Slashdot Mirror
Why the Fax Machine Refuses To Die
snydeq writes "Deep End's Paul Venezia waxes befuddled on the ongoing existence of the fax machine. 'Consider what a fax machine actually is: a little device with a sheet feeder, a terrible scanning element, and an ancient modem. Most faxes run at 14,400bps. That's just over 1KB per second — and people are still using faxes to send 52 poorly scanned pages of some contract to one another. Over analog phone lines. Sometimes while paying long-distance charges! The mind boggles,' Venezia writes. 'If something as appallingly stupid as the fax machine can live on, it makes you wonder how we make progress at all. Old habits die hard. It just goes to show you: Bad technology generally isn't the problem; it's the people who persist in using that technology rather than embracing far superior alternatives.'"
Sheet-fed scanners are ridiculously expensive, plus you have to save the file, attach it to an email, then, hopefully, the file isn't too large for the sender or recipient's mailserver. With the fax machine, one just drops the stack in, verify the fax successfully transmitted, task complete.
Also, many people feel that snooping of phone lines is much less likely to occur than snooping of email, when is sent in the clear.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
People seem to think that because a fax machine scans physical documents that it represents an authentic signature on a document. Solid reasoning? Not a chance, but when has that stopped anyone from reaching stupid conclusions?
...From a more reputable news outlet which doesn't split their articles up into two page
http://www.theonion.com/articles/report-fax-machines-still-pretty-impressive-if-you,21256/
I'm sure the 2-day difference in the article dates is completely coincidental. ;)
I don't have anything to contribute to this. I still use single blade disposable razors instead of laser hair removal.
Unless you buy http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fax-reader/id406902152?mt=8
Sounds like (I didn't read TFM, natch) like Paul just went through the hell that is known as a Real Estate Transaction.
(having just suffered through a similar endeavor, in which 14 trees were felled and 33 tonerbeasts were slaughtered so that the real estate agents could continue to do things the way they've done them for 30 years...)
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
The thing about a fax is, that anyone can use it properly in its default configuration.
Scanning for most people is fraught with troubles, from too large files they cannot email, to losing files saved who knows where, to simple connection problems between scanner and computer. Meanwhile the fax still just works, unless you are lucky enough to work at a place that has rigged up a well-run scanning infrastructure for you.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Fax machine. Plug it in. It just works. Something computers still just dream of.
I actually work for a certain fortune 500 company that produces laser printers, and while we are phasing a lot of our fax focus out, there just isn't the faith in email that there is in fax. With a fax, you have a physical copy ending up in an office that you know someone has received. There's no spam filter to worry about and you know that that fax is going to get to the right person a lot more than than email if you don't have that person's direct email. For something you have a physical copy of, fax is just a lot simpler. Until there are more printers out there that have email addresses built into them, we're going to be a ways off from replacing fax.
In organizations that have access to large databases of sensitive information, the security risk makes secure faxes preferable. For instance, the Internal Revenue Service has access to nearly everyone's financial information, a security breach, however unlikely it might be, would be devastating.
"it's the people who persist in using that technology rather than embracing far superior alternatives.'"
You go to be kidding me right? I don't use fax, but I do think it offers better security when you have something to send to someone that is confidential. Try to do that with email + attachment! I don't think so.
Reminds me of the people who insist that any sort of business conversation happen in person, no matter how far away they are. Need to have a 15 minute chat with some guy in California? Here's your plane ticket, see you in 3 days. VoIP? Never heard of him, here's your taxi to the airport.
People who are talking about the ridiculousness of fax has never had to deal with an email not arriving in its proper destination with rational cause.
............
You track the situation, only to find out that, say, hotmail's own proprietary spam filter, which you will never be able to divine the logic of, has filtered the email. (nothing related to spf or similar).
or, you will find that some random spam blacklist has randomly listed your ip range, and some customer/client was using that blacklist.
or you will find that the customer set their spam filter ridiculously high, filtering a lot of legitimate email.
or, there was some problem with the receiving server, and its mail delivery queue got erased.
you can insert any kind of i.t. mishap that may happen in communication in between two points on the internet.
these are stuff that you cant take risks with when contracts, legal matters, actually any kind of critical information is in question. hence the continuance of fax.
Read radical news here
Pharmacist here. They are still in heavy use between us and the md offices, for a few reasons. E-Rx ins't always 2-way, so a refill request often has to be faxed. Many times we need to contact the MD office and they can't take a call. A fax gives them all the info, in a simple readable format to take care of later. Sometimes a hospital needs a patient profile for the last 6 months and it would take 30mins to explain it all over the phone, so it gets faxed.
Emailing HIPPA documents in not an option and I wouldn't use it even it was.
That's a great article on why the fax machine refuses to die. Oh wait, there's no explanation. It's just some guy complaining. When I read an article which is just some douchbag complaining, ten times out of ten it was linked by slashdot. Maybe "Why won't the fax machine die!" can be the opposite of "Get off my lawn!"
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
We still use scanners because no one wants to tackle good, ubiquitous, and easy to use, security in email.
All fax machines are required to implement delivery confirmation and time stamps, and log a certain number of incoming and outgoing faxes. There is a rigid standard behind the faxing specs, and fax records can be (and have been) used in a court of law. It's hard to find another *cheap* and *widely adopted* digital sending standard that has the same legal robustness, with a proven track record. That alone is why fax technology will be slow to die.
"False hope is why we'll never run out of natural resources!" - Lewis Black
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fax-reader/id406902152?mt=8
1. Sheet Fed Good Quality Scanner .....
2. Simple interface to enter an email address
3. Price competitively compared to fix machines
4. PROFIT!
I hate single use machines, but some times the simplicity of one alone justifies it's existence. Keep it simple and cost competitive and you'd have a winner.
A FAX has a legal advantage. A third party, the phone company, can verify the sender, receiver and date/time. There is also a bunch of case law regarding when a FAX can be or must be accepted as a valid legal document.
It ain't cheap for what you get.
It can be used as a court document. That is the only reason why it is not dead yet.
You don't appreciate technology until you understand the function it serves and problem solved. Fax orginated as battlefield deployment solution to get maps and text into the right hands.
Today, nothing has changed. It is the weapon of choice to enlist support, disseminate and communicate on the battlefields. Only the location has changed. And the win-win with FAX is its ability to run unattended, bombproof reliability and that receipt verification is the gold standard guarantee of undeniable success in the chain of communication.
Speed has nothing to do with the fact that its importance is Fax's ability to deliver guaranteed. The physical paper output assuredly enforces every fax must be ' handled' at the receiving end irregardless how much timeshift it pushes itself onto the receiver.
That is one critical factor no amount of email, voicemail nor text message can compete against.
Unfortunately a lot of business practices and legalities are abased around paper documents and technology that has been around long enough to be trusted and have precedents. Furthermore there are a few 'features' that people perceive in a fax machine that they don't see in email etc.
1. A Fax is a peer to peer technology that is very similar to a telephone call, behaviorally not much change required there to use it or understand it.
2. If a fax to the right number sent then it is received. If an email is sent there is no guarantee that it is received.
3. A fax is paper at one end and paper at the other, no sneaky computers can edit that fax at either end; therefore
4. A signed fax is really a signed document.
5. John McClane thinks faxes are neat in Die hard 2, but computers are too hard in Die hard 4.
I went through the exercise of designing a transition to a paperless office a few years ago. There is a lot of gray area in terms of authenticating electronic documents for tax and legal purposes etc. that businesses would rather avoid. It doesn't matter if it is technically possible to alter a fax, the generally understanding is that it is an authentic copy of a physical document, and as such almost the same.
Depends on where you are too, and the legal / business environment. Eventually we will get rid of them, think of them as telegrams waiting to happen.
PS. Do you think telegrams were like twitter when they first came out, people just sending messages because they could ?
unless you buy http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fax-reader/id406902152?mt=8
While I can certainly see the point he's making, most businesses have had large copier/printer/scanners that can send pdfs to a CIFS share on the network, e-mail pdfs via SMTP, and send faxes for years and years. These copiers typically come with the upgrade after rentals, and there are lesser $50-$100 inkjet home versions for smaller offices as well. A lot of companies do what the author posted and don't have fax machines.
But the main issues aren't signatures or other things mentioned at all: they're human factors and cost factors.
There are two on the sending of faxes:
1. Large and bureaucratic companies still have procedures from the mid-1990s that explicitly list faxes as the method, and it's a mess to get anyone to fix it. No one will disobey these procedures, as it's often a punishable offense.
2. There is rarely any proper setup, much less the required training to end faxing and go paperless. Whether management, IT, or the copier company should do it is irrelevant. No one seems to wish to invest the necessary time for proper training, particularly if there are dozens of facilities and hundreds of office employees.
And two on the receiving of faxes:
3. People will balk on relying on e-mailed pdf's simply because there is a threat of it being lost to a spam filter. These spam filters often can't automatically choose well between a fax and an e-mailed, randomized PDF selling bootleg pills. One important fax lost and all trust is gone. Fax machines don't have this problem.
