would take huge desks and rooms to match.

Using CUPS on my Linux machines has always been an exercise in frustration. Installing the proprietary brother drivers using their shell script always just works. I wish they had drivers for ARM though so I could use a raspberry pi for sharing the printer instead of my Intel server.

I've been working on printer related technology for my whole career and I almost never print anything. Ask any IT person the technology they least like dealing with and they will all say printers.

I don't own a printer myself

But my small-ish company owns several, and in my country it is basically essential...

A major reason to have a printer here, is that if you do ANY, and I mean ANY business, you need to file a electronic form with the government, and print a physical copy.

The reason for this, is that we have a transportation tax, and if the road police stops you, you must have the printed document on you to show to the cop the goods you are transporting had the tax paid.

Weirdly a lot of people DO NOT know that it is the road police that is the intended readers of the document, so the information that is relevant to them is often wrong (people file price, tax, etc... correctly, and then put random values in volume amount, weight, size, registration plate of vehicle, etc...) then they get surprised the police seizes their stuff.

And many just don't print it, and assume sending to the digital document is enough. (it is not, a cop in the middle of nowhere might not have internet to check on the official servers the document, and thus he will want the paper copy that he can read with a flashlight)

Yes, people don't realize that truckers (who are transporting goods and equipment) still use paper a lot for official permits and info. In my country, they were among the earliest demographics to adopt pagers, then mobile phones, but at the same time, they all have a steel clipboard that opens to a storage compartment for a stack of paper permits (one or more for every state in the USA you are driving across), log sheets (for state and federal government, job sites, etc). And while you must file things with some government offices electronically, you better have the paper copy for the cops and Department of Transportation inspectors in various states as well as for mandatory road-scale-houses on interstate highways.

I'm with you. I wish CUPS would not be installed by default. I'm curious if most people print in 2020. I don't either. In Japan you can print via USB stick, sd-card, wifi, cloud, etc at pretty much every convenience store and there's usually one close by. where I live there is one 1 minute way, another 2 minutes, another 2.5 minutes, another 4 minutes, and probably 10 more within 10 minutes. I know that's less common in other places but I did use the printer at a library in SF so I know they have (had?) those services too

In any case I uninstall CUPS when I install a new installation of linux because, at least in the past, I'd see tons of files updated all the time every update all related to cups, something I wasn't using at all.

> In Japan you can print via USB stick, sd-card, wifi, cloud

Yep. Even if you need to own a printer, lots of modern printers for office or home also offer those options. For 99% of the cases it's just as good as printing from the computer.

This is how it should be, IMO. CUPS is ok, but I would rather never have to install any software related to HP, Epson or Canon on my machine, let alone a driver.

In Japan I would trust that system as well, here I am too worried that people syphon off the interesting confidental stuff off.

> I wish CUPS would not be installed by default

I don't. CUPS does not harm (it's lightweight and quiet), and I don't want to have to install it or configure it if I ever need to use a printer. Drivers should be installed automatically too, so I don't have to think about it. I install whatever mainstream distro, connect to whatever printer there is at the place I am with my laptop and it should just work. People have other things to do than (finding out how to) configure a printer and install packages for that.

Distros cannot assume people will know in advance what printer they will need to use with a laptop. For a desktop computer, it's slightly different, but still, common things just need to work out of the box, life is too short for fiddling for most people (I like fiddling though, but only when I choose to do it).

On less mainstream / more KISS distros, it would be okay (better) not to install CUPS by default though.

> In Japan you can print via USB stick, sd-card, wifi, cloud, etc at pretty much every convenience store

So you walk 1 minute to the convenience store, spend a minute fiddling with the plug, another few trying to go through the menu. Finally get your print, and walk a minute back. Say it takes 10 minutes total.

Meanwhile I just press print and in less than 10s my printout is on my desk.

I can see why some people don’t need a printer, but I need one often enough that walking to the conbini and doing that dance is a major PITA.

Inkjet printers are not reliable well because sometimes ink clogging or something bad is happen if I don't use frequently. Using printers in convenience store is no hassle.

Personally nearest convenience store is not near so I have an inkjet printer.

In Japan they still use fax machines.

I guess in Germany, too. (Haven't followed the development in the last couple of years.)

In the US, most medical organizations still use faxes.

I hate it. If I need to send something to my insurance company, I have to print it out, and go to the UPS Store (and faxing is not cheap).

Otherwise, I hardly ever use my printer.

I remember seeing an HN comment from someone who runs an online fax thing. I wish I had saved the comment when I saw it. Basically you can just fax stuff from your computer for a small fee.

The problem is medical related stuff can be quite sensitive and a rando fax internet service could easily be looking at the images you fax and saving the interesting ones.

That’s why I don’t do that.

In any case, it’s infrequent enough, that it isn’t an issue.

I used to do that for my own company just for our own customers to use via our software.

It was just a single T1 line in a data center with a linux box with a Dialogic T1 card installed, running HylaFax+.

This got us 24 high speed fax lines on an internet connected server, and all the application servers sent jobs to it via the regular hylafax+ client (which is like a slightly customized ftp)

The users didn't use the fax lines directly to send arbitrary files or prints from their desktops, they just used our software which had the option to fax things it generated. For some years there were several thousand end users and back end automated processes generating tons of faxes 24/7 and it hardly ever scratched the surface of that T1, because it often sent the faxes faster than the traditional 9600. Many times the receiving machine could receive at 14.4, and sometimes even at 19.2 or 33.6, and the server queing up the jobs and using all 24 lines could chew through a lot fast, so even when there was a lot of jobs, they didn't pole up much.

That wasn't a generic service but an integrated one, but it's only a small step from there to having a generic email-to-fax gateway/service, or a web front end, or even a virtual printer driver that faxes instead.

I used to use a generic service like that for a while also. Not one I made, someone else's service. Unity Fax, later renamed to fax.com. It worked like I just said, you could send and receive by email, or through their web site. They gave you your own phone number that anyone sending a fax to that number was sent to your email (or your inbox on the web site).

There are many such services just like that.

The UK effectively banned faxes in healthcare earlier this year, it couldn’t come soon enough.

It is funny, the NHS uses Microsoft Teams. So faxes are more insecure than giving all their data to Microsoft?

Microsoft Teams brings its own potential problems, of course, but faxes are pretty insecure, both because of the transfer medium (they're typically unencrypted and easy to tap) and because they inherently involve making paper copies of sensitive data that should never be put on paper in the first place.

barely? I haven't used a fax machine in Japan in > 10yrs. 20yrs ago it was indispensable. For example you wanted to go somewhere you'd have the store/museum/etc fax you a map.

But, yes, Japan is behind the times many ways. It's apparently on the government agenda to modernize. Social distancing has made it clear that requiring personal stamps to stamp papers has to be replaced by something else.

Also in the US, apparently. A company I used to work for didn't have a fax machine until we opened a US office; then suddenly we needed one, as a lot of paperwork had to be faxed. This was about 10 years ago, I suppose; maybe it's better now.

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