Plot twist: Karen's fax machine turns the incoming fax into a PDF, which is saved on the network, and an AI processes it, sending her a summary of 300 words or less.

No government workers were harmed.

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ocimbote 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Minus the AI part, I agree. I'm 100% convinced many fax machines nowadays exist just for bureaucracy and are actually fax-to-pdf.

	▲	estebank 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If the genersted PDFs are stored encrypted in an accessible server with proper access control, then that is a measurable improvement over email containing medical informstion that a random citizen would send, which would be bouncing around unencrypted around at least one third party SMTP server. Of course, if then that person uses an online Fax service, they are sharing that information with at least one other party... And that's even without considering the security benefit of not receiving files that could be compromised, instead generating a file from an image stream. (Now I'm trying to picture what a daisy chain of exploits would be needed to craft a malicious Fax.)

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padjo 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah there's no way a fax actually gets printed for this. I worked in an admin role like this 25 years ago and incoming faxes went straight to PDF on a network share even back then.