Slashdot Mirror
Fax: Technology That Refuses to Die Under Attack
securitas writes "The BBC Magazine's Paul Rubens reports on the ever-growing popularity of the fax machine, despite the widespread availability of e-mail and digital document/photo scanners. Why is fax still so popular? Partly because it is a mature technology that has legal weight and because of the emergence of Internet and Web e-mail-to-fax and fax-to-e-mail gateways, not to mention the relative lack of spam faxes. But that is changing. The New York Times Technology's Lisa Napoli reports that Infoseek founder Steve Kirsch is waging a battle against purveyors of illegal junk faxes (IHT) like Fax.com, which Kirsch has sued for $2.2 trillion, detailed at junkfax.org. Also joining the fight are lawyer and Telephone Consumer Protection Act co-author Gerard Waldron - he won $2.25 million from Fax.com. Finally consumer advocate Robert Braver's junkfaxes.org has 36 lawsuits pending against the junk fax industry. More evidence that spammers are among the lowest forms of life on Earth."
I have a dozen or so customers coming in every week looking for Fax/Modem Cards... Most of them actually just refer to them as fax cards and dont seem to even know that it is a modem, or that there even was internet before braodband, but oh well....
Words are only yours until someone else uses them...
So that's where Peewee Herman ended up, working for the BBC.
Let's hope he doesn't any movie reviews!
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
...when is the last time you received a FAX offer to enlarge your penis?
There is certainly a lot of FAX spam, but it's still quite useful today. Not everyone has a scanner handy, and it's often easier to sketch something up or jot a note on paper than it is to scan/crop/edit/add stuff electronically. If you happen to be discussing something static that you have a picture or a PDF of, fine, that's easy to email - but dynamic data has really yet to become widespread and easy to use. I know that there are some new PDF features for markup and such, but they're still not nearly as quick and easy to use as a pen.
> the relative lack of spam faxes
Not in this world.
-- grmbl woz heer
I guess I'm getting too old! I say, if it works well enough for what you need it for then there's no need for a mad rush to replace something. Bah!
it's because fax machiens are soo easy to use. They don't have operating systems, or keyboards or mice. For the most part they are idiot proof, cheap, and portable.
But most importantly, hey do one thing and do it well.
why don't i join in two?
Many companies reply on Fax to get signatures, or approval for a project and etc.
Faxed documents are used as practical legal documents in Canada, AFAIK. Companies rely on Fax to get their work done, which should keep Fax around for a long long time.
One question though, isn't it about time to move up from 14,400 baud Fax transmission?!
-
1) Buy Fax Machine
2) Wait for Unsolicited Faxes
3) PROFIT!!!
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
Junk faxing is not at all new, nor is it uncommon. I know my office was getting 1-2/day (multiple pages), back in 1998ish (and surely before I had started working there).
There are very specific laws against this, b/c unlike e-mail, it's easily proved that the junk mailer wasted your resources (paper/toner/phone line).
My idea of a good anti-spam bill would just extend the current anti-junk-fax laws to include any form of electronic communication, but that doesn't look like it's going to happen.
-bZj
.sig
which Kirsch has sued for $2.2 trillion
Hmmm, does even the US government hold such amount of money ?
My dad got the Melissa virus faxed to him at work via a Email2Fax gateway. Over ten pages of VBScript printed out. He also got the first Nigerian Scam I saw via fax.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
We still have a trusty old thermal paper fax machine. We added it after several years of fax modem only. The reason was the difficulty in getting WinFax and the faxmodem to handle Identi-Call rings reliably. (After going DSL it made no sense to maintain a second data/fax phone line).
Since then we have come to realize that everyone has access to a fax of some sort, even people that lack or don't understand e-mail and more advanced technology. If nothing else they can walk down to the corner store and fax us something.
The other realization is that fax maintains the design or layout of what you're sending without relying on HTML e-mail, attachments, or the sometimes slim odds of your recipient having the same software that you do.
Aside from that, any piece of paper, even fax peper, holds more weight and seems more legitimate than an e-mail.
Three Squirrels
That's why the fax continues to be used: it's familiar, intuitive technology. Actually, that's the reason it even exists. When cheap fax machines started to appear in the 80s, a lot of us didn't take them seriously -- we purely digital media as the wave of the future. What we didn't take into account was the severe difficult of converting all those legacy print documents into some easily manipulated online. Tools for creating online documents have improved a lot since then, but they still don't tackle a lot of basic problems, and many (Word, Acrobat) are still biased towards creating hard copy.
Wow, I never thought about it that way any you're right!
I guess I don't know the gender, but I assumed it was a female arm because of lack of much hair on what we can see of the top of the forearm.
Here's more:
what do you think?
I have to keep my fax machine disconnected unless I'm sending something or know something's coming in, thanks to fax.com and others. I've tried unsubscribing to no avail. They'll still occasionally "ping" my fax line looking for a way to advertise more junk.