4. Fax machines often are still used simply to receive, but not always to send. If you are expecting a fax, only faxes will come out of a fax machine. It won't get confused with the dozens of other pages in the big printer/copier device, much less end up with piles of nameless pdfs in a CIFS share.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/report-fax-machines-still-pretty-impressive-if-you,21256/
The fax machine does one thing and does it well.
What I think *should* happen is that fax machines get a protocol update, where they (optionally) go something like this:
Alice: "brrrring brrring" ... blah blah" ... blah blah" ... blah blah. I've sent you an encrypted [image|pdf|text]."
Bob: "Hi I'm a fax"
Alice: " Good I'm a fax too. Hey, have you got an IP address?"
Bob: "Yep, here you go
Alice: "You grok PGP?"
Bob: "Yep, here's my public key
Alice: "'K thanks, here's mine
You could wrap retries and all the rest of the delivery protocols around it too, and you end up with a thing that looks like a fax machine to the users, but runs on the up-to-date network layers.
BTW, I still use a handheld calculator while I'm writing Matlab code. It's all down to the efficiecy of the user interface.
Some companies use it to screw over each other.
When Square-enix contracted now defunct(because of them..) Grin, they demanded that they sent them game files including audio over FAX.
What Grin did send however was a screenshot of FF12 to see if they even gave a damn, and Squeenix said "this isn't Final Fantasy enough."
I browse the Internet with a fax machine you insensitive clod!
In the UK we've recently seen the close of the Football (Soccer to the US) Transfer Window. Nearly all of the business done between clubs and agents is done by fax. Deals have to be confirmed by a fixed time at FA Headquarters. Want to guarantee it gets sent, arrives, is printed and seen before the deadline? You fax it.
For legal purposes, fax (or secure snail mail) is required. The sender and receiver and date and time of transfer can be verified and can't easily be tampered with and there's one copy at each end. There's no copy somewhere on the internet cloud that can be hacked, lost, stolen or compromised by an exploit or poor password choice. Telephone wire tapping is degrees of magnitude more difficult in this sense as catching a single document would be a one-chance time sensitive opportunity. (That's not to say it's not possible, just much less likely)
And finally it's cheaper and faster than implementing a truly secure online technology (which all solicitors would have to adopt - try getting the Law Society to push that through if you like nailing jelly to a tree) to communicate between solicitors.
It's why I'm always amused at web developers cursing IE6. You can curse at it all you want, but it won't magically improve itself. It's the people using it that refuse to kill it.
http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/index.php?date=062111
No blue screens nor Guru Meditations ( :-) ) Or reboots. Or updates. Plug and play. Don't fix it if it's not broken.
I think you're doing something wrong, you can sign up for the various Apple developer programs online and pay there as... Oh wait, I'm replying to a troll who can't even be bothered to stay in the realm of reality...
A simple, efficient idea always lasts long. the telephone was invented in the late 1870s... the internal combustion engine in the 1880s.. unix in the late 1960s :)... i don't see anyone calling these ideas stupid...
It's not unusual - we still persist with pencil and paper as tools of choice. Nothing ever gets totally discarded.
Won't LET you? There are over 100 fax enabled apps, nimrod, and a bunch are free.
Who gives a fucking hoot if it's outdatet or not?
Nostalgia has it's charm especially if it works and some geeks get worked up about it!
One of the reason Fax is still in use, because it's simple! Have you ever tried to show your grand mother How to send (scan and email) a receipt to you? Good Luck with that :)
I'm glad fax is still around because it is very important to me, as I've never heard of this so called "internet".
When television became popular, many people proclaimed the end of radio broadcasting. But today, radio is more popular than ever. Why? Because TV doesn't replace radio. Sure, it's more capable, but you can't easily watch TV while driving down the freeway at 70 mph, or while jogging or biking.
Likewise, e-mail doesn't replace fax. Sure, it's more capable in some ways. But fax delivery is automatically confirmed, e-mail delivery is just best-effort, no guarantees. E-mail isn't secure by any standards; fax is secure enough to be HIPAA-compliant. Fax is drop-dead simple, e-mailing scanned documents is still too difficult for many computer novices.
Until there is a better way to fax, the old fax machine is going to stick around.
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-12-10/
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
http://www.theonion.com/articles/report-fax-machines-still-pretty-impressive-if-you,21256/
I recently had to replace a 15 year old fax machine for a client of ours (we are their IT support) that broke down. I checked a couple of options and was very disappointed. The company has complete VOIP, everyone can phone from either their fancy desk VOIP phone or SIP client on the laptop. The fax machine is connected through the voip-analog converter (the provider wanted to run the fax machine entirely on the analog line, but the analog lines were in really bad shape, data fiber however is fine :-)). There are no fax machines I could find (be supported by the VOIP provider and be reasonably cheap) that do FOIP directly. There is no software that I could find reasonably cheap (free and opensource, sip client is :-)) that would allow the server to function as FOIP client. Their clients send a bunch of faxes so they were really nagging me about fixing their fax machine. I delivered them a nice XeroX WorkCentre multifunction...works like a charm.
The fax machine concept itself isn't outdated, it's just the technology in use in them that's outdated. All they need for an update is a higher quality scanner built in and to be updated to communicate over the Internet. The big problem with that is, of course, NAT (Network Address Translation). Thanks to the scarcity of IPV4 addresses, nearly every device "on the Internet" is not really on the Internet as it isn't directly addressable and has a non-routable IP address. So, to use something like a fax machine over the Internet, either everyone who wants to use one has to do some complicated (for the average person who just wants to plug it in and have it work) DMZ setup in their router/gateway, or all the fax machines need to communicate through servers using some sort of protocol like email. Maybe when we move to IPV6, as long as the ISPs don't screw it up and every device can get an IP address, fax devices could communicate directly and essentially be plug and play. There would need to be some method to ensure that the device is consistently given the same IP address however. Plus, IPV6 addresses are a little too long and complicated to hand out as easily as phone numbers... Plus, fax spamming would become an even more severe problem. It may turn out that some sort of intermediate server that provides permanent, easily human-readable, addresses along with some sort of authentication/real-life identification system might be best.
Because Fax provides something nothing else (except telex) can: a point 2 point communication which guarantees either instant delivery or instant information that delivery is impossible. Fax is also considered a "Legal Document" in almost all countries... email is not (and should not be).
E-mail has a 48 hour period where you can't know whether your mail has been received or not...
The HIPAA commenter was closest. because emails are legal documents many (esp. in healthcare) won't
provide you their email address. But they will provide you their fax number.
Also where are the price-competitive IP fax machines??? (or TCP/IP no state/stateless connection/-less diversions please!).
It is inefficient as hell, and we still force generations of newcomers into learning this esoteric pattern of symbols..
A major reason that faxes are still popular is because a faxed signature is recognized by law as equivalent to a signature you signed on a physical document. In fact all 50 states have adopted this view, but im not sure other "electronic signatures" such as signing your name with a touch pad and emailing it are recognized so broadly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_signature#In_Contract_Law
It seems like the more advanced a technology becomes, the more it takes for it to accomplish a basic task. My Android phone takes about 30 seconds to go from cold and dark to making a phone call. This is also the same for your desktop PC. My PlayStation 3 has to be properly shutdown to avoid damage to the hard drive due to forced power-downs, which takes about 10 seconds. The self-checkout kiosks at the grocers has a 3-5 second lag each time I scan an item or put it on the baggage area too quickly. Let's face it. Sometimes it's better to stick with older hardware for the sake of simplicity and ease of use. Fax machines may be old and clunky, but it beats having to send email attachments or wrestle with scanners.
... will die right after the fax.
For whatever reason, business still has a need to have proof that an actual person used a pen to apply ink to a piece of paper for certain kinds of authorization.
True Story: I was on vacation once with my family and my sister, who doesn't really ever vacation, she just works from the road, had some purchase orders to sign. She's a manager and while there's this huge long bureaucratic process involved in purchase orders, most of which is done through email or some kind of internal webapp, the final step requires her signature.
Of course, the solution to that when she's on the road is that they email her a copy of the document -- probably a Word file but maybe a PDF, I didn't ask -- which she must print out, physically sign, and then fax the signed document back to the office.
You might think my sister works at some backwards podunk company that sells buggy whips to icemen. You'd be wrong.
My sister works at Cisco.
A fax machine is tangible and it has a set number that for most situations refers to that specific fax machine based on where it is. The problem with email, other than security and privacy, is that it's generally associated with a person as opposed to a place, and people aren't as reliable as fax machines.
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
Unlike e-mail, in the US, sending junk faxes is illegal. Not only is it illegal,anyone can sue for damages of $1000 per fax, with triple damages in many cases. There are lawyers ready to handle junk fax cases. There were lots of lawsuits a few years ago. "Fax.com", a major junk fax operation, was sued for $2.2 trillion; they're no longer in business.
