techillogic

[azurelunatic]

afuna and I were discussing some of the most roundabout ways to get information from one place to another, based on something she encountered at work:

nothing says "easy" like a link that points to another link that points to a form on a page!

This got me going, and we got progressively sillier. The eventual result:

A link that points to another link that points to a page with a PDF form embedded with FlashPaper, which must be digitally photographed, uploaded from the camera, printed out, filled out, and faxed to a fax service that take the fax and emails it. The image in the email is converted back to text and read aloud by a screen reader.


Last night at work, I got a screenshot that the user said was "scanned". The image was sideways, and on first glance appeared to be black and white, although subsequent examination showed color from what was probably .jpg artifacts. It appeared that they had in fact held up a black-and-white scanner to their computer screen, and saved the resulting image as a color .jpg.

I did not think that such a thing could happen outside of fiction.

Comments

[azurelunatic]

Wouldn't the email-to-text include CAPTCHA, sort of? after all, it can't be easy to read by that point. Hmm. Perhaps it had better go through a reCaptcha-like service to make sure that the fax is accurately translated by the screen reader.

[pauamma]

No, the CAPTCHA would be at the stage you enter the email address to have the fax sent to. (That part actually makes sense. There was a rash of imaged text spam earlier this year.) And the DRM would be... the equivalent of those silly email disclaimers that some people are forced to use. Or something equally annoying, useless, uselessly annoying, and annoying useless.