"Stick your penis into the rollers of this fax machine and win a FREE cruise to Nigeria!"
Table-ized A.I.
Why are fax machines popular? Because they are secure. Sure there are more secure methods of delivering information like registered mail. But the potential for someone between company A and company B to intercept information from an E-mail is greater. Likewise the expense of qualified people to setup your secure firewalls and what have you is a greater cost than having to spend on an ISDN line and a half way decent fax machine. Is it possible when sending a fax someone at the other end of the line could swipe the documents from the machine and take all the secrets that might be sent? Sure it is possible, but the chances of that are the same as the chances of someone finding an unlocked terminal. For that reason fax machines are much more secure because the average person can trust that there is a direct connection, and that no one at any point during transmittal is going to intercept any information. This also involves a level of trust with your telco, and that someone hasn't tapped your lines. This leads us to question whether the current standards for E-mail are suitable to replace the good old standby fax machine.
I hate all sigs, even this one.
Scanning in a document, attaching it to email, and then sending it requires more time, expertise, as well as less reliability. The time issue is the most important.
I use a fax program but only becuase I hardly ever need to send faxes and I don't want to allocate space for a fax machine. The complexity of me sending a fax from my computer, even if it is a document I create on the computer, is significantly more complex than using a fax machine. I also have used email-to-fax services, but these were only benificial for out-of-area faxes, in which I saved toll charges.
I see it similiar to Advantix camera. The advantix is probably of lower quality than even a simple 35 mm point and shoot. However, for most people is very much simpler, and therefore the quality issue is compensated for.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Slashdot is a technology oriented website, i can say with some certainty that everyone here has a fairly comprehensive knowledge of computers. However, this is not true of the rest of the world. For people who know little about computers aside from basic email checking and word processing, sending handwritten documents and other such things electronically is only feasible by fax. I have helped several people who send documents of this nature on a regular basis set up scanners they had purchased. They were absolutely mystified at how to set up the scanner and email documents that were scanned with it. Fax machines are far far easier to use than email and a scanner, and the recipient gets a paper copy of the document, something which is mentally comforting for many.
Let's make a difference
it rides over phone lines, and therefore inherits the very high quality of service inherent to the telephone system, whereas email, phone-over-IP, and anything based on the internet is a best-effort solution. You'll never hear "I don't know, I didn't get a fax from you" whereas one can believably pretend to never have received an email, to justify a lack of response.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
considering that anybody who wants to see posts marked as trolls can jsut give them a bonus, why not mod them down?
When is the last time you just typed up an email address on the computer, slapped your document on the scanner, pushed a button, and everything worked flawlessly without any intervention.
Fax machines are incredibly easy to use and just seem to work, end of story. They have a user interface that just about everyone is already familiar with (the telephone) where as computers and scanners are just plain over complicated in really stupid ways. There's issues with drivers, non-standard UIs for scanning, and I have yet to see "one button" features work on any scanner on any platform.
It's a shame not more devices work as easily as fax machines and telephones.
Join Tor today!
I have a private fax machine, have never EVER given the number out to anyone, and yet I get 1 or 2 fax spams a week.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
To (an average person) send a copy of a document to someone is much easier and fast using a fax.
If you scan and mail it takes sometime:
- turn the computer (if it's off)
- wait the scanner to heat (if you didn't use it less than 5 minutes ago)
- pre-scan (to mark the region will be scanned, it's usually automatic can't jump that phase)
- choose the right configuration (color and depth) or the result can be a mess and full the mailbox
- scan (time depends of the choosen configuration)
- final edition (ajust size, compression)
- pdf (if it's more than few pages)
- attach and mail
Someone may say you can configure that before, but some scanners demand you check the values on every step (and page) and also someone that used the scanner before can have changed the configuration.
There's also another point that is difficult to share a scanner in a work enviroment while with fax it's easier
Please keep your fascist nutcase President south of the border where he belongs. Thank you.
My fax machines from 10+ years ago still sitting around for sending and receiving fax. Although most of the time I use attachments with e-mails, I still use it a fair bit for sending documents. It is extremely useful for exchanging signed documents. Unfortunately, I don't use my modem anymore, and my desktop computers don't even have any installed. Getting a PCI fax modem, I found, is a waste of money. And there is no ISA slot in my Athlon or P4... Also, a new PCI or external modem is (~ 3-5 times) more expensive than a 10/100 network card?
============
Mathematics will always come back to hunt you down, in so many ways
What harm will a cleverly hidden goatse.cx link actually do? Why do you moderate an otherwise insightful post down just because it makes joke and links to goatse?
This is a family show, think of the children!
Fax spam was actually a problem LONG before e-mail spam was an issue.
