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The Fax is Not Yet Obsolete (theatlantic.com)
Fax, once at the forefront of communications technologies but now in deep decline, has persisted in many industries. From a report: Law-enforcement agencies remain heavily reliant on fax for routine operations, such as bail postings and return of public-records requests. Health care, too, runs largely on fax. Despite attempts to replace it, a mix of regulatory confusion, digital-security concerns, and stubbornness has kept fax machines droning around the world.
An early facsimile message was sent over telegraph lines in London in 1847, based on a design by the Scottish inventor Alexander Bain. There is some dispute over whether it was the first fax: Competing inventors, including Bain in the United Kingdom and Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell across the Atlantic, sought to father facsimile technology, which was a kind of white whale for inventors. Telegraphs already allowed messages to be passed across distances, one letter at a time using Morse code. But the dream of transmitting copies of messages and images instantly over wires was very much alive.
Writing in 1863, Jules Verne imagined that the Paris of the 1960s would be replete with fax machines, or as he called them, "picture-telegraphs." The technology did eventually lead to a revolution in communication, though it didn't happen until years later. It first became known to many Americans after the 1939 New York World's Fair, where a fax machine transmitted newspaper images from around the world at a rate of 18 minutes per page -- lightning speed for the time. Further reading: 'You Had to Be There': As Technologies Change Ever Faster, the Knowledge of Obsolete Things Becomes Ever Sweeter.
An early facsimile message was sent over telegraph lines in London in 1847, based on a design by the Scottish inventor Alexander Bain. There is some dispute over whether it was the first fax: Competing inventors, including Bain in the United Kingdom and Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell across the Atlantic, sought to father facsimile technology, which was a kind of white whale for inventors. Telegraphs already allowed messages to be passed across distances, one letter at a time using Morse code. But the dream of transmitting copies of messages and images instantly over wires was very much alive.
Writing in 1863, Jules Verne imagined that the Paris of the 1960s would be replete with fax machines, or as he called them, "picture-telegraphs." The technology did eventually lead to a revolution in communication, though it didn't happen until years later. It first became known to many Americans after the 1939 New York World's Fair, where a fax machine transmitted newspaper images from around the world at a rate of 18 minutes per page -- lightning speed for the time. Further reading: 'You Had to Be There': As Technologies Change Ever Faster, the Knowledge of Obsolete Things Becomes Ever Sweeter.
Is.
Dead.
You cannot beat the simplicity of a fax machine. You put in a piece of paper, enter someone's phone number, and it just WORKS. Yeah, you could in theory say the same about email, but think about how complicated it gets to attempt to scan an image, and then get that image into an email attachment? Everyone here on /. probably knows how, but honestly sit down and attempt to write up the steps for someone who isn't a hard-core techie that just needs to get the job done. Too much tech is getting in the way of the actual jobs at hand.
For an interesting look at the 1948 state of the art of transmitting photographic images by wire, see the based-on-true-story suspense movie Call Northside 777 starring Jimmy Stewart. A major plot element involves this technique. It was a rather involved processs, slow, and not at all simple.
That doesn't change its obsolescence.
I volunteer at a K-8 school and we just installed a new phone system. The system uses VOIP, with the hardware running on a virtual machine. However, I am running a phone wire (Cat-3 actually) to the office for the fax machine so we can bypass the old wiring which is a mess using 66 blocks. Educational records are still transmitted by fax.
Problem is that people think Faxing hasn't adapted.*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
My printer can do both, as well as traditional POTS.
*Heck I remember when HylaFax was a thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Even used something like it when NeXTStep was still going strong.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Fax is very much alive in Japan. We use it often for the stupidest shit you think we'd be doing by email now...
That would be T.37 or iFax, and a lot of printers come with software that makes the whole process pretty easy.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
For the monthly cost it does provide a certain amount of amusement at my office watching millennials get frustrated at using it. So Iâ(TM)d say there is some value left.
Easy way of putting signatures onto documents.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
In the last five years I've moved from Australia to the USA and then to the UK, and now back to Australia. In all countries I have set up businesses, filed taxes for myself and the businesses, corresponded with the various government departments required to do all that stuff. I have had health care and gone to the doctors.
I had to send three faxes in this five year period - all to companies/organisations in the USA. Each time I had to do it (many months apart) I marvelled at what a weird anachronism it seemed to be, and asked various friends & family in other parts of the world if faxing was something they had to do very often (usually after me asking them if they had a way for me to send a fax, which they didn't), and they seemed equally surprised.
I can't remember the last time I sent a fax in Australia; easily more than 10 years ago.
Correction: the fax is not yet extinct. It is certainly obsolete.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Here are other items which are also not obsolete:
* Apple IIc
* Falcon
* Polio
My wife and I are currently fighting a denied health insurance claim. The reason it was denied was that the insurance company sent a fax to the wrong phone number at the hospital, and didn't check for a confirmation. Some companies are barely in the 1990's technology-wise.