Most companies are paper based. So you have sheets of paper containing information and status. With E-Mail you would need to type in the information or print it out. There is no visible media transition on Fax, you put in a piece of paper and you get out a piece of paper.
In a business E-Mail is no advantage, as, in order to integrate it into your processes, the employees would need to be able to program so their computers can process them automatically. Those would be very primitive programs, but on a GUI-based computing environment, it's very hard to automatize processes.
So unless you teach people how to program, the fax will be dominant.
...is that the sender could be more easily verified. On the other hand it seems to be no problem at all to get a Schengen Visa using only documents that were scanned instead of faxed. So I believe there is some legal value to scanning as well.
Somehow it seems a good thing that physical fax machines have outlasted WinFax.
Yet another good product that grew increasingly large and ugly until it finally died.
Three Squirrels
But I blame HP. HP has had a wonderful alternative called a "digital sender" which is basically a high-speed document scanner (50 to 55 ppm) which looks just like a fax, except it goes to email address (in PDF, JPG, TIFF formats), utilizing a simple interface.
But the price is too fricken high! If they had been smart and offered it at a reasonable price, we could have been replaced the fax by now.
Regards,
MBC1977,
It is easier and quicker to use a fax machine, than to use a scanner with or without a sheet feeder to generate a PDF and email it to the recipient.
How to use a fax machine:
1) Get the fax number; 2) Place paper in tray; 3) Type in fax number and press send
How to create a PDF:
1) Place paper in scanner; 2) Press scan; 3) Wait for software to load; 4) Wait for scanner to warm up; 5) Fiddle with software settings; 6) Forget it I give up, where the hell is the fax machine!
Yes, there are dozens of all-in-one scanner/printer/copiers for cheap, and pretty much all of them also work as fax machines, because once you've got the expensive mechanical parts and a computer smart enough to send data to your PC, adding fax capabilities costs you $1-2 for a keypad and $1-2 for a modem chip.
And they'll be compatible with all the other fax machines you might want to talk to, not get into arguments about which Microsoft Word versions are currently emulated on Macs, and while they're not blazingly fast, they're usually fast enough for whatever you actually need to do.
And if your company has a fancy mail server, it probably has a fax receiver as a standard feature, and probably also a fax-sending gateway.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Swede here. Have not used a fax since the late 90s (faxing a receipt to France) and have not once in my life sent a fax to anyone in Sweden. And I'm not young, and I am an office worker.
In fact, last week, a friend of mine called me just to tell me he had had to send – a FAX! He couldn't believe it! He had had to send a fax to some company in another country and he thought it was so preposterous that he called me up to tell me about it. A fax! A fax!
Yes, the reasoning on the other end was they required "a signature" and we had a good laugh about this.
Here in Norway, all medical records are centralized and on a separate secure network. Of course, we don't worry about things like payment and insurance systems because all of our medical costs are paid for by the government. We only pay tiny symbolic doctors fees which are designed to keep us from going to the doctor 100 times a week.
When you live in a 3rd world country like the U.S. (been to Alabama and the shit holes in Mexico, the difference being people in Alabama have color TV and glass or screen in the windows of their trailer holes and in Mexico, the houses are made of clay and the people who live in them work for a living or starve... no welfare), you complain about anything like centralized medical databases and socialized medicine because you would rather live in fear of all your neighbors then to improve their quality of living enough to reduce the risks.
But in alternative circumstances, non-medical, fax machines should have died a long time ago.
Personally, I don't open up attachments unless I've had some sort of out-of-band confirmation from the sender, or it's someone that I communicate regularly with.
With a fax to e-mail service, I can be relatively certain that there's no chance of it being some sort of infected file attachment, although there's still a chance of it being a spoofed e-mail from the service should there be an exploit in the file format they use. With boring old faxes, I have *no* concern about viruses ... spam, yes, but not viruses.
And for those who haven't seen the email messages that network connected fax machines generate ... you'll be amazed that anyone would open them at all. They scream 'this is spam or a virus' ... I'd be more likely to open an attachment sent with no email body, and the subject 'Fw: Open this word document/there is no virus' or 'Kindly see attached file of POWER BALL AWARD and contact us for your claim thank you'.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
When someone asking me to send them a copy of paper document, it's just too overkill to boot the computer, which might take up to a minute, and start the scanner. What's worse, the scanner, ethernet controller/wireless network card require setup and drivers to work. Yeah, it's maybe not a big deal for most of you. But what about the old grannys or even someone(including myself,sometimes) couldn't obtain the drivers for their OS?
I am sitting here with some metal discs in my pockets I use for transactions and my watch displays time in a fashion invented by the Babylonians. The fax has a long way to go to catch up with these hangers-on.
The fax machine is an old worthless high cost and time consuming machine. It is a razor and blade scenario, just like the fucking printer. I can't wait for that shit to go too. The accessories cost more that the device over time. It's bullshit.
Organizations that use it, use it because the have to, not because the want to. The only reason one business has a fax machine is because another one has it and decides to use it.
We could go all digital if we wanted easy.
The people that use are old or don't want to change or both. The baby boomer generation and silent generation don't like to use anything different and wait for it........ DON'T UNDERSTAND OR USE NEW ADVANCES IN TECHNOLOGY TO THERE ADVANTAGE. They refuse to try something new and it is because of their stubbornness that the fucking fax machine is still here. Working in a series of tech jobs, I should know and anyone the likes innovation sees it too.
PEOPLE WHO DON'T ADAPT QUICKLY TO CHANGES ALWAYS COMPLAIN AND MAKE IT WORSE !!!
I know what you are going to say. These generations invented this and did that, and I say "that's great".
Personally I don't really care, because it will die soon anyway, the same way stamps and the postal service are passing away, cursive writing, books [I like books], and checks.
I'm an IT Manager for a Fortune 100 company and a couple of years ago ran our European B2B team, processing around $8billion of orders a year. Fax accounted for 20-30% of that order value and cost us a huge amount in manual order entry (both in effort and in terms of transcription errors). The majority of the faxes were, annoyingly, system generated - they just chose to send them by fax either by printing them out and feeding them in, or printing them to a fax driver.
We tried all manner of things to get rid of them and move our customers to other order placement mechanisms, as well as projects to implement fax OCR based solutions, but they generally fail for one reason:
- It is virtually no effort for the customer to fax us an order, so it "costs" them nothing
We tried moving them to a variety of different solutions:
Emailing structured forms: Nope, they have to re-type the fax produced by their order management system to do that
Web based order entry: Nope, they have to re-type into our forms
Systems integration: Nope, it'd cost them to get an email / FTP / HTTP / Web Services front-end put on their order management system
In the end, the best solution we found was a company in Canada who've produced a print driver for pretty much every OS. The customer loads it onto their server, PC or whatever they produce faxes from and print to that instead of their usual fax driver. That then intercepts the output and sends it to this Canadian company, who develop a map of that document format to turn it into an EDI message, which they then send to us in a standard EDI format. Because they were getting in before the data was transformed into an image, they could process it and send it, rather than trying to deal with some fuzzy, misaligned image after the fact. Great little idea.
So, I guess, as I said, the main problem with getting rid of faxes is that, generally, it's the supplier of a service who picks up the tab for them being unwieldy, unreadable and un-processable. There's no incentive for the customer to change - after all, the supplier should just be glad they're getting the custom.
--- Band: Joey Ultra
Bad and Superior technology are relative concepts. I didn't do any research about it, but it is OBVIOUS that fax machines present advantages otherwise people wouldn't use them. Remember that people being used to it is already one advantage...
When I deputised for some Director in Belgium, all faxes were received in the Post Room. The secretary wasn't allowed in there, a severe man in a brown warehouse coat had to bring it upstairs for her when he was ready. And she then logged it in a little book. She brought it to me with my coffee tray, but only if the little 'traffic lights' outside my door were green. I had buttons for that.
"Do you know where you can buy ink for an Amiga brand fax machine?" Krusty
You talk about fax's being old school yet you do not have the google +1 button on your articles. Why you living in the stone age but pick on others doing the same?
Can I send a document in my native language from any hotel computer, with arbitrary layout and graphics and have the recipient correct it and send it back to me? Or is it still like early 90s thingy where I would have to tell people I never met before to install fonts or a particular version of Word - or worse have the message bounce hours later, when I am already on the plane?
My doctor goes on his computer and places a prescription using whatever software it is that they have on it (some medical records system, I haven't looked at it). When I get to Target, they have the prescription ready.
Evidently they have some secure system that meets HIPAA standards for communicating between doctors and pharmacies. It is also apparently something that isn't that esoteric, being that Target uses, or that exclusive, being that my fairly small doctors office uses it.
Before you start poking fun of "ancient" technologies please at least take some time to stop and think about all the ways more modern technologies suck just as bad if not worse.
spam filterings only purpose is to make SMTP totally unreliable and therefore useless while junk still piles up in your inbox.