(However e-mail spam dose predate fax spam that's annother issue)
Before the famous greencard spam some companys engadged in fax spam. Including SCO.
Samford Walace was one of those people. But when fax spam was outlawed he switched to e-mail. However thsi method of marketting had already receaved a bad reputation from the green card spam and worse.
Samford however didn't care if he pissed people off.
If you complainned to Samford directly about his spam he'd put you on a specal mailing list where he'd send a message ever hour on the hour and then every 30 minuts with the express purpous of flooding your e-mail box.
What samford did was harrasment.. in fax and later in e-mail. He set the standards for the spam and junk fax industrys even if he started nither. Chances are good if he had chousen a diffrent field (one he maybe knows something about as he never got that harrasing your target market is very stupid marketting) we'd probably not need laws banning junk fax or e-mail and the industry standards would actually respect the target markets fealings by implamenting and enforcing it's own industry standards that come short of banning.
Such as no harvesting of e-mail addresses, no illegal products, no deceptive advertsing, honnor unsubscribe requests, always offer unsubscription forms, never sell unsubscriptions (as confermed spam lists).. or even spam lists (as there'd be no way to get off them if you sold the list)
I don't actually exist.
This is clearly an offtopic and flamebait message.
I dont know, most of my customers are it consultants building systems for other people. The concept of the fax server is still here, and alot of my customers are still using one.
Whats really surprising is that the platform of choice recently for a fax server seems to be winblows server 2003...
Words are only yours until someone else uses them...
"More evidence that spammers are among the lowest forms of life on Earth."
People whose families are murdered by an oppressive governmental militia would beg to differ.
Anyone familiar with projects like VOCP? I've gotten my share of fax-spam and am tired of dealing with it, actually. I'd like to prevent others from being able to send me voice mail, fax, etc, if their ID comes up as unknown number, or matches a list of companies I don't want to call me.
I've also considered using Nagios to automate fax (or voice calls with a sound card) status reports and the like. Lots of possibilities here worth looking into.
From the junk fax FAQ on tort law. Does anyone know if this could apply to the SCO case?
Q. Can you go after the individuals involved as well as the corporation?
A. Yes.
The "general rule," discussed in 3A Fletcher, Fletcher Cyclopedia of the Law of Private Corporations (perm. ed. rev. vol. 2002), sets forth as follows:
"An individual is personally liable for all torts which that individual committed, notwithstanding the person may have acted as an agent or under directions of another. This rule applies to torts committed by those acting in their official capacities as officers or agents of a corporation. It is immaterial that the corporation may also be liable. Under the responsible corporate officer doctrine, if a corporate officer participates in the wrongful conduct, or knowingly approves the conduct, the officer, as well as the corporation, is liable for the penalties. The person injured may hold either liable, and generally the injured person may hold both as joint tort-feasors.
"Corporate officers are liable for their torts, although committed when acting officially, even though the acts were performed for the benefit of the corporation and without profit to the officer personally. Corporate officers, charged in law with affirmative official responsibility in the management and control of the corporate business, cannot avoid personal liability for wrongs committed by claiming that they did not authorize and direct that which was done in the regular course of that business, with their knowledge and with their consent or approval, or such acquiescence on their part as warrants inferring such consent or approval. However, more than mere knowledge may be required in order to hold an officer liable. The plaintiff must show some form of participation by the officer in the tort, or at least show that the officer directed, controlled, approved, or ratified the decision which led to the plaintiff's injury. . . . A corporate officer or director may not seek shelter from liability in the defense that he or she was only following orders. Personal liability attaches, regardless of whether the breach was accomplished through malfeasance, misfeasance or nonfeasance."
Id. at 1135.
In addition, an important distinction should be noted: "[p]ersonal liability for the torts of officers does not depend on the same grounds as 'piercing the corporate veil,' that is inadequate capitalization, use of the corporate form for fraudulent purposes, or failure to comply with the formalities of corporate organization. The true basis of liability is the officer's violation of some duty owed to the third person which injures such third person." Id.
I used to work in a small office. As a consequence of the work we did, we had to send out a specifications sheet several times a week. Now, every single time either my boss, her assistant, or the receptionist tried to fax this document they'd always screw it up. No matter how many times I showed them, they'd always screw it up. Eventually I got so pissed at having to stop my work to help them with the fax machine, I decided to save our specs to a PDF which thereafter they could email. Things proceeded a lot more smoothly after that. (Except when we updated our specs, but the receptionist kept sending out the old file for weeks... God, I hated that job.)
while computers and e-mails can carry viruses, fax machines can never be put out of action by a hacker or malicious program code.
