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. ;)
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.
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!"
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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
People who talk about the ridiculous of nails obviously never tried to hammer in a screw--it's really hard to do and they pull out too easily after you manage it.
FTP predates even TCP, and precedes modern fax (group 3) by 9 years; HTTPS has been around 15+ years. Both of them are reliable unless the network is down between sender and recipient, in which case both will immediately let you know that the file failed to transfer properly (similar to, say, getting a busy signal when trying to send a fax).
There are other reasons fax hangs on (legal acceptance, 3rd party verification of message send/receive time, etc), but the fact that email sucks as a file transfer mechanism should be irrelevant.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
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.
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
Nobody ever got their dick caught in an email
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...
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.
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