Criticism of paper-and-fax coronavirus infection reports spark change in Japan

https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20200502/p2a/00m/0na/022000c

by doener • 6 years ago

72 39 6 years ago

AznHisoka• 6 years ago

Japan has also relied on traditions like using a seal called a hanko to sign contracts. https://www.nippon.com/en/news/fnn2020042836711/

Covid is forcing many of these companies to transition to electronic signatures like Docusign.

jacquesm3• 6 years ago

What could possibly go wrong? Let's all use an online service that is perfectly positioned make it seem like someone signed a document when in fact it is about as valid as a 'card not present' credit card transaction.

Electronic signatures should have a lower level of trust than those performed in front of notaries and other officials. There is no way to check for coercion and many other ways in which the signature would normally be invalidated.

acqq• 6 years ago

Electronic signatures should have a lower level of trust than those performed in front of notaries and other officials.

Exactly. The level of trust of the electronic signatures should be as low as it can be, as computer security is really, really hard, especially outside of military settings: it should only be used to prevent the flood of login attempts and to allow to get or submit some less critical information, not to be legally equivalent to notarized signatures.

Unfortunately some administrations swallow the propaganda of the companies selling the electronic signatures and promote them as "solving everything" then they are "surprised" that the citizenship is skeptical.

And we know how unreliable "Certificate Authorities" are, and how hard it is even for big and very rich companies to maintain their certificates.

It's not that the cryptography behind the signature is the problem: it's everything around that is the problem that needs a lot of care.

jfoster• 6 years ago

What are the ways in which a signature would normally be invalidated? (and how do you check for coercion?)

eru2• 6 years ago

Signatures by hand are not really about security. It's more a signal to really take a contract serious.

dependenttypes2• 6 years ago

We have just fine ways to perform electronic signatures. GPG and signify come to mind. It is really weird how companies opt in for clearly inferior technologies.

fiblye• 6 years ago

Use of a hanko implies that you're acting on behalf of the owner of that hanko. If someone signs a paper with your name, you can say someone forged your signature and prove that your writing is different. If someone fraudulently uses your info digitally, you can get them to pull up IP records and other various digital fingerprinting info to prove it's not yours. If your name is stamped, you're kind of boned.

It's not an uncommon thing for people in Japan to be divorced without even knowing it. Their spouse secretly grabs their hanko for 5 seconds to do a quick stamp, goes to the city office alone, hands in the divorce form with both names stamped, and it's finalized. There's actually a separate form called a fujuri todoke that you can do in advance to block these one-sided divorces, showing that the whole stamping system is flawed if you need to do separate forms to block potential events of it being used without your knowledge.

Nearly anything works better than stamps.

upofadown• 6 years ago

Then why not just get the notary to sign the transaction after questioning the signer in person? The issue of coercion has nothing to do with the medium used for signing.

flocial• 6 years ago

As a matter of fact this tradition of hanko is holding back many companies from telecommuting since they rely on getting hanko from the chain of management for critical and frankly some trivial internal decision making.

mikekchar2• 6 years ago

While crazy, this shows another example of the ways things change in Japan. Nothing ever changes until one day it changes overnight. April 23rd someone tweets the bleeding obvious. May 17th (apparently), the entire country is using a different system. But for decades before that, there would be absolutely nothing you would have been able to do to incite change. It would have been absolutely impossible. I always find it amazing that change always goes from 0 to 100 in a matter of days.

JimiofEden• 6 years ago

Do you have other examples of this? I've heard this anecdotally over and over again, but I would be interested in reading actual instances where this is the case

9nGQluzmnq3M2• 6 years ago

The OG example is the Meiji era, when Japan went from a strictly isolationist feudal state to an industrialized and expansionist powerhouse in a few decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_(era)

mikekchar2• 6 years ago

The biggest one I've seen with my own eyes is smoking outside in public. When I first came to Japan you would see lots of people smoking while walking, or smoking on outside train platforms. Then one day somebody put up a big billboard all over the place that had a drawing of a person holding a cigarette and a child. It said, "You hold a cigarette at the height of a child's eye" or something to that effect. From that day on, practically everyone stopped smoking and walking. It's really incredibly rare to see it now. It might have been a localised effect around where I lived, but other people I've talked to from around the country remarked on it as well.

I've seen other things like it, but this was the most remarkable to me. The government seems to randomly put up signs like that to see if they take hold. It never seems to go gradually -- with early adopters, etc, etc. Either everybody goes with it or nobody does.