Hmmm... Sure o'that ? I reckon' that if you have a look at the faxes firmware, some security holes would appear, at least in some machines. Enough to let you remotely print a fake fax, with wrong number id, or send faxes to other people. A fax virus would be perhaps possible, although unlikely due to the many different brands of firmware out there. Diversity and single-purposedness of faxes is what protects them.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
If you ever want to get revenge on a spammer and they have a 1-800 number just get yourself the following
A piece of blackpaper
Sellotape
Place the blackpaper into the fax machine and sellotape to make a tube.
Enter the number and hit send
All the other end will receieve it page after page of black printout. It might be an urban legend but apparently there was one type of fax machine that would overheat and catch fire if this was done to it
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Personally, if modding a "smart" Troll down as "Troll" pisses you off I'll carry on doing it simply because it's funny.
Just think, whenever I moderate, I'm trolling you.
BSE does not spread by contact.
Mores the pity really. Texas could do with being wipped off the face of this Earth.
Telex, that thing that the fax replaced. That required a number of years to die off after faxes became populer. It was fast, it could almost keep up with a fast typest.
The two big things that telex had over a fax is that
1. A telex message was a legel document a copy of the telex message was keeped a both ends.
2. A telex would work here faxes could not (bad phone systems, old exchanges, ship to shore)
Telex is not dead yet, just almost.
I'd start looking at those e-mails because many of them are probably advertising the same company.
3 D7 22
Look at the source and start filtering the domains that the e-mails link to. For an image and/or for the link people are supposed to click on.
For example:
I've gotten two e-bay spams that have
http://www.ertdfg.biz/index.php?id=3D173&affid=
I block ertdfg.biz and I block 100% of spam from them no matter what forged domain sends the e-mail. And no legitimate e-mail will ever be filtered out.
Spammers can't obfuscate the domains for the links or the images (aside from character codes but that's the only one and it's 100% unique) so blocking them is highly effective.
Blocking words doesn't work nearly as well because words get used a lot for many purposes so a program can't really be sure. ertdfg.biz has exactly one purpose.
I don't know if baysian filters take image domains and linked domains into consideration but they should. It blocks the company and not the spammer. Filters should give the user a complete list of the domains found in e-mails and allow the EU to decide which ones are spam (and how much of the link is spam: i.e. www.geocities.com/bigboobies you wouldn't want to filter geocities.com but you would want to filter that subfolder) and then the filter should add them to the expression watch and delete on sight.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
YHL. FOAD.
You can be fined ( rather large fine ) for sending spam faxes here in my area.
It was passed long ago, since the person receiving the fax has to pay for it...
( much as we have to do for e-spam too , i know THEY are not paying for my bandwidth or storage or time.. )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Yes well, at least they can spell correctly. Dumbass.
CINCINNATI BELL IS TEH SUCK.
I find that you get a much faster response to a fax than to any other form of communication.
It is much harder to ignore a fax sitting on your desk than it is to pretend that the email got lost in the spam filter, or the letter got lost in the post, or to sit for hours waiting for them to answer the voice telephone.
Fax spam can be a problem in the UK. Fortunately, my home fax machine isn't on any of the spammers lists, but at work we get about 15 spams per day, even although they are illegal.
If work was a Ltd company rather than a partnership then it would be legal to send them unless you put your number on the "do not fax" list (Fax Preference Service). A lot of spammers will stop if you put it on that list, but there are others who use the FPS as a list of confirmed working fax machines, and spam their own "Do not fax" services to that list. They generally want about GBP5.00 for you to be placed on the list.
If you try complaining about it, nobody wants to know.
I thought fax.com was the place run by Qualcomm as the email-to-fax gateway and such. I didn't know qualcomm were into spamming. Learn something new every day I guess.
...despite the fact that every computer I've used since 1984 had a built-in "desk calculator" accessory (and friends who used SideKick have had one even longer), I have a pocket calculator in my desk drawer at home... and at work... and my wife has one on her desk... and so does just about everyone else I know.
I use several different versions of Windows at work (XP, Win2K, NT 4.0, and 98) and I can pull the calculator out of my desk drawer in less time than it takes to figure out where in the start menu they've put the calculator in THIS version of Windows.
In the old Mac OS the calculator was under the Apple menu, but it isn't any more and if I'm away from my own Mac it takes less time to pull out a calculator than to bring up a new Finder window, select Applications, select Utilities, discover that the Calculator isn't a Utility, find it in Applications, drag it to the taskbar--oops, excuse me, Dock so I can find it again...
And the real-world calculator always has the buttons in the right places (regardless of what keyboard I'm using or whether NumLock is on)--and is, as far as I know, free from arithmetic or roundoff bugs.
Oh, and it doesn't take any time to boot. And it runs for YEARS and YEARS on a watch battery (my PDA only gets six months on a set of AA's).
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
well, if this ain't a push-button topic!
has no one here ever used hylafax and whfc ? they are a pure joy to use and 100% reliable, much easier and less time consuming then printing out a document then faxing it. just click print, select your number from an address book and forget about it. i mean for most faxes, who keeps paper documents any more except really small offices?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
It's not like spammers are just now discovering fax machines. Junk faxes are old enough news that there's already legislation on the books to cover them, in the U.S.