Personally I'll take my chances with someone physically tapping my phone line vs the global trust house of cards we seem to be stuck with (See diginotar)
Sure you can pgp sign messages but in the real world nobody does that.
lets sign emails using DKIM and DNS security and we could use that
I live in Finland and honestly I've not seen a fax machine in use for a decade or so. Had some luls at a previous work place a few years ago when some americans asked to fax a contract. Analog landlines are also very rare nowadays and the old copper wiring is usually recycled for dsl-based broadband modems in places where optical fiber isn't present. I'm pretty sure my grandmother is the only one I know who still has a landline, but I'm not sure if she actually uses it for anything else than a back-up in case she forgets to charge her cell phone and needs to do a emergency call or something.
Fax machines are super easy to use. Pop the sheet in, dial the number and hit the green button. Done.
In that respect fax is far superior to the supposedly superior alternatives.
"We live in a global world" - Harvey Pitt, former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman
Fax machines, despite using 40-year-old technology and having come into prominence in the 1980s, are actually still pretty impressive if you think about it, a new Brookings Institute report confirmed Tuesday. "Yes, the words 'fax machine' evoke this arcane image of a bulky telephone apparatus that makes a dial-up modem sound, but come on, if you take a step back and think about how, with one press of a button, it's capable of transmitting a facsimile of a document thousands of miles away over a standard telephone line, there's no way you can't find that slightly remarkable," the report read in part, adding that one has to admit that even with all the technological advancements over the years, the fact that fax machines are still viable communication devices in offices around the world is "pretty goddamn amazing." "People still use these things. They rely on them. It's not uncommon for someone to say, 'Send me a fax.' When's the last time you heard someone say, 'Can I borrow your Discman?' See what we're saying?" The report concluded that the mere fact we're even talking about fax machines right now should be evidence enough of how great they still are.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/report-fax-machines-still-pretty-impressive-if-you,21256/
The fax *MACHINE* died years ago, if not decades ago.
But fax as a transmission medium has several advantages - it's real-time, it's guaranteed delivery (to the point that courts will accept a valid transmission log as evidence of reception at the other end), it's direct (and thus pretty certain to be secure - at least as secure as your phone line), it's cheaper than a phone call and it allows you to send arbitrary images (i.e. not just a particular format / language / layout / etc.). Ever tried scribbling a diagram on a computer to send to someone to, e.g. know how to turn off a burglar alarm, or where you left that file? It takes ten times longer than sketching it on paper and faxing it.
The school I work for still were running an old fax machine. I moved them to a network fax driver and they haven't looked back. But faxes are still sent and received every day from themselves, their suppliers, the parents, etc. When you want to see a signature (i.e. did the kid sign his own "permission slip"?), a fax is infinitely easier than some electronic method - it also arrives instantly and the sender knows immediately whether or not we received it ("Please send Johnny home to wait at his aunt's house because I won't be able to pick him up"), and you can keep it forever in its original format as legally-binding evidence.
The cost is neither here nor there - because it's actually cheaper than a phone call or even a text for single-page items, and not many people have the need to fax internationally - if you do, the cost is a drop in the ocean to your operations and there's nothing stopping you doing it over your already-"free" VoIP link for example.
And sending them is no more complicated than printing them out (however, it's MUCH simpler than printing them out, only to then fax them, which is a ridiculous idea) and can be done from any workstation or even via email - you can even pool them until phone calls are particularly cheap or send them from remote company fax servers (i.e. one on this continent, one on another, email/print to the appropriate one to save costs).
As a communications medium, it's quick ENOUGH, simple ENOUGH, cheap ENOUGH, reliable ENOUGH and prevalent ENOUGH (probably easier to fax the North Pole than it would be to send them a large image, I should think) and the installation knowledge is basically zero (hell, printers have come with fax built-in for decades now - plug them into your phone line and you're done).
I bought my house via fax only a few years ago. I was on holiday in Corfu and the lawyers needed a signature within 8 hours to finalise the deal (yes, it really was THAT close to losing the house) - the accepted formats? In person or by fax. Not even a mention of any other way of doing it. Now it may be a ridiculous requirement but it's there for a reason - fax is accepted in courts where other media might not be (at least not without an awful lot of extraneous evidence proving its integrity). How long did it take us to find a fax machine? First hotel we walked in, who did it for nothing even though we weren't guests. How long did it take us to find an Internet connection? The first three days were spent doing so and it cost £1.50 a hour, no scanning facility and dodgy PC's (everyone logged in as the same user and it was crawling with malware).
A full network, with scanning facility, international links and clients who all have the same - yeah, you can probably abandon fax. But for the cost of it, it's worth keeping if it brings in even ONE more customer (or even just satisfies one even a tiny amount) - and integration with a large network is a ten-minute job even for hundreds of users (e.g. Hylafax and fax-to-email/email-to-fax).
It's not the fax machine that dies hard, it's the universe of paper documents that dies hard. What simpler, more reliable, more secure, and more point-to-point mechanism is there for transferring a piece of paper from one place to another?
Anyone remember the 'Telex' system? It was the legal standard before fax became popular. Fax basically put Telex out of business (but it still hangs on, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telex) Then fax became a legal document. Many courts now accept uploaded pdf files as legal documents. But fax will hang on for years.
Faxes are a long way from being dead, I installed a Telex system less than five years ago and that has supposedly been dead for decades! I know companies that send/ recevie 4 Million faxes a year on the one fax server, trust me there is a lot of life still left in faxing.
Nobody ever got their dick caught in an email
The Fax is the superior alternative to sending documents by snail mail. Why we don't use the author's proposed oh-so-elegant PDF+Ethernet/Internet-based alternative? Because since about 20 years ago, desktop computers have been an incompatible, unrealiable, virus-infected mess that "normal" people are reluctant to use if they need to do something reliably - thanks to Windows, mostly. As for why we still need paper: because a few paper sheets are still far superior to a (short) electronic document for most practical purposes and you can actually have both at the same time.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
One of the main reasons is that in many jurisdictions, the courts still persist in accepting a signed fax (which a child of 10 can fake up) as equivalent to a signed original of a contract, and in rejecting anything signed digitally (which takes a CS degree to install in your email system).
I don't feel quite comfortable about it, as there is really no way to determine whether a faxed signature is a forgery. Sometimes these contracts are for tens of thousands of dollars, but the client is in a hurry and wants a fax rather than waiting for a "wet signature" to arrive in the mail.
Get This:
Now and then my clients will request what they call a "digital signature". They're not asking for public key cryptography. What they want to do is email me a Word document. I am then expected to "digitally sign" the document by signing a blank piece of paper, scanning my signature, cropping it into a small graphic file, then inserting my signature graphic at the bottom of the contract. Yeah, Right. I've never done that. Instead I've printed the document out, signed it, then faxed it.
I wouldn't want a clipped-out graphic of my signature floating around The Series of Tubes, after all.
Most faxes are I think Group 3 faxes. Group 3 was described to me once as "a big mass of protocol". It's not layered like the Internet protocols are, so there is no way you can alter any part of it to improve the protocol.
There have been some attempts to improve on Group 3. Group 4 fax is a layered protocol just like the Internet is. I once interviewed at a company that made Group 4 faxes. This was back in the late 80s; they used laser printers, and high-res scanners, so that the document one received via Group 4 looked just like a laser print.
But they were very expensive, and for them to work, one needed Group 4 devices on both ends. Other than during this interview, I've never seen Group 4 devices in actual use.
I still own an ancient Apple LaserWriter model that includes Postscript Fax. But again for it to work, both ends need to be Postscript Fax. At the time you could only get a Postscript RIP from Adobe. No one wanted to adopt a single company's proprietary protocol.
What was really screwy is that my printer doesn't include a scanner. The way it's meant to work is that one can choose to fax documents from the Mac OS so that they print remotely via fax. One can't use it to fax signed contracts back and forth like you can with a fax that has a scanner. I thought the Postscript Fax feature sounded like a great idea when I bought the printer, but I never once actually used it.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
In Poland Fax document is threatened the same by law as original document send by post. Therefore You can send someone invoice by fax but You cannot do this by email. It is common situation when someone prints pdfs from email and folds them to look like those would came by fax.
Did you encounter at least one machine that does "two way fax"? Apart from sending the station ID all machines I've ever seen send pages in just one direction. On many fax+phone machines you can't even send pages in the opposite direction of the call like it happens if you dial a document retrieval service.
These days faxes rarely travel end-to-end, in many cases they encounter media gateways that convert analog T.30 fax to T.38 and back. That's a place where station ID and page content can be easily modified - it's in digital format with checksums removed.
Fax is considered a legal document in most countries, since Date/Time Sender and recipient are clearly identifiable.
So it is smarter, from a legal point of view, to send your Invoices etc via Fax rather then by E-Mail.
From a business perspective thats all i need to use it.
Our stinking government still requires me to FAX crap to it all the time when dealing medical issues. As well as my insurance company, Met Life. When I need to sign something there's no legal method that I can use other than a FAX. I can't "sign" and Email. And please people, don't tell me about some crappy company that offers to provide verification for $$$.
Sounds like one of the main legal reasons for not using email and sticking to fax is lack of a verifiable sender
- that would require a new mail protocol to overcome.
