16 ms·

The Fax Is Not Yet Obsolete

67 points by rustcharm 8y ago

iptel 8y ago
Fax is not more secure than email.
- dfox 8y ago
  It is more secure as long as you regard PSTN as more secure than internet. Which is a view that has some merit.
  - msla 8y ago
    > It is more secure as long as you regard PSTN as more secure than internet. Which is a view that has some merit. Not as long as you can send faxes from the Internet. https://faxzero.com/ https://faxzero.com/ FaxZero even allows you to put in the phone number the fax comes from. It's $1.99/fax to remove the FaxZero cover letter, and they accept PayPal. (Also, someone with the username iptel might know a bit about this.)
    - dfox 8y ago
      I meant it in the confidentiality sense. The fact that you can put anything on the cover sheet and header line as sender number and that it has exactly zero relevance as authenticator should be obvious to anyone who actually ever set up a fax machine. Edit: and exactly how that differs from SMTP?
      - msla 8y ago
        An office fax machine sitting out in the open is going to be less confidential than email on an SMTP server where only a sysadmin or the recipient can see it, yes.
- sokoloff 8y ago
  It is more secure in some senses. You can't get a PDF-borne virus from an old-school fax reception. My tax preparer only accepts mailed documents and faxed documents. It's sometimes a pain, but I have to admit that I'm a little bit happy that he's more paranoid than I am about my financial information.
  - cesarb 8y ago
    > You can't get a PDF-borne virus from an old-school fax reception. How about a JPEG-borne virus instead? https://research.checkpoint.com/sending-fax-back-to-the-dark-ages/ https://research.checkpoint.com/sending-fax-back-to-the-dark...
  - zamadatix 8y ago
    "not fax" doesn't have to mean "use one of the least secure digital formats in existence". If you're goal is to replicate a fax you should probably limit yourself to a basic bitmap encoding similar to group 3/4 encoded faxes and create a validated decoder (something many fax machines lack).
  - rustcharm 8y ago
    Actually, you can! There was a presentation at DEFCON this year (DEFCON 26) showing exactly this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLCE8spVX9Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLCE8spVX9Q > "See for yourself first-hand as we give a live demonstration of the first ever full fax exploitation, leading to complete control over the entire device as well as the network, using nothing but a standard telephone line. " Maybe it's time for you to find another tax preparer. Mine accepts encrypted documents with her public key.
    - sokoloff 8y ago
      I need my tax guy to be an expert on tax law way more than I need them to be on the cutting edge of computer communications and security. If he wants to stick to his old-school fax machine and keeps me on the right side of the tax agencies, I can accommodate his preferences on tech.
  - 8y ago
ams6110 8y ago
Purchasing departments still use fax also. Where I work, most purchase orders with established vendors are sent by fax.
shaklee3 8y ago
I noticed real estate also heavily relies on it. Everything still seems to be done with paper and fax.
- mdanger007 8y ago
  Why not scan the paper to email?
  - Roboprog 8y ago
    Hopefully the upload was to a secure web site.
  - bugbie 8y ago
    http://27bslash6.com/overdue.html http://27bslash6.com/overdue.html
  - beatgammit 8y ago
    Well, a fax definitely isn't secure...
- thrower123 8y ago
  I was somewhat amazed that my bank was fine with me using my phone to take pictures of signed forms and uploading them the images for my mortgage refinance.
- ardy42 8y ago
  That seems to be changing. I recently bought a house and literally all of the paperwork I had to do before closing was done using Docusign or a similar website.
crushcrashcrush 8y ago
My company deals with medical professionals and we absolutely need to maintain a fax line. The IRS loves faxes, too.
reustle 8y ago
> Law and Medicine Still Rely on the Device And a vast number of businesses in Japan, unfortunately
- u801e 8y ago
  It looks like the movie Back to the Future part 2 got something right regarding faxes: https://youtu.be/UlEFqR4SaVA?t=60 https://youtu.be/UlEFqR4SaVA?t=60
Roboprog 8y ago
FAXes have legal standing in California. As much as I hate supporting them :-)
petecox 8y ago
Only if your telco still supports it. In Australia, perhaps not. Our home phone service was moved from copper to VOIP as part of the NBN rollout. The technician who did the installation confirmed our multifunction laser printer would no longer fax, as the network didn't enable it.
- ObsoleteNerd 8y ago
  Yeah our building (Melbourne) doesn't even have copper going to it, we just have FTTB then CAT5 to each apartment.
frv103 8y ago
These requirements for faxing are becoming almost silly. Not only is the PSTN infrastructure in some areas so bad (40 year old corroded copper lines and such) that there are potential problems every time it rains, but incumbent carriers are trying to do everything they can to rip down what is left of the copper infrastructure. I don’t blame them as this makes practical and financial sense (remove copper phone lines, replace with fiber, offer data and voice through the fiber). The dream is that the PSTN will be done away with entirely, with all traffic going through the internet. A big problem is with fax machine manufacturers simply claiming that their machines “are not voip compatible” which is ridiculous, but the extra effort involved with getting faxes to work smoothly over voip can be a nightmare, and not something any vendor wants to be involved in supporting. The result of this is clients with $15k fax machines reporting a myriad of problems, which the fax machine vendor claims that the only solution is a PSTN phone line for the machine, which in many areas is no longer possible due to the incumbent carrier phasing out the infrastructure or making it incredibly difficult to obtain. There are a lot of “Efax” services whose purpose is to get around this