The reason people like fax machines isn't because they don't get junk faxes. It's not because fax machines are easy to use, either (though they are -- but with a little computer literacy, email is too).
You can sum up fax's popularity in one word: Paper.
Think about it.
Breakfast served all day!
I'm suprised that I haven't seen this reason given yet. Faxes (at least in NZ) are always admisable in a court of law (as far as evidence of corrispondence), but email isn't. That is why all official business corrispondence is sent my fax (which is very hard to fake) rather than email (which is easy to fake)
Karma? Hey I just call it as I see it.
In the form of stock pump and dumps. Every day the office fax gets a "hot stock tip" which is, of course, some company that noone has every heard of who's stock is in the shitter. Since they aren't offering brokerage service or anything just free "advice" the only purpose is pump and dump.
However, even the legit fax spam is annoying. We get tons of offers for certifications courses (since we are IT), lots of home mortgage offers that are worse than the one I have now, and advertisments for cruises.
You're an idiot.
Anyway, in this short essay Eco describes fax spam as a serious problem that almost renders the whole technology useless. He even proposes a simple but clever solution. Well, sort of.
... won't accept emailed instructions to do anything, not even a Word document with an embedded picture which is my scanned signature.
... even if the fax is a Word document with an embedded picture which is my scanned signature.
But they will accept a fax as an instruction do to something
(Actually this is quite useful. If something needs to be done with my wife's bank account whilst she's in the US on a jolly, I've got her signature on disk and can just send a fax to her bank. (I usually remember to email or text her to tell her I've done this.))
I think the fax issue is largely a paper issue. Electronic copies are not trustworthy to most people and I have found that signatures are a hangup.
I have been changing my organizations filing system from paper to electronic. The part that gets me every time is signatures. I end up scanning documents using tiff with group 4 compression to capture the signatures. I have tried to explain that a copied signature although legal, is not trustworthy because it can be electronically transferred to another document.
The major hurdles for electronic signatures as I see it are:
1. Legal acceptance
2. Ease of use.
I think for example, gpg signatures could stand up in court, but they are difficult to learn to use.
I would like to hear opinions on this matter.
Fax is popular because it's easy. Plug it into the power & phone lines, drop a pieece of paper in, dial another faxmachine, and it goes. Not to mention that wallpower, phoneline and paper are selfcontained, reliable technologies that rarely surprise the user with complexity. Every technology could take a page from fax's book.
--
make install -not war
Because they don't work.
Thermal, inkjet, Xerographic. Makes no differernce. They all suck.
If you don't sit there and hand feed each sheet it will grab some crooked, or grab two at once and you'll have pages missing.
Faxes suck. I avoid them like a plague. I worked at a company that did fax equipment for two years and it was a nightmare.
is misinformation about what is legally binding. no one in a dilbert office wants to make a mistake, so you just do what the various pointy-haired managers tell you to do. case in point, dealing with the same client, they insisted that the nda had to be faxed both ways; emailed scans would not do. then the contract had to be couriered; fax would not do. are we making sense? no. welcome to people. it only makes sense when you break it down into territorial grunting within tribal units.
amusing fork of tech that refuses to die under attack: in the eighties i was a bike courier. one of the fax companies did a great full page magazine ad of a bike courier with the heading: EXTINCT? i pinned it up in our office because it was hilarious. we were so busy that we couldn't hire enough people. near as we could tell, fax machines just generated more paper we had to move. two decades later i note that both bike couriers and fax machines are still doing fine.
about the only office tech i've noticed die off is the typewriter. many offices keep one around for filling out printed forms, but i don't notice anyone buying them for that purpose.
oh, and company pocket protectors. those didn't even have a retro resurgence.
I do a lot of business with small factories in China. Most if not all of these factories don't have any sort of connectivity other than fax. It's going to be quite some time before faxes are replaced in such situations.
Plus, with languages like chinese, japanese etc., it's always been easier to write something out by hand and send a fax than fight with a computer. In major metro centers, sure, it's changing, but fax will have a place there for a good long time.