- only accepting mails via that protocol would also go some way to killing spam.
I can tell you precisely why, at least for Germany:
A fax has the same legal status as a letter.
An e-mail does not.
The proper legal terms are "Schriftform" and "Textform". Certain documents, legal papers, applications, paperwork in general by law requires "Schriftform" which basically means "written down". An e-mail or other electronic document does not qualify. A fax does. Yes, it's nonsense since a fax is basically an automated scanner/printer. But it's the law. So for many types of legally relevant communications, you can send a letter or you can send a fax, and that's why the business world still keeps fax around.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Why do people still rely on point to point circuits instead of just throwing everything onto an uncontrollable IP-switched network?
Answer that, and you've answered the question about faxes becuase a fax is a temporary point to point circuit which can be setup with anybody who owns a POTS line and a cheap fax machine. There simply is NOT a newer tech, so saying it's 'outdated' is simply wrong to start with.
Next issue, please.
'If something as appallingly stupid as the fax machine can live on, it makes you wonder how we make progress at all. Old habits die hard. It just goes to show you: Bad technology generally isn't the problem; it's the people who persist in using that technology rather than embracing far superior alternatives.'"
Alternatively, the "far superior alternatives" aren't; it's the people who persist in thinking technology, because it is new, is automatically far superior.
I'll grant that much of what is faxed could be handled via email, but faxes have some advantages:
Security - a dedicated fax machine with a secure line makes it a lot easier to control confidential material; and ensure it is destroyed, than if it is emailed; or put on a server for ftp.
Fax machines are cheaper to use and set up than a PC with an internet connection.
You don't have to do much truing to make someone comfortable with sending a fax.,/P>
Fax is basically set and forget - no need to scan, name files, attach to an email, send, delete originals, etc. For some cases, people's time is more valuable to be used messing with emails.
People still send paper copies as well - a much older, but still very useful, technology as well.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I find the quizzical statement in the posting description a bit disingenuous - the fax machine, for all it's archaic attributes, is only slightly more complex than a touch-tone phone, a 1940's technology widely rolled out in the 1960's.
If you start with paper, FAX is easy - if you start with an electronic document, email is easy. The commenter obviously deals with electronic documents, not paper ones. Email is neither simpler nor cheaper.
To send an email attachment you need to scan the page, write an email, attach the scan to the email, send the email, hope the email isn't too large for the recipient, hope the recipient gets the email, and the recipient has to open the attachment and print the email.
To fax a paper document you simply drop it in a hopper, dial the phone number and hit the 'send' button - all the above is had led for you, with a paper document popping out the other end.
Of course, FAXing is also cheaper - unlimited domestic calling is common today, and cheaper than broadband Internet OR dial-up Internet access and a landline phone. You can typically FAX a document cheaper than you can send it via snail mail, and it has the added bonus of delivery confirmation AND near-instant delivery.
Ken
When I was working in NY(Manhattan). The internet lines to our office went down, and given that we all at slashdot know how good the ISP's are in US and how the ISP's restore service quickly in the event of problems .... I will continue with the rest. There were high value contracts which needed to be signed form our end and sent out. Well the only solution turned out to be a simple fax. Even if the fax is down you can always go out to Fedex and fax it. (Won't scan an send stuff out through an unsecured email ever.)
So yes faxes will not die out as they are a last line of defense.
You get one nerd point to put on your helmet if you can - without googling - identify the decade in which the first patent for a fax machine was issued.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=120R2-phK0U&feature=player_embedded
WIthout fax, paperwork heavy businesses (like my Flex administrator who needs substantiation on everything!) would need someone at the other end trained to open thousands of emails and print them all out on their end every day. Faxes save that time consuming step and a body. The majority of office workers cannot work off digital copies of long documents. Fax doesn't really have a place with one-on-one and small business communication, but I highly doubt the corporate world will ever replace it with the digital alternative, unless it is the one button solution that automatically prints your faxed emails when received. It's not the sending part that's the problem; everyone is just tied to hard copy.
A news organization would not have repeated this drek. The author has either no brains or is ignoring the obvious to generate controversy. Either way, how about editing it out in future?
- I've got bad karma because I won't parrot everyone else's opinion
The FAX machine is a work of genius. Look at Venezia's proposed alternatives and what they require -- scanners, computers, networks, E-mail accounts, software, etc., etc. Yes, most IT people work in a place that has those toys and more. The guy making sandwiches at the sub shop down the road doesn't. What he did a decade or more ago is to run down to Staples and buy a FAX machine. The infrastructure he needs is a phone line (landline -- less common now than a decade ago, but still available) and a 120 volt power socket. If he want to use the machine to receive lunch orders, he needs to plug it into a 120 volt power outlet and the phone line, and keep the thing supplied with ink and paper. That's it. If he wants to send a fax, he also needs to know how to dial a phone.
I guess now that Steve Jobs has left Apple, there is nobody left who is capable of making Venezia's tech toys as simple to use as a FAX machine.
I'm just upset at the wrongheadedness of the entire article. If a large group of people are using a technology that "should" be obsolete, despite a plethora of alternatives, you shouldn't be deriding them -- you should be listening to them, because they are trying to tell you something very important.
The reason that FAX is still around is because of one simple thing - LEGAL ISSUES.
Signed and faxed documents have held up through court cases as being valid for many things. There is no equivalent to a signed and emailed document.
Until there is a court-accepted form of global digital signatures, faxes will stay around.
It does not matter if you've written your signature by hand, stamped your approval of it or dipped your thumb in the ink bottle and then pressed it on the paper.
The important part is that by faxing your document, sent from a location registered to you/your company (through your phone number, which is listed on the fax), in real-time (no delay while the document bounces around e-mail servers across the planet) - is being received in real-time on the other registered physical location (again - phone numbers and time-stamps on the fax).
In physical form. So it is instantly sign-able or file-able by the other side.
And as a bonus, besides the fact that the other side can check your number with the phone company or call you personally to verify - there is the fact that there exists a third party record that you called the number you faxed to and that the call lasted for exactly as long as it took for your fax to get there.
It is a physical format intended for dealing with physical (as opposed to virtual) locations and people.
Few lines of code can pretend to be you when emailing something.
I am yet to hear about malware which will pick up the phone on the sender's end of the line, answer in his/her voice and resend the page that had a typo or transfer error on it.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Phone numbers are not nearly as easy to spoof as email addresses, there is no uniform standard for digital signatures and email authentication, so which alternatives are you referring to ? We still want to see the autograph under a purchase offer. So what's your alternative ? Printing a document, signing it, scanning it as pdf and attach it to an email ?
I'm a technology guy in my mid 30s, but come on... superior alternatives...
Bad technology generally isn't the problem; it's the people who persist in using that technology rather than embracing far superior alternatives.
That explains Windows rather nicely! :-D
Gas cars are like fax machines. Yea they are fun, but they need to stop making them. You can still play with the ones you have tho.
Fax is a media that has poor ANTISPAM filters (this is hard to do). It costs nearly nothing to the sender. Chances are that the receiver get the thing directly printed on paper, hence have a (superficial) view on the whole content. That makes it a great thing for spam / ad business / direct prospection (call it the way you like) targeting SMEs.
So you wanna start send documents.
1) FAX machine : Tell the phone person to please provision a POTS analog phone line to a jack right there, and tell me the external number. Fax machines are cheap and can be bought on the office expense account (the one used to buy paperclips). For bonus points tell the receptionist your new departmental fax number. Unbox fax, plug in, you're running. You know if it works or not because every far end tells your near end in some manner that is "OK" or not. Support is, if it breaks, buy another. It just works.
2) Scan and email : Fill out request form for IT dept for the hardware. They need to follow the capital expense forms and procedures to buy your $100 flatbed scanner, along with possible competitive bidding, assuming they even have the capital budget remaining for the year. Your bosses bosses boss may need to get permission from his boss to transfer $100 of his capital budget to IT, assuming he has the budget. Its quite trivial to spend thousands in labor on meetings and arguments about spending $100. It may or may not arrive in 3 months and may or may not meet your needs, but you're stuck with the hardware. Fill out a request form for IT to get the scanner software installed on your locked down PCs. Argue endlessly about who will support the system, and how much it will be supported. Eventually you get it working, and every time you send an email with a scan, you have to call or wait for an email response to prove their anti-virus didn't eat it. Its a nightmare.
At home I would never use a fax. But I understand why they're the path of least resistance at businesses.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Next up, why do when continue to use wheels when we have jet engines? Why do so many people still use fire to heat their homes (gas furnace) when they can use electricity as a modern replacement? Why do people eat food when it would be more convenient to just get your nutrients pumped into you through an IV? I guess some people just don't want to keep up with the times...
These "superior technologies" are just too difficult to use for most of the people. Look, who deals with faxes typically? Receptionists? And all others who need to send them something.
