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

[owl]

*boggles*


*boggles some more*

[pauamma]

To make it really easy, it must also have some DRM, a CAPTCHA, and a silly encryption scheme.

[wibbble]

I proposed this as a backup system:

Take a simple tarball of the directory to back up. Print it out. Wallpaper your house with it.
If you ever need to restore from backup, get an intern to type it in.

The problem is that it's not good for longer-term backups. So I proposed an alternative: build a machine which chisels out your backups onto stone tablets, with a '-' for binary 0 and a '|' for binary 1.

I love when conversations turn into a 'who can be the most absurd' competition.

[azurelunatic]

I love my job.

[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.

[azurelunatic]

using actual tar for wallpaper glue?

[pauamma]

The purple Camel Book had an extended tutorial that involved Job and a clay tablet printer.

[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.

[wibbble]

It needs to be removable, so I'd go with a staple gun.

[lacey]

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.

...oh my.

[azurelunatic]

It was unlikely to have been printed, as printing wouldn't have shown the exciting Windows XP close-this-window-now eraser-shaped corner X, nor all the happy rounded corners.

[lacey]

The corners must be happy! We can't have sad corners!

[gameboyguy13.livejournal.com]

First thing I do in XP is switch back to Windows Classic theme <_<

[azurelunatic]

I unstack like windows on the task bar first.

[lacey]

I suspect a lot of people do.

[azurelunatic]

Someone reported the other night that they had gotten one of the same ... except in .pdf form.