Hey! I’m an ancient oldie!
Not quite Methuselah but not far off it. But I can easily handle being digital! Forgetting peoples names is another matter…
Well I am delighted that you are digital, Besoeker! maybe that was a rather large blanket I put the older people under. Its just the folk around my area that I know, who are older than me, often struggle with digital things. But clearly from what I see on here, its a breeze!
And I have fun here making fun of the oldies…
Hi
Spitty hit the nail on the head.
Secure communications will still be done on the old system, digital is just not secure.
Faxes are being brought back for secure communications.
The Russians and Chinese have never stopped using them.
They have just made all domestic calls from phone booths and all public phones free which was an interesting decision and quite handy in some remote locations. To make an international call you will still need a phone card because none of them take cash any more.
That is just not correct - faxes are easily intercepted and decoded their advantage is that there is no paper trail. This is why pollies still use them so much.
Encrypted email and other digital communications are far more secure from prying eyes but it does have the major problem that, while the contents cannot be read except by very sophisticated decryption methods, the fact that such a communication was made is recorded all along its route.
Phone booths are extinct in the US. I would be amazed if you could find one, except in an Airport.
The same problem exists with the older non mobile phone technology though, it only has a certain capacity and an emergency soon overwhelms it.
In actual fact mobile technology has an advantage in that it is very plug and play. Coincidentally I was in the UK at the time of the Lockerbie air disaster, my brother was in charge of the mobile phone network for that area and within a few hours they were able to instal equipment which dramatically increased the mobile phone capacity many fold in that area for use during the emergency. This would just have not been possible with the older exchange system.