Have you read my blog lately?
"Not as clumsy/random as a blaster - An elegant weapon 4 a more civilized age" https://it.slashdot.org/commen...
* "For over a 1,000 generations Jedi Knights were guardians of peace & justice in the old Republic. Before the dark times. Before the EMPIRE"
(NOT "wannabe weapons" of TROLL shitlords on /. like ZIP https://it.slashdot.org/commen... - theirs = effete downmods I RUN 'EM DRY OF & lies & WHY they LOSE).
APK
P.S.=> Many here know https://linux.slashdot.org/com... & enjoy greater speed/security/reliability & anonymity hosts yield natively speeding you up 2 ways (adblocks & hardcodes that protect vs. DNS security issues in redirect poisoning + request tracking logs & RESOLVE FASTER locally from RAM driven by KERNELMODE speed vs. slow usermode in "solutions" packed w/ security issues (DNS/Antivirus) OR not working fully by default (adblock) in usermode addons easily detected by webmasters & blocked doing less but using more)... apk
Law-enforcement agencies remain heavily reliant on fax for routine operations, such as bail postings and return of public-records requests. Health care, too, runs largely on fax.
You left out higher education.
We're adding an addition to our high school, which includes a new office for the careers counselor. I consulted with the architects on the low-voltage wiring. When we ran it by the counselor for approval, she asked me, "Where's the fax line?" I looked at her dumbfounded, wondering why she couldn't just use scan-to-e-mail, or run to the district office down the hall if necessary. She said, "Student transcripts are all private information. Every student portfolio I sent is by fax. I send at least three a day, with the average fax between eight to ten pages." In the age of secure upload, I couldn't believe it, but she said that only one college she works with regularly uses 100% secure-upload, while everyone else is 100% fax.
fax is less secure than FTP!
it's *analog security*...
You don't need photoshop to forge a fax--ms paint will do just fine--hell you could draw freehand and no one could tell the difference.
In many jurisdictions, a fax has a long case law history of being considered as good and legal as paper (usually when confirmed in person or verbally). That is why faxes continue to exist. Yes, digital signatures might be better in some cases, but faxes will continue to rule until there is an agreed upon deployment of an alternative that is considered equally non-repudiable.
Scott Adam's Dilbert strip on this:
https://dilbert.com/strip/1992-12-21
It is always hilarious that the most illegible, easily manipulated transmission vector is the gold standard for authenticity. Photoshop away, print it out, and FAX it to someone and it is valid.
Just because people still use it does not mean that it is not obsolete. For example, imperial units are obsolete but some people and countries still insist on using them for a variety of reasons, why should faxes be any different?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
[Fax is common among] Lawyers, insurance companies, and others that have to interact with governments.
Doctors of all kinds, service workers of all kinds, lots of people still use faxes
Service workers interact with state assistance programs run by governments. Doctors interact with Medicare and Medicaid,* which are run by governments. Doctors also interact with insurers, who interact with governments in countries attempting universal availability of coverage.
* And foreign counterparts
Unencrypted, or easy to MITM, meaning that snarfing fax data is often easier than other internet traffic (hint: modern telephone, even if you have a physical landline is running over VOIP over the network. It is part of the reason why you will never see telephone speeds above 28.8k, at least on AT&T telephone networks.)
The thing is, fax is a very useful vehicle to get your message across. It works and doesn't come with troubles like receiver doesn't show the html "right", which doesn't belong in an email anyway, the file you sent as an attachment cannot be read for this or that reason, like getting scrubbed by antivirus or simply not having a specific application installed, or the email you clicked on is "wrong" and now has taken over your computer. Oh and it doesn't require expensive data bundles but works on a normal unadorned POTS line. That it doesn't work so well over VoIP is because premature optimisation for voice: FoIP networks exist and do work.
Me, I'm very annoyed at the inability of even "smart" cellular phones to send or receive faxes. Receiving should be trivial: It's a black-and-white (or even colour) picture of a sheet of paper. Sending, well, take a picture of a sheet of paper, or perhaps a whiteboard. Show what it'd look like when faxed, then fax that.
That way you'd have the old integrated with the new. But the phone companies instead tried to push "MMS", since they could charge a bundle for that at much less technical expenditure for them. But that didn't take off so it fell by the wayside of "progress". Fax on the other hand used to have a very wide installed base and linking the old and the new there would have made for lots of fax calls to and from mobile phones and thus revenue.
And that is the thing: We run forward to each time a new gimmick, incompatible with everything else. A new app, a new chat, a new thing, a new mayfly. For infrastructure you instead want to have things that you can depend on, and that work together. Fax was a pretty solid proposition that "just worked" right up until our obsession with the new broke it.
The sad thing is that you can make sure every workstation has a tiff fax viewer and do the sending and receiving over FoIP entirely in software, say connected to a fax in/out box in your email setup, so it's not like you need an extra device on your network to have your office be able to do fax. It should be entirely turn-key-able, so can be and ought to be trivial to maintain for offices and such, making it available when suddenly needed.