The easiest to dispell things you say are:
The continued existance of fax machines is a condemnation of the world's most prevalent computer software, Microsoft. That people would continue to pay per minute long distance bills to transmit grainy images makes no sense in any culture that uses roman characters, and many that don't especially those that have made the effort to use free software to reflect their character set. Besides greater cost, fax machines have no standard interface, are not reliable and require redigitization of records. Microsoft has managed to level the playing field. Some people never figured out the email thing because Microsoft's supposely easy software is not. The added complications of "don't click this or that attachment, exe, scr, pif, bat, etc, because it will destroy your computer" has added to user frustration and consusion. Because Microsoft email clients are insecure, people are using virus and spam filters that destroy useful content. Email should be cheaper, more reliable and easier to use than any damn black box fax with machanical paper feed, crappy 10 keys and lcd for control. Only Microsoft could screw it up.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
That would be the last time I had to print something out for some retard who refused to join the 21st century. Lacking a fax machine, I generally have to snail mail it, or drive to some place that charges to send faxes.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I was playing a video game the other day on my Xbox. I was playing Max Payne 2 and lots of stuff does die. So if you shoot it, it will die because you attacked it by shooting it. There you go problem solved!!! -_-
We get junk faxes all the time at ungodly hours in the morning...usually between midnuight and 3am. It's not just a problem for dedicated fax lines. We will probably have to change our phone number because of these scumbags...their "removal" lines never work.
There is no gravity...the earth just sucks.
None of them carry them. I work at Bestbuy and we sell 98% of america's printers. All we carry are all-in-ones with fax options on HPs and lexmarks $200+. Yet daily someone asks for a standalone fax. Its sick.
What I would like is an inexpensive, small piece of hardware that would answer the phone and forward faxes and voice messages to email accounts. (It would have a POTS jack and an ethernet jack.) I've been doing this on and off with a linux box, but it would be nice to have a small dedicated device to do this. Does anyone know of one?
from junkjax.org:
As a thank you, after we receive your registration, we'll tell you 12 things you can do to stop junk faxes as well as how to determine who is sending your junk faxes even if they block their callerID.
So they won't tell you the twelve things until you register with your phone number. By doing that, aren't you giving up your rights under the federal do-not-call list?
The reason this is so much worse than typical junk faxes is that it's not a dedicated fax line that only wastes paper or electrons. This is my bedroom telephone. It actually rings as if it were one of my friends calling and I have to answer it only to hear a fax tone. And the fax spam comes at all hours of the day and night. It starts around 7 or 8 AM when I'm sleeping. If it came at 4 AM, I'd just go back to sleep, but at 8 AM it's almost time to wake up anyway, so I don't get back to sleep so easily, which means I go through the whole day short an hour or so of sleep, which messes up my mood and alertness and productivity for the whole day. Anyone who thinks the $500 TCPA penalty for sending a junk fax is excessive just wrong. $500 is just about the right amount of damages for the hassle and impairment that an 8AM bullshit fax causes if you weren't ready to wake up then. Even getting rid of the fax machine would not stop the junk faxes. They've slowed down since the incident I described, but they persisted on a few-times-a-week basis for several months.
The only big problem with fax machines is phone line limitations. Busy signals suck.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
We all know how easy it is to spoof an IP.
Why in the world do you say that. Spoofing someones IP is a little harder than changing the number that a call appears to be from. ISDN and other digital sevices have the ability to do just that!
The perfect assistant is one that will suck your dick/fuck you. Then leave and let you go home to your wife.
THAT is the perfect assistant.
Ignore those Start -> run -> calc posts.
:) you won't have ripped that mofo off yet..
Win-R -> calc.
Being that you don't play games at work (right?
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
One reason I think the Fax machine is still around is because in most business an order or authorization recieved is not "official" or "credable" if recieved via email. However if sign an order and fax it in it is considered "official" and binding. just my two pennies, Good day
"The universe is my dwelling place and my house is my only clothes! Why are you entering into my pants?" - Liu Ling
What really bugs me are companies that send faxes through long-distance brokers that obscure the Caller-ID of the sender. I own a small company that gets fax calls on a daily basis EVEN THOUGH WE HAVE NO FAX MACHINE. These calls invariably come at the busiest time of the day. Sure, it doesn't take long for someone to answer the phone and then hang up again, but it's a needless distraction. I did the *69 thing and the telco reported the number as belonging to Sprint Canada. When I called Sprint to complain they said that the number was one of the pool used for forwarding discount long-distance clients, so although the number reported by *69 was local the caller could be anywhere in the world. They couldn't (or wouldn't) say who was calling me.
Apparently the only way I'm going to get these calls to stop is to hook up a fax machine and receive the fax.
Ouch, that's worse than goatse.cx
I just absolutely had to post this.
my colleague came over with a one-page document and asked me once, how he should email the page over to my coy's branch office. he asked me how he should scan it and paste it into and email or if there was some software that could convert it into a Word document. i looked at him for a while, and told him simply to fax it. he looked back at me, enlightened.
so sad that sometimes the box setting on our desks is so constraining the way we think - when a lot of problems could be solved outside the box. and even sadder if some managers and (system) analysts don't quite see this.
You can create a shortcut. Right mouse click -> properties -> shortcut.
Choose "C" for calcuator.
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
Everything else is on magnetic or optical media that doesnt have much life anyway. The fax produces hard copies which are fast becoming a commodity.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Did you even read his previous work off the same link you provided? The guy still has a better career than your loser ass.