I'm trying to think of something that is easy to verify, but it's nearly midnight here and I can't think of anything off hand. If I remember I'll try to post back later.

ekianjo2• 6 years ago

Or things actually never change in Japan, not even overnight. Let's not make rules out of huge exceptions prompted by a crisis. You can still read a book written in 1896 about Japan and hardly find any cultural change at all.

harpratap• 6 years ago

That's not necessarily a bad thing

xenospn• 6 years ago

I remember my first visit to japan in 2009. Everyone had flip phones and no one had a Facebook account.

The next year when I came back, everyone had an iPhone and a Facebook account.

SenHeng• 6 years ago

Smartphones and online messaging apps like LINE and Twitter really started taking off after the 3/11 earthquake when all the phone lines went dead but the internet still worked.

So that was another one of those almost overnight changes, when the population migrated from emails to online messaging almost immediately.

microcolonel3• 6 years ago

Given the things I've seen exposed to the public internet from Japan, I really don't think it's wise to rush computerizing this system.

Even here in Canada, and I'm sure in much of the world, fax is a common tool used by doctors' offices on a daily basis. It has some definite downsides, but at the end of the day when you replace it, you should have to provide an alternative that doesn't compromise workflows, interoperability, or standards.

In fax-based systems, anyone who can prepare the paper document can, in principle, participate; because the fax protocol is built on long-expired patents and widely-published standards implemented by many vendors.

When it comes to other forms of document filling and transfer, the standards now vary widely; when they say the fax system is outdated, are they imagining the replacement is a straightforward cookie-based html form website backed by a database, or do the want something more "up to date" than that?

9nGQluzmnq3M2• 6 years ago

The article is referring specifically to faxing around handwritten reports of coronavirus deaths and infections.

The fax in general will, I'm afraid, still hang around Japan for quite some time. My mother-in-law doesn't have a mobile phone but she does have a fax.

gspr3• 6 years ago

Question to the people in fax countries: are your fax machines still connected to a POTS line, or has the word come to mean a glorified "scanner that automatically emails at the push of a button"?

frosted-flakes2• 6 years ago

I believe that in the USA fax is legally considered "secure" and doesn't violate HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) privacy laws, but email does.

So yes, I think it's an actual fax machine in those cases.

wolrah2• 6 years ago

you should have to provide an alternative that doesn't compromise workflows, interoperability, or standards.

The thing is that it's absolutely trivial to set up a workflow that from a user standpoint operates identically to fax, but it still doesn't happen because of institutional inertia.

Standalone fax machines almost don't exist anymore. You can still find one if you look for it, but the majority of them these days are multifunction print/scan/copy/fax devices. Almost all of these devices can be given credentials to an email account and configured to automatically print messages and supported attachments received in that account. Likewise, they can almost always have a "speed dial" button configured to scan a document and email it to someone as an attachment in some standard format.

Put those two things together and as far as the users on each end are concerned the icon on their speed dial button might have changed but everything else appears to operate the same. One end sets a document on a machine and presses a button, the document feeds in, and a short time later it spits out at the other end. It's more reliable, higher quality, and potentially even faster if it's a large document.

It's equal or better in every single way, but if you actually try to implement this you'll almost always get pushback from one end or the other, if not both.

I say if an organization requires fax for anything in 2020, not just as an option but as the only way to do a specific thing, that organization should be considered unfixable and just thrown away to be replaced wholesale. Even if they default to fax for anything, that should be a huge red flag that things need to change.

Fax is evil and should have been dead a decade ago.

microcolonel3• 6 years ago

that organization should be considered unfixable and just thrown away to be replaced wholesale

what?

Fax is evil and should have been dead a decade ago.

why?

Paper document facsimile is a useful facility basically as long as people fill or sign things out by hand or with stamps, and with Japanese even just coding people's names correctly into a computer is a task that requires both specialized skills and tools.

These sweeping statements just strike me as ignorant and devoid of empathy.

fomine3• 6 years ago

Just sending email with report.xlsx is still better workflow compared to FAX. (Excel is ubiquitous in Japan). Don't replicate FAX experience.

brazzy• 6 years ago

Germany's reporting system is also fax based, and while there has now been some talk about it needing to be improved, I'm not aware of any concrete changes or even plans.

Criticism of paper-and-fax coronavirus infection reports spark change in Japan

Related Stories