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."

Comments

They still sell well...

[micker]

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....

Re:They still sell well...

[Powercntrl]

Indeed.

My father is a realator and one of the things he had to do was fax house listings to customers. He used to do it by printing them out, faxing them, then throwing them away. Besides the obvious environmental impact, he was using an inkjet printer at the time which meant it was a very slow process that also consumed a lot of expensive ink.

When I found out this was how he was sending faxes, I purchased a new-in-box USRobotics Courrier 56k V.Everything external modem on eBay for about $20 (no, I didn't forget any 0's) and set him up with Winfax Pro. I remember those modems costing a fortune back in the days of BBSing... The Courrier was a good workhorse of a modem back in its day and being used for sending/receiving faxes in this age of broadband gives it a new lease on life. And hey, anything that saves paper and keeps electronics out of the landfill is a good thing.

Simple....

[Anonymous Coward]

...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.

Technology for technology's sake

[pinballer]

Probably the same argument for IP telephony vs telephones may be applied. When IP or Internet voice calls become standard and analogue lines become antiquainted we'll see the emergence of some applicance (document scanner with an Ethernet interface).

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!

Maybe..

[niko9]

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.

Legal Documents

[tobechar]

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?!

Re:Legal Documents

[Phoenixhunter]

There are 33.6k baud fax machines ya know...there are even *color* fax machines.

Re:Lack of spam faxes?

[Camel Pilot]

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.

Email2Fax

[Lars T.]

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.

Still near universal

[rueger]

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.

point and click

[fermion]

The fax machine is the perfect assistant. It is almost 100% reliable with almost not setup, maintainance, or fuss. Put paper in, press a fewe buttons, and go. The last time I used a fax machine it offered two line capabilities, ability to store many pages, as well as computer printer functions.

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.

Fax is not easy, apparently

[molafson]

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.)

Fax Revenge

[rf0]

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