Yes, I know, we were supposed to all be working in a paperless office ten years ago. So why not? Because electronica can be diddled with and altered. You can do it to paper, but it's a lot harder and can be proven otherwise.
This sig no verb.
Using a PC to Fax:
Step 1: Lift cover of scanner and insert document face down with the letterhead toward the hinge of the cover
Step 2: Import the document into $MS_PRODUCT
Step 3: Select File -> Print
Step 4: Select the "Fax" Printer
Step 5: Press Print, enter Fax Number when Prompted, then click OK
Troubleshooting: If document fails to scan, follow the "Scanner Troubleshooting" section of your 2000 page user manual. If document fails to fax, follow the "Microsoft Printer Subsystem" troubleshooting section of your 2000 page user manual. If neither works, contact a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer at a cost of $100/hr.
Using a Fax machine:
Step 1: Insert Document Face Down
Step 2: Dial Number
Step 3: Hit "Send"
I even bought an external FAX modem for my Linux box, thinking I could at least save the rolls of paper wasted by the penny-stock and vacation scammers. But so far, getting it to answer a single FAX call and process the incoming data has been the impossible dream.
FAXing is a technology that deserves to die. Will someone please pull the trigger?
Fax just makes it even easier for the other end to deny they received documentation. I've been burned twice now by real estate agents who have openly denied receiving faxes.
The first one, the fax machine used wasn't the kind which gave receipts.
The second one, the fax machine did give receipts, but the agent claimed we forged it! After all, you could just print something which looks identical on a normal black and white printer.
Fuck the fax. If you want legal proof of something going over, use registered mail so they have to sign for it. If you don't want registered mail to be the only option, try to get receipted email accepted.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
For last sometime I have been working on the machines called MFPs (Multi-function peripherals or Multi-function printers). These machines can work as scanner, printer, copier and fax machine. Initially these machines were simple fax machines (at least in our company!) with a PSTN connection. Because these machines can be used as printers so network capability was added so that it can work as shared networked printer.
Then features like "Fax to Email" and "Email to Fax" are added. and now we are working some feature additions like Real-Time Fax.
FYI, these machines do have an Operating system, a Real-Time OS. New fax machines are having full keyboard (though small in size than the PC keyboard) and a LCD screen.
But the bottom line is, even after so many enhancements, basic fax functionality is still present and doesn't seem to be dieing at all.
~Aha~
...because since January I've gotten 12 junk faxes from some fly-by-night mortgage company in the Philly burbs. I held onto them all, and after reading about what a slam-dunk these TCPA cases are, I've been tossing around the idea of pursuing them since the summer (you can sue for up to 4 years from the receipt of the junk fax).
Tonight I noticed that a law firm local to me posted their info on the junk fax attorney registry since the last time I browsed the site, so I just fired off an e-mail to them for more details on pursuing it with their assistance.
I'd love for these fax-spamming bastards to foot the bill for my new G5 in the spring. If I decide to pull the trigger on this, I'll write about it in my journal-- if things go well, maybe others will be encouraged to do it.
~Philly
Why is fax still so popular? Partly because it is a mature technology that has legal weight and
All we need to do is hack some fax machines and do bad things that break its validity in legal issues and that part will break down.
Fax is evil, mm'kay?
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
I'm sure you've made millions of lawyers happy with that statement.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
My blog has occasional updates on my personal collection of lawsuits against junk faxers.
To make a long story short, these people are just like any other spammer; they're in it to make a quick buck.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
...it is a technology that even idiots can understand.
I have a Lexmark X125 that I got on clearance. Besides being an excellent printer (black and color inkjet), it is also a 33.6 kbps color and b&w fax. It cost $70 Canadian.
Strangely enough, however, there is no pc-to-fax option with it... you must still print out the document (on it) and then scan it in.
Fax is teletransport technology.
A little story about "spam" fax I recieved and how I was annoyed first, but very pleased afterwards.
;)
One day I returned home from work and I noticed having about 30(!) messages on my answering machine. I usually get no more than two or three, imagine my surprise.
So I started replaying them, and all I got was the fax "beep". While I was "enjoying" the beeps, the phone rang, and I heard the meanwhile familiar peep.
This went on for a few minutes, but at least I saw the caller's number on my phone (the answering box was an old one and didn't display them.)
Taking a wild guess, I removed some digits from the end of the number, added a zero, called and got connected to the companies night watch.
They tried to help be but said there were hundreds of fax machines in their office and it would take hours to look at each one. I figured already that someone had typed in the wrong number, set the fax to repeat forever and left the office.
Nice perspective for the night (yes, I could have pulled the plug
Anyway, they asked me for my number with the promise to call back. A few minutes later (in between some "peeps") the head of PR of this huge office equipment company called me and offered some compensation.
