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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.
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.
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.
Fax is very much alive in Japan. We use it often for the stupidest shit you think we'd be doing by email now...
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"
When your doctor sends you to get blood drawn, those results come back to him as a fax. They are also sent via electronic data, but a shocking number of medical facilities still do everything by fax, and not because of anything having to do with the government.
When I was in Houston, I could barely believe it when I learned that the world class Hermann Medical Center there still uses faxes for everything. I mean, they got freaking robots doing surgeries and gene splicers and all that stuff, but still waiting on someone carrying a sheet of paper with blood test results from a fax machine to a doctor's hands.
You are welcome on my lawn.
3. Small offices. These offices usually exist because they fill some small special niche market. There must be hundreds or thousands of these (hard to count all of them) just in any small city. 4. Travelling offices. It is much easier to carry a fax and plug into the pay phones at a truck stop to get documents from an office than getting email on your phone and trying to connect wirelessly to a printer. Just an example of something complicated being very simple and effective, even though everyone around rolls their eyes. 5. Fun! As soon as you hear the fax machine pick up with its endearing tone, everyone gathers around to see what will come out. Page after page, what page is next? It's endless fun just wondering what will happen next. Need I give more of the endless set of examples that come to mind?
How many of those doctors, service workers, and others are required by law or regulation to use FAXes?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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.
I developed a hybrid fax system at my voip company using freeswitch.
Basically you can send and receive faxes via e-mail or fax machine, or both.
Using a simple SIP based analog gateway attached to the fax machine we can send and receive faxes via fax machines.
But you can also send and receive faxes by email. To send you send it to (10-digit-number)@fax.myvoipcompanyname.com and it sends it.
We use a simple authentication list to match outbound faxes to customers by their sending email address, that we verify with SPF to ensure its coming from a legit source and not being spoofed.
Law offices love it because we can have inbound faxes sent to a special email account for archival & backup purposes, but also print off at the fax machine for the receptionist to grab. Most opt to receive strictly via email, but some insist they need it printed off automatically, too.
Lots of flexibility and its all basically gravy for us on top of their phone system. I had one lawyer switch to us because of our "state of the art" fax system.
Protection safeguards per the HIPAA laws vary with the method of data transmission. FAXes are assumed to be confidential as long as you know the number you're dialing is correct; e-mail and other digital means require you to validate most of your entire IT chain, and probably to encrypt the e-mail as well.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
>How many of those doctors, service workers, and others are required by law or regulation to use FAXes?
Due to HIPAA, fax remains very important in the healthcare field. It is considered a "secure" transport/channel, just like the US mail. Meanwhile, Email is not considered "secure", unless it and/or the attachments are encrypted (and with no PHI in the subject or unencrypted body). And there is no "good" (good = easy, quick, standardized, compatible, universal) standard for Email encryption, unfortunately.
Faxing is annoying and slow. But it "just works."
Most of them are STILL unaware of the ESIGN Act, passed eighteen years ago. It recognizes digital signatures.
When your doctor sends you to get blood drawn, those results come back to him as a fax. They are also sent via electronic data, but a shocking number of medical facilities still do everything by fax, and not because of anything having to do with the government.
And that test results page is packed with medically needed information that arrives as a goddamned image, as though it were a wedding picture. Someone in the doctor’s office has to sit down and transcribe that information into storable form. You better hope that person doesn’t miss a digit or transpose two fields.
If my bank can run an online banking website that prevents anyone but me getting into the data (using a combination of both strong authentication and the latest HTTPS standards, why cant medical providers do the same thing? Diagnostic lab makes the data available via a secure portal, doctor logs onto the secure portal and downloads it. Need a different doctor to get the information, easy enough to authorize that different doctor to get it as well.