> Matthew in accounting that will open that invoice attachment so he can pay it.
This is painfully accurate. A chain is really only as strong as its weakest link :/
This is painfully accurate. A chain is really only as strong as its weakest link :/
With 30 years of daily experience in this field, I am ashamed about how we fail Matthew & my mother in the sense that they can still not just enjoy the internet and open random emails without one of us blaming them for how stupid they are.
I think we need to start very early. There should be more mandatory comouter science and information security classes at schools because we are all confronted with these topics everyday.
Most people can work systems such as washing machines, vacuum cleaners and so on, the problems arise when the internet (or other forms of connectability) comes into the picture. But the reality is that most such systems will probably soon be connected in some way, so the challenge grows.
So I think it is very important that we push for more information/education instead of going into the direction of more locked down, closed off and proprietary systems because these can easily "not respect" the end user.
It’s like we’ve given every Tom, Dick and Harry a F1 supercar then we blame them when they crash the thing. The mistake is ours for not making better security models. Desktop apps should be sandboxed by default, and isolated like we isolate phone apps. For all the justifiable fear people have about apple’s control over what software can run on their machines, I think the app sandboxing and signing security model they’re working towards is the right one for 95% of computer users.
They don't understand the concept of files as separate from applications. They just don't. They understand the concept of sharing -- that seems to be intuitive enough -- but not of files as objects in themselves.
A system which works this way would, of course, be completely rage-inducing to myself.
I think we need to all realize that most people aren't cut out for computer science, per se, but most people are cut out to learn to responsibly use a computer.
As a matter of fact though, the same people do _not_ use computers responsibly. What do you do, then? Metaphorically jail them?
There are lots of areas where as humans, it's easy to reach a "sufficient" level, _and_ the dangers of an insufficiency are well known. Punishments or strict measures just don't work.
Everybody knows that they can be sufficiently and with little effort fit, but especially, that unsufficient fitness leads to sicknesses and earlier death. In this sense, which punishment can be worse? Yet, this doesn't work.
Leaning to driving is not the correct analogy. Almost everyone can use a mouse or a touch screen to operate a computer.
Even better is that the company should have its own internal ordering system.
This always becomes a war where the seller wants you to send orders 1 way, and the buyer wants to send all orders another way.
It would be really cool to have an invoice format that contains payment and tax information in a machine readable way and a way to send that information around with a verifiable channel.
pdf.js lacks capabilities to extract the XML or verify signatures, so the usual way will be to use Acrobat Reader or the usual bunch of "industry-standard" invoice-processing crap that now suddenly has to deal with malicious input.
The idea to do it differently might be nice in theory, but is lacking a smooth way to change over from the old paper-invoice ways. PDF will be the thing for some decades and we will have to deal with it.
This means that while you might be able to use something other than PDF for the human-readable part, I don't think anything other than PDF will be used. All the other stuff (XML with embedded SVG or PNG, Word, plaintext) will have acceptance problems in one form or the other.
EDI is big business to big business, as evidenced by you mentioning SAP. There, you may be completely right, I don't know.