Fax has a number of advantages over any other system that allows to transfer images:
- universally compatible (99.99% or something like this)
- plug-and-play (plug into standard phone outlet)
- easily addressable (can sent to any number and do not need any special credentials to "enter" the system)
- can put plain paper into it
- immediately produces hard copy of the document (no need for a computer to open the document and print it - most of the fax users absolutely want it on the paper)
- cost-effective (most of the faxes are sent locally or to toll-free numbers anyway)
As long as there is no alternative that offers all of these features (in some way at least ;) ) faxes won't die. I would actually imagine a device that could probably change the picture - a fax machine that uses cellular data network to send faxes to a service centre which forwards them to the recipient using any method that recipient supports - down to regular fax if that's the only method). This kind of machine that does not "plus" into the phone line could probably help to break the dependency on the phone network. And once it is broken, the users of these machines will gradually use more advanced features (those who can appreciate them).
It's probably because of legal problems, too. In Germany, for example, a fax is legally binding i.e. it holds the same credibility as a written letter and stuff whereas an email of a scanned document isn't regarded as conclusive. Of course propperly signed PDF documents are but those involve costs for getting a certificate that's accepted for such stuff as well as the need for tech skills to use that (and try to see it not from our geeky POV but from the view of an average secretary) or even more costly technical solutions to do that automagically... and the receiver has to be able to review that signature and to interpret if it's correct, i.e. a signed pdf or email is only regarded conclusive if the sender signs it with an accepted certificate AND if the receiver validates that signature and can proof that he did... it's insane, I know, but that's how it is
1) we need an encrypted e-mail standard,
2) faxes are easier to use by computer-illiterate management.
3) people mistakenly think it is impossible to change a fax, which is what makes it so "secure" for legal documentation.
Which means we need to completely redraft an internet standard without MS taking it over, make smarter management, and prove to people that they are stupid, and smarter people could take advantage of it. All three are pretty much impossible, so I don't see faxes going anywhere anytime soon.
Consider that restaurants now accept take out orders via fax. They just hook up a fax machine to a phone line and let the paper fly out of it into an "IN" basket of orders. (wonder what they do with the junk faxes for male enhancement products?). How would you do this with a network setup? They NEED the paper orders to be handed to the chief. How would you set this up with a computer to receive orders over the network? It HAS to be a plug and play system for these guys.
Here's my plan:
We have manufacturers quietly replace every fax machine's innards with a scanner that sends 256-bit encrypted e-mails to other "fax machines" while letting techno-Luddites continue struggling to punch in the right numbers and standing around like idiots waiting for a wasted piece of paper that says something was sent. So nobody gets wise, we can degrade the image quality when their "fax machine" prints out the message at the other end. We could even keep the things plugged into POTS if the idiot users think that's an important part of the magic.
Ask me about my sig!
Were you consoling the computer, or was it consoling you? Really, some people should pay for a decent therapist.
I just checked the fax machine for our floor. There were 20 printed/faxed pages there this morning. 19 of them were "fax spam" - 1 was a PO from a client. We are small, so we don't have a fax server, but I'd rather not waste so much paper for 1 client order of $100.
This order was from a long time client who doesn't have a computer. They will physically mail a check when we send an invoice. We have a few hundred clients like this.
I can't be arsed to print out timesheets and travel expense forms, fill them in, sign them, fax/scan and send them. I pop the file open in GIMP, paste my signature image, apply a graininess blur, and email the result to my boss- who then prints it out, signs it, scans it, and emails it back to me. By that point, it looks just as lousy as any other form, and corporate accountants are satisfied.
No OS on the planet can protect itself from a user with the admin password. - Yvan256
From the perspective of the average user, a fax machine is not bad technology. They buy it, plug in two wires, type a number and go.
If they are going to do the same thing with a PC, they have to buy a PC, buy a scanner, make sure they have the appropriate scanning software, make sure they're scanning the a file format the recipient expects, ensure their PC has an Internet connection, make sure the attachment isn't too large to email, get the recipient to read out their email address in the phonetic alphabet to ensure they get it right, and I'm leaving out about 20 or so other things.
I dislike the arrogant tone of this post. Just because a technology is superior on technical merit does not mean that it necessarily gets the job done for the average Joe. You try talking users through all of the complexities of scanning, document management etc. You'll buy a fax machine in two days.
Even if it's a lousy *technical* solution. As anybody who's been paying attention and heard the words, "Mac" or "Apple" for the last 3 decades should have figured out by now, it's the interface, stupid!
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I spent last Christmas communicating with a guy. I'd send him an email, a minion would print the email and then fax it to him. He'd scribble his thoughts all over the paper and then fax the minion back. The minion would then copy the fax and email it to me as a PDF document. I would then try to decipher what he'd scribbled before we went round again.
It was like using technology to play Chinese whispers.
There's something to be said about old, tried-and-true, low-tech solutions. I manage my company's North American enterprise faxing solution and we still do a few million faxes per month. Faxing has some advantages that email doesn't; and most people don't tend to think about. Here are some examples: In construction (or similar industries) where you have a somewhat low-tech field office like a trailer sending a fax from there is much easier to set up. A simple phone line run there from the neighborhood box is relatively easy and inexpensive and allows the foreman to send a hand-filled order sheet to a supplier so they can get parts right away. In small medical offices doctors often fill out pre-printed order sheets by hand with 2 of theses and 9 of those, etc. Drop it in the fax machine and you're done. In some instances sending a fax is fastest legal means of delivering a document. Things like international export documents at the request of some customs agent that won't allow a shipment to clear the docks until receiving a packing list or other sort of document. Two other small benefits: If you have to write on a document you must scan it first anyway; why not just fax it if high quality isn't a goal; and since phone lines are held to a 99.999% uptime by government regulations, you can still send a fax when the 'Net is down. While I agree that faxing isn't the best transmission medium for all situations, it's sometimes the easiest due to it's pure simplicity and reliability. Until someone can come up with a better way to send a document these ways I don't see faxing going completely dead.
Scanning to a computer is still difficult, time consuming, and error prone. Emailing with attachments (especially over Exchange) is still an awful experience. Printing from any computer to any printer is still a nightmare. Fax machines do all this for you and it almost always works.
Indeed - the problem with 'robosigning' was that you had unqualified people signing documents they didn't review saying that they were qualified and indeed reviewed the documents.
Whether you use a physical pen is mostly a question of how easy/difficult your signature is to forge. If somebody notices that every single one of your signatures are identical, they might be able to copy it out of a document and forge it by copy and paste, but really, they can do that anyways.
I don't read AC A human right
Not a great citation, but I did buy a house(a pretty large contract, wouldn't you say), with the sellers in a completely different state, using a mix of scan and email and fax. All involving physical signatures.
You can google it a bit, but technically speaking, verbal contracts can be legally binding. Where they get into trouble is that there is typically little to no record of them, making them difficult to enforce. So the question of 'legally binding' isn't really a True/False until it goes to court. It's more of a range. At the bottom would be verbal contracts. A step up would be a standard written contract, next would be one witnessed by a public notary(who will affix their seal), then one prepared by a lawyer, etc...
All the various forms of signature don't affect the legality of the contract. It doesn't even 'need' to be a signature. A mark or even a stamp can be considered sufficient(remember the disabled!). The signature is essentially a mark of consent, however you choose to make it. Why a signature instead of a check or an X? It's an anti-fraud measure, no more, no less.
I don't read AC A human right
Every 6-8 years your body's cells are fully replaced with the following generation. Even thoughts not flashed to the newer cells are gone. So what makes you not a forgery of your earlier self?
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
Several other posters have already pointed at it as well but a lot of the reason is legal issues. I work for a company that does a lot of work for the US Government. As far as they are concerned, if I sign something and fax it to them, its just as legal as if I signed it in front of their face. However if I scanned and emailed that same document to them, they wouldn't accept it. There are many laws on the books regarding faxes, but not so much with other technologies.
Just add the ability to enter in an email address instead of a phone # and send the fax as a PDF or JPG to the recipient. They could even encode text codes into the JPG image via steganography techniques.
The IDEA of a fax machine is still practical for office settings. Just update it to use the internet.
Hi.. where can I buy one of these 'fucking' scanners? They sound like a lot more fun than my regular scanner.
Yeah, because a signature reliably ensures that the person signing a document is who they say they are.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Get to know your fax machine! Classic geek examination of this device, from the TV series "The Secret Life of Machines".
http://www.secretlifeofmachines.com/secret_life_of_the_fax_machine.shtml
Watch the video: http://qt.exploratorium.edu/ronh/SLOM/SLOM_0301-The_FAX_Machine.m4v
Fax machines do exactly one thing, and they work.
Sure, for offices, fax may be at least semi-convenient, but for me, it's a damned hassle.
I do fax maybe once a year, when some damned bureaucracy demands one, and provides no other way to send them a particular document. I have no land-line, just Internet and cell-phone, so when somebody forces me to fax them, I have to scramble to mooch someone else's fax line, or even make a trip to Kinkos.
I hate faxes. I hate 'em. Give me an alternative. I'm more than happy to scan documents with a signature and email you the images.