Some VoIP providers have FAX capability as part of their package. SMS even.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Most of them are STILL unaware of the ESIGN Act, passed eighteen years ago. It recognizes digital signatures.
Tthe ESIGN Act was passed eighteen years ago. It recognizes digital signatures. Adobe makes it really easy to sign a PDF, which you then email back.
Despite it's apperance, /. isn't really a mental institution. Would you kindly take your issues somewhere more appropriate? A shrink might be able to help you, howling at the moon here doesn't accomplish _anything_ but pollute the threads.
More properly, an industry that still uses fax is doing things the old, inefficient way because it can’t be bothered to change. From legal protocols that use low-security handwritten signatures rather than PGP to stubborn old bastards in the medical world who won’t digitize, the fax users are a cavalcade of obsolescence.
If you don't have a touch screen (a phone), a mouse works just as well today as it did 18 years ago.
I've been in the copier/printer/fax business since 1981. In the mid 80's, fax machines really took off, but, we had a hard time getting people to use them. The excuse was always "but I can't get rid of my messenger...I've always had a messenger". Now, I get the same complaint. "I can't get rid of my fax, I've always had a fax". I learned WAY MORE about the telephone system (USA) than I ever wanted to know, to figure out why fax transmissions/receptions would flake out over the decades. Now, with VoIP, as long as the ATA box is T.38 compliant, 99% of the time I can get them to work, but, most of the time, I have to turn off the V.34 modem, ECM, slow them down to 14.4k because of network problems, ATA boxes with sucky cache and what not. We sell more fax cards that go into multifunction copier/printers now, than we ever did with a stand alone fax. It's funny when I tell one of my users...ummm, you do know that you don't have to print it, then fax it. Just "print" the document, select the fax machine as a printer, select the number from your address book or type it in, and it goes from your PC direct to the fax? It's like I told them they have this new feature called SLICED BREAD. I wish they would kill off faxing, but we have a ton of hospital type accounts and they won't budge on email, even with encryption. Too worried about HIPAA violations.
And nobody cares, because fax is obsolete.
There is no point in developing new methods of dealing with fax.
Actually past a point it's ATM. Not TCP/IP although that can be encapsulated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_transfer_mode
Who works with BB phone provider - no one uses faxes any more, not small businesses nor private citizens.
Yes, it is that assumption that is, as always, the weak link in the chain. Long strings of digits and human fallibility mean that thousands of documents are sent to the wrong destination every day... if not every hour.
But hey, that's okay, "It was a accident". :facepalm:
mnem
Fax are obsolete, just like the organizations which rely on them.
I work for a major university in the midwest USA.... We just did an audit, and we still managed to find over 900 fax machines on campus (out of ~20,000 phone lines). Big pockets of them in the medical school, hospitals, law school, admin area (for transcripts), laboratories, police station and the lawyers office. Most everybody else has chucked them at this point. We ran a survey to see who would want to move to our central fax server -- it was less than 200 of the 900. All because people still want to put the paper into the feeder and hit "Go".
The revolution in Fax was getting TODAY.
Fax's irreplaceable undeniable delivery produces physical documents that someone must handle.
Fax is the only medium that guarantees delivery AND that someone will see it.
Those attributes remain its most significant. For government whether battle plans delivered to the field, signatories or legal its remains admissible evidence. For business it is simple, cheap and ubiquitous communications. For politics piles of fax can be measured, categorized and vouchers.f
Let's see - you're going to have your employees use their personal phone to do this?
I'm not sure that I want the clerk in my doctor's office using their personal phone for this.
Oh, because of security, you're going to have your employees leave their phones in lockers when they come in. So you're going to have company issued phones at their desks? You're probably not going to want to use the latest phone - $500-$1000 in equipment for an employee making minimum wage? So you'll be looking for something like an older phablet or phone with decent WiFi access. And plan on buying new ones every few years.
Fax machine is pretty easy - insert sheets, dial number, walk away. Buy a new one for $100 every 10 years when it breaks.
That's your assumption. Evidently not quite true.
[dad retires]
hello {bank, insurance, medical} I am trying to help my dad...
Power of atty, yes...
Fax it to you ?
it there an alternate...
right; your fax # is
maybe a dozen times
and so are processes in place that still require a fax to be used.
Q: Can you send me the form, filled in, by fax?
A: No, i can't because of where i live
Q: Really, where do you live?
A: in the 21st century.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
The same folks who would still be using quill pens if they could.
There are lots of technologies that have been superseded by newer technologies. But very often, the newer technologies don't cover well certain specific use cases.
Pagers are still in use in some locations, like hospital basements, where cell towers don't reach. The printing press is still better at printing very large numbers of copies, than computer printers. Paper is still easier to hand out at a lecture or meeting.
Faxes are not regularly hacked, making them more secure for the medical and legal industries, than email.
Many older technologies aren't COMPLETELY replaced by their newer counterparts.