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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...
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!
Actually I get 4 to 5 spam faxes per day but over 2k spam emails per day. Most email spam are filtered but a significant number still make thru and requires > 15 minutes a day slogging thru them because maybe a client/customer is trying to get a message to me. Email is on the cusp of being near useless as a communication method. I am hoping for a significant reduction on Jan 1 but I know my hopes are misplaced.
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.
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
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.
Also, because a technology has been supersceeded doesn't mean that it will be replaced.
With PDAs, computers and electronic documents, you'd think people would be asking why the use of the several millennia old idea of pen and paper hasn't been eliminated.
For so long as there is a practical use for a technology, it won't completely go away.
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.
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.
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
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 ----
He also got the first Nigerian Scam I saw via fax.
Hey, the Nigerian Scam was making the rounds years ago, before email became popular. I remember first seeing it over 10 years ago when I was a temp worker at the university.
And that's nothing, according to Snopes, the first varient of this scam was in the 1920's.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
...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!
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!
The Nigerian scam started as snail mail. The low quality paper and rubber stamped 'letter head' and hand stamped postmarks gave the letters an interesting charm.
The potato it is uninformed.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Fax snake it - load first page, tape second page to the end, tape third page to the end of that, as first page comes through, tape third page to first page. Of course, the best way to fuck up a fax machine is to send one of those for a while if it's a machine, and then do it with a random hash if it's a computer.