From TFS:
One word: religion. By comparison, the continuing use of the fax machine is a shining example of rational and forward thinking behavior.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
A fax machine typically is an end to end device.
Imagine no phone lines but a pice of wire connecting 2 black boxes. Essentially that's it. One could argue that so is an "Ethernet" system over which most of our internet traffic is encapsulated from our homes. Very true, except now you need to install an operating system on the back to back units, software that may not be compatible with theother end to end unit, and the user at each end would need to understand the format through which information is transfered. Consider: User one: "I am sending an Image". User two: "I am trying to read it as text and I cannot understand it".
We might also argue that we are using phonelines for modern data communications too, just like a fax machine does. This is also true.
However, if you buy just a laptop, yes it's portable but can it print out your document as is? What if you are sent an email attachment but your laptop does not have the software to open it?
All of the above can be achieved with modern technology, however as modern as it's getting, a fax machine's power is in its simplicity.
Put paper in, press phone number, press send. Receiving is even simpler. Phone rings, machine prints.
With most Internet based systems one needs an internet account. Most internet accounts need phonelines to run on, thought not necessarly true in every part of the world. With a fax, all you need is a working phone line and a box plugged into it. With most new fax machines you dont immediatly need paper as they can store up to 50+ pages; for when you do get paper.
Imagine the ethernet scenario earlier but with a fax machine:
User one: "I am sending a fax", User two: "Got it thanks".
The content does not require any special software or action from either user.
Clearly the limitation is that a picture isnt going turn out as good as an email attachment, but thats not the fax's purpose. It delivers documents and it is very good at it.
An important lesson in technology design today is that it needs to beat the simplicity of a fax machine. Otherwise it's just big scary computer with lots of wrong buttons.
Michael.C.
I'm currently installing a new VOIP system for my company. Telephone lines for fax machines are expensive, and our corporate culture is cheap, cheap, cheap. And they work like crap with the analog converters on most VOIP systems.
As we install the system, we push to remove the faxes. And everybody is cool with the idea of dropping their fax and saving money.
But we rarely can remove a fax. Why, because they all have clients, vendors, agencies, pharmacists, etc who force them to use a fax.
They pay the bills. $500 per piece of spam can quickly add up for a widely available number. Add in the fact that they usually default in small claims, thus keeping the suits cheap. Plus if you win they also have to pay your expenses.
It's not that fax machines "refuse to die": it's that they're very, very hard to kill. Within the office battle environment, the fax machine is second only to the photocopier in terms of sheer endurance, and anyone who has gone against a photocopier knows what I mean. Photocopiers are real monsters, especially those with multiple-size trays and magnification options. Some of the smarter models are actually more vulnerable, such as those with memory, because they do have a central logic that can be disabled while older models are tough brutes. Even so, you're going to waste a lot of ammo on a photocopier. Now, fax machines... Those critters are just evil. During the HR Bureau Siege of 1996 it took just 4 fax machines to wipe away a Fast Response Armed Team in less then one minute after first contact. They just lay low until the line goes hot, and then... It's a nightmare, you don't want to know. But mark my words, you go against fax machines, you want backup and plenty of firepower. You guys think you've taken down a word processor makes you a combat veteran but you've seen nothing. All you have to face nowadays are inkjets and lasers, I've seen what a daisywheel can do to a human body and believe me, it's not pretty. Office Wars is Serious Business.
Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.
I'm going to make myself sound foolish here, but what the heck. I had a fax machine a few years ago. I hadn't used it in a few years, but I needed it so I dug it out and plugged it in. I tried everything I could think of, and I couldn't get it to work. Finally, after trying for quite a while I gave up on it. I was going to throw it out but a friend of mine asked me for it so I gave it to him.
It turns out I just had the phone line plugged into the "line out" jack instead of the "line in" jack.
Maybe I unconsciously assumed the jacks were interchangeable. Who knows. I felt pretty stupid. The point is that, to some extent, technology seems familiar to us because we use it. To me, a fax machine was just something I had to use, but resented, and therefore I suppose had no interest figuring it out. However, I can spend hours taking apart a computer or troubleshooting a strange network connectivity issue that would make the average traditional fax user's head explode. To each, his or her own domain.
www.clarke.ca
Are you writing from 2005? I travel all over the country on business. Part of my job is to look through technical manuals and make copies of drawings and other information. I have never been to an office which did not have a big, serious, multifunction scanner/fax/printer. 90% of them scan to email or a network drive, and the other 10% just scanned to a network drive. I have not seen a flatbed scanner used seriously in many years. They are all on the shelf collecting dust.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
I've dealt with people and companies who insist on a fax rather than an email or a scanned image because of some bizarre perception that faxes are more "real". There's a perception on an emotional level that when you put a document in your side, the guy on the other end gets the same document, even though if you tried to pin them down they'd admit that this couldn't technically be the case.
And so, you might firm up a deal via email and phone conversations, but when it comes down to signing the document, they'll insist on faxing you a document, and have you sign it and fax it back. Even though we both know, were we pinned down, that it's not the same document.
When Star Trek transporters become available, we'll probably go back to "fax" machines that beam the real document from one spot to another, although McCoy will continue to insist it isn't really the same document.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Not trolling here, but i 100% agree with OP, plus here for 1500 peoples the additional cost for running a lot of small printers and faxes is 20000-30000 euros per year and that s only the gain from the ink cartridge price, hence we are replacing them with one huge (maybe 1m20) multifunction printer (scan to mail, network share, print, copy, ip fax) shared by about 5-10 peoples, we ask peoples to walk the 10 meter from their office to the printer.
Then you need to also factor in: place gain cause we usually replace 3 appliance by 1, time gain because these things print maybe 4x time faster, repair speed because we have a better maintenance contract and instead of hauling the small printer to it office try to repair, call support wait 3 days, there are peoples coming onsite to the printer fixing it and we almost never hear of it, thats time gain for the it which can speed time on more interesting things, functionality gain because now most of them are A3, double side, built in stapler, linked to AD, etc ... There are added bonus on ink , it cost a lot less on big printer than small ones and so we can refill it ourselves, very rarely and so peoples don't hold war stocks of ink cartridges with them, 2 years ago, when we retired a printer the peoples also gave us back the ink they stcked which was no longer needed by them , that was the last printer of this model and theses guys stocked for 15000 euros of color cartridges, they just asked for new ones every months, and that s a single printer, we may have like 100000 euros of unused ink sticked on hidden shelves (actually i have no idea, just guessing)
Many people still use fax machines because it's easy and convenient to use. It's not the fault of users that we are still use old technology, it's the fault of the Tech industry. Companies should have been making Fax Copiers with new protocals that can send a fax over the LAN to another compatible Fax Machine. The other issue is that Fax Machines and Copies outlive most other technologies, they were built to last!
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Best discussion I ever had on the subject: Lawyer: OK, we'll fax you the contract, you'll need to sign it and fax it back. Me: OK, well send it to this phone number. It's not a real fax, it's a number that routes to a website we connect to but it will get the job done. Lawyer: Yeah, we use the same kind of thing here. Both: (face palm)
I could have sworn I saw a bunch of guys from an office drag it out into a field and pulverize it with a baseball bat
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
my machine will print a confirmation with date, time, # of pages, length of call, # called and a 85%ish sized copy of the first page as sent..
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Used to be 100 % fax. Became 50% fax I now have a fax only because 5% still prefer it and it is basically free. I'd have a multifunction printer anyway, and the only extra cost is one phone line. For an office this is trivial-I'd happily pay for a phone line if it gets me one more customer. Lots of folks have a multifunction device, would be flummoxed to have to scan and send, but the fax is there......
Use Google doc and with a few clicks share your document with your friends ... and Google, duh!
G doc uses https, so definitely more secure than an email. Zero waste of paper, ink and electric power 'waiting for a call'. At the end, you share a spindle in the cloud with tons of users. That's a green secure solution, except that Google will definitely crunch your documents.
Many people have requested Google to provide a new feature, password protected documents. But we all know why this won't happen.
Rules and law said we needed a signature to send a transcript to anything besides a university. This was in the early 90s. We got a call from someone who needed one sent to a prospective employer that day, emergency. He had no fax around, mail wouldn't work fast enough, but we both had email.
We had him write a signature with his mouse in Paint, copy/paste that into a Word document containing his request, and email that to us.
The signature was a bunch of squiggles, but it sufficed and he got his transcript. We got a nice thank you letter along with the payment (transcript fee plus rush fee plus express mail fee, it wasn't cheap).
I don't recall reading a warning of any sort in any of the fax machine's manual I owned. I'm positive dick faxing is supported since group 1.