A few days later I recieved a huge box with all kinds of ink-jet papers (standard, photo, parchment-style etc.), make-your-own-puzzles, shirts and overhead sheets, two pretty expensive pens and a dayplanner.
Boy, I whish they'd make that mistake again.
There are fewer illiterates than people who can't read.
One of the "virtues" of fax spam is there's almost always an 800 voice number to enable the spam. We just put THEIR fax in the machine and send it to their 800 voice number with redials=99 and delay=1. We can hear them answering on our fax machine.
If each 800 call costs them a couple of cents, the total redial will cost them a couple of bucks. Once we got an angry call from some call center manager complaining about fax calls. We verified they were the call center we were hitting over the phone, and asked if they had a fax machine so we could send some configuration info...and faxed 25 copies of their spam to their machine!!
We wouldn't have this problem on our departmental machine if we didn't have some loser in the department using some high-risk credit bureau; ever since they faxed a signed document OKing their 378% annual interest rate, we've gotten a ton of bogus mortgage offers, stock tips and vacation packages..
It makes Sending Edits to the printer stand out more. They can use whatever format they want- export or fax the document to you, you mark it up (sometimes they don't catch "teh"!) and fax it back.
Repeat until the printers get it right.
I understand that you can do strike-throughs in WORD and have things marked in red or whatever,
but its easier to read it on paper* (I read documents on a screen. The older generation can't. Deal.) , as you are reading edit with a pen, and then fax it over (or have one of your minions fax it over).
This is faster. And when you bill at $200+ (USD) an hour, in 6 minute increments, you are saving your client money by not typing it in. (yeah, tell that to the trees!)
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
A few years ago I worked with an HP digital sender, which is really nice. You feed the paper, put in an e-mail address, and they get a PDF.
Of course, you're in for three grand for a $199 scanner with a bolted on $199 computer, for the convienience.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
For less than $200:
1. Turn on fax machine
2. Wait for it to warm up
3. Fax document
4. Get fax transmission receipt
5. Done
- vs -
1. Turn on computer
2. Wait for Windows, OSX, Linux, etc. to boot
3. Fire up scanning application
4. Scan document
5. Rescan document because first one was unreadable
6. Futz with document because it's still unreadable
7. Attach to e-mail
8. Send e-mail
9. Call recipient to see if they got e-mail (not all companies forward return recipts)
10. Re-send 'cause they didn't get it
11. Recompose because they don't have the same document processing software you do.
12. Follow steps 7 - 10.
13. Go home because it's quitting time.
Cost? $500 for a cheap PC, $100 or more for document processing software, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera...
Why is it such a shock that faxes are still around?
--Your sig can appear here!!!
Google, on the other hand, hangs out in my IE toolbar (YMMV).
Type an arithmetic expression into google, and voila - your answer is returned.
It's like magic! :-)
It's nice to see Pee Wee Herman with a job, again!
For some reason anything he replies to that is something he doesn't agree with is a 'troll'. Then he proceeds to rant about how whatever is being discussed is actually Microsoft's fault. Every single fucking time, it's all Microsoft's evil at work.
I find it hard to fathom that someone would be this dense and stupid. I mean, it's like this account is some sort of nasty bot created by RMS to troll Slashdot and ridicule the people who use open source software.
OTOH if this is a real person behind the keyboard - well, you're one sad basket case my man. I recommend you seek professional help.
In the mean time, I'd suggest you stop advocating free software and open source. If nothing else you're the perfect example of everything that is wrong with this community. I mean, you're so out there it's not even funny. And believe me, I've seen some screwed up zealots in my time.
I don't know why anyone would use a fax modem. Your computer must be on to receive a fax. You must have a phone line connnected to it (extra expense) and programs like Winfax are a pain to use. Search the net for "Internet Fax" and you will find many companies that offer you your own personal fax number (local or toll-free)like e-fax and docuharbor. Your faxes are sent to your email or you can login to a secure web site to view, print, download. You can also send faxes to email addresses or a old-fashion fax machine. I've used e-fax, but I like docuharbor because the incoming faxes are converted to PDF file. But try any of the companies that offer an Internet fax product and you will find that faxing is now easier. Oh yeah, no fax spam if you have a toll-free number.
I recall seing a keyboard with a calculator button before, a Compaq, if I recall well. My Dell Dimension keyboard has 3 buttons besides "suspend" that can be programmed.
I use "email" and "search" for volume and "Home" for the Windows Calculator. Every time I see a job posting online, I push the button and start typing my $salary * 2,080 to translate from hourly salary to yearly. It's pretty awesome, and loads instantly.
You're right, though. Win Calculator isn't like the old Texas Instrument 81 with the variable storage and all the neat features. Quick money and conversion things, though, are perfectly doable with a programmable keyboard.
"Wireless : LAN