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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...
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.
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.
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?!
-
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
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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
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
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 ----
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.
Wardialing. It's illegal to do it, but just like spam and spam laws (and telemarketers using autodialing machines with recorded messages), it doesn't deter them in the slightest. Even worse, once they figure out your number has a fax machine attached to it, they then sell that number to all sorts of junk faxers. Soon you'll be getting all the toner, OTC stock tip, mortgage refinance, and free vacations in Florida junk faxes...
...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!
You'll never hear "I don't know, I didn't get a fax from you"
Guess you've never sent faxes to offices where they have one common fax machine shared by lots and lots of people.
IMHO QoS is a non-issue when it comes to fax-like things. Unlike voice, a fax doesn't have to be real-time. A few seconds delay is perfectly acceptible. I think the real problem is that e-mail offers no usable confirmation of delivery. I'm sure there are softwares out there that can do this but no standard.
With always-on connection being almost a given in offices these days there is no reason a successor to e-mail with fax-like semantics can't be designed. The key points to address would be:
1. Confirmation of delivery
2. Standard format... say postscript or a basic PDF or maybe even a png or jpeg
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 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.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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.
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
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"
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.
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.