I've been in the office machine business for almost 30 years. When fax machines really started taking off in the 80's, our sales had a hard time getting businesses (especially law firms) to purchase one. When asked, they would say, "but I've always had a messenger service, why would I need a fax". When the MFP (multifunction printer), along with the internet took off, with scan to email, we tried to get the same people to switch their fax, copier, printer, out for a MFP. When asked, they would say "but I've always had a fax machine". People resist change, it is human nature. If you are lucky, a fax, in G3 mode can get a good 14.4 connection, and if you are really lucky, a 33.6k connection. The problem we are running into today is that a lot of places are trading out the traditional analog phone lines, which fax machines love, to a VoIP system via DSL or cable. The problem comes with the conversion. You take an analog signal from the fax, digitize it, then send that signal through the fax modem, through the VoIp conversion, digital out to the other end, and reverse the procedure. Getting lost in the translation is an understatement. You have to take a high speed fax, choke it down to 9600bps just to get it to work. Not to mention the headaches the phone company causes. Travel in any good size city after a rainstorm. Take a main roadway, and look at the cable overhead. That is usually a trunk line. Watch the poles. Eventually you'll find one with what looks like a giant gas cylinder strapped to it. They use liquid nitrogen to freeze out the water, because it's cheaper than replacing the cable. When you are on the phone, if you hear "bacon frying", or an echo, just think what that does to a fax transmission. I have one hospital that has well over 200 fax machines in the late 90's. Tried to get them to switch for years to scan to email. They wouldn't do it due to privacy concerns. Speaking with their telecommunications people (the brick wall) why they won't switch, because they can't insure the privacy of a document outside their own intranet. Any email outside the hospital firewalls, couldn't pass muster (so they say) with the H.I.P.P.A. laws. (how lame is that excuse?). Yeah, the odds of dialing an incorrect fax number, and have that number actually be a fax number is a lot less than someone typing in a wrong email address, and having it actually be an email address, but, you can set email to be encrypted, pass codes etc. I chalk it up to laziness. People are comfortable with fax machines, and do not want to learn something new.
My realtor/mortgage agent/etc. would NOT accept high-res scans emailed from me to them. Faxes only. Because, you know, some phone number from the 10,000-person institution I work at is OBVIOUSLY only going to send content authentically signed by me, right? Infuriating.
Yes of course we have the technology but every regulatory body has both vague and strict standards on electronic signatures. 21CFR part11, HIPAA, etc. Any system with electronic signatures has to go through rigorous validation testing as do software updates.
It's easy to validate a fax machine once and never validate it again. Compared to software that has to be validated for each update and also for every update of the OS. Yes, this is above and beyond what the regulatory bodies require, but companies go overboard on it because it's cheaper to spend a lot of time in validation and over-validate than to do poorly during an audit and have your stock price drop.
HP et al's extraordinarily crappy software support for their integrated products means that at the end of the day, it's far easier just to drop a stack of paper into a fax machine and let it grind away. Life is too short.
The printer/scanner gang have been making these machines for two decades and still can't get it right.
Sometimes embedded solutions are just better, or at least more likely to work.
I love all my electronic gadgets as much as the next /.er, but there are very practical advantages to paper. It is very high resolution, light weight, very easy to mark up in a comfortable and intuitive way, is always on--no crash, dead batteries, boot up time--is very ergonomic (you can move around and read it, read in direct sunlight, you can fold it and unfold it, etc.) and its very easy to move stuff from your computer to paper.
If you think about how insecure the computer-internet combination is, you might be able to comprehend why those concerned with document security prefer faxes and fax machines. Contracts, and just about anything you want to send true copies of electronically, with reasonable certainty that copies will be verbatim copies of the original, you want to fax.
Computer-net communications are quick, slick and wide open to anyone motivated to hack into them, or to create a malicious program to divert or alter. For this, while computers great for games and googling and sending stuff that does not have to be beyond reasonable doubt true copy. But where true copy is required, the computer-net combination simply can't be trusted. That's why faxes and fax machines remain, and will continue to remain, just like 'hard' paper copies, that show where they are modified.
For security it is the computer and the internet that can't compete.
Finally a slashdot article I can post authoritatively on.
I work at a non-profit HIV/AIDS research organization administrating their data management software. About 150 sites around the world fill out "Case Report Forms" (CRFs) and send them to us by either fax or email. About 15% of the 100k pages we receive in a month come in by phone fax. We are actively working to move them to email wherever possible because of its reliability and economy, but for some of our sites email faxing is not an option. The usual concerns mentioned already do not apply in these cases. Privacy is not a concern because the data is anonymized before it is sent to us for blinding and privacy purposes. Authenticity is not a problem because the originals can be pulled from the site should any data come into question, though in practice this never happens anyway. The reasons phone faxing is still popular are inertia and the ubiquity of phone service. Our African sites are willing to pay long distance prices to send us data by phone because it is harder/more expensive to get reliable Internet access to them. Even running IP over the phone lines they send faxes over is less practical than just sending us the phone faxes. Three of our sites phone fax their CRFs to a fourth site which relays those faxes to us by email. It sounds like a terrible idea, and it certainly has its problems, but it works well enough to not be the next problem worth solving.
I anticipate that all of our sites will move to IP based data delivery (mostly email with some Electronic Data Coordination) within two to five years as Internet access becomes more ubiquitous. For now it is a mistake to underestimate how well POTS works in third-world countries.
Faxes are much more admissible than e-mail, even encrypted PGP signed ones.
Anything that requires a signature almost always needs to be faxed, although I have subverted this on a few occasions using scanned signatures pasted into the form and then sent it via an old 25-pin serial port US Robotics faxmodem ^_____^
As a rule of thumb, only undistilled fermented beverages like wine (and especially champagne) can be aged in the bottle. The reason is that the fermentation process can potentially continue inside the bottle, assuming the bottle is stored under the right conditions. (That's why champagne "pops" - the yeast were still actively fermenting the wine when it was bottled, and the continuing fermentation produces CO2 inside the bottle.)
Distilled beverages like whiskey are totally sterile and extremely chemically stable when they're bottled, so their flavor does not change over time.
Folks, I'm a doctor. If I sent a sheet of paper with so much as your name, date of birth, and the fact that you breathe on it via email, the fine would start at $50,000 for the first violation of the federal health information privacy law, HIPAA. $50K first violation. No joke. People get fired for this. When I ask for medical records on a patient who moves to town and comes to me for care, I get a sheaf of paper records faxed onto paper. Dreadful. I page through every single one and then scan them into my electronic medical record for any future necessary reference. When patient moves again to another community, he'll ask for his records again for his new doctor. My office will turn his electronic digital info into -- you guessed it -- a fax to the new doctor. You might wonder, why not just transmit the electronic info from one system to another? That's not possible. There are about 150 different "EMR's" out there [electronic medical record systems] and NONE of them are compatible. I hate faxes. They ruin documents. All the fine squiggles of EKG heart tracings or fetal monitor tracings are mangled by faxes. I hate paper. I worked 2 years in high school as the blueprint boy in an architect's office printing what I guess would be architectural drawing "copies" onto pieces of paper 4 feet by 6 feet in size, and getting paper cuts of commensurate dimensions. But faxes not disappearing any time soon. Were it only so. Please, someone, lead the charge. -- Joshua Steinberg MD Binghamton NY
Thanks for writing all of that out so I didn't have to. Fax is way less secure than e-mail.
Properly encrypted email on a trusted server has every feature you list there, plus more (of course with the issue that if you leave it unprotected with a weak password, someone could compromise it). But properly encrypted, and it doesn't matter if someone gets that one email, they can't open it.
Oh, and there are places, like the State of Alaska, that do acccept legal documents online. Sad when Alaska is leading the country technologically.
Learn to love Alaska
Fax machines persist because they are easy to use, and they work. Drop in the document, hit a few buttons and walk away.
No boot-up, paper handling hassles, scanning, file management, choices, etc. Just drop, dial and shoot.
Fax is going to the network, where IP will replace the modem, but the concept is so simple that it persists.
Why do we still "dial" phone numbers on our cell phones?
Many commercial documents require signatures. A signature from each party, and a signature on each page footing or where amendments were made.
Doing this with PDF files is somewhat awkward. Electronic signatures can be hacked. A human signature via fax has won acceptability, first of all, because it is one-to-one in communication. We don't know of telephone lines being hacked.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
See, a fax machine has only one purpose unlike "superior" alternatives that are built round general purpose digital computers that are not "always on" and ready to xmit. Also, even in US (or for that matter any advanced country), I dont think knowledge of how to use a PC is really ubiquitous as compared to phones, or fax machines for the office help. I once had a tough time getting my old aunt to understand why she had to press the CALL key on a mobile phone when in her old land line the connection would establish automatically. OK
The fax is still more or less a computer. So make a fax machine that actually IS a computer, with its own unique e-mail address, that can send and receive to other such addresses. Then you can work on improving the scanning mechanism or whatever you like.
Of course, regular old faxes suffice in businesses (apparently; I haven't seen a fax in my country, ever).
I am not devoid of humor.
Sure, if you OCR the TIFF file, you can turn it back into editable text, at the cost of a few percent of mistakes and the loss of most of your formatting and data structure. But otherwise all you've got is a bitmap, and while you can edit it, it's the modern-day equivalent of using white-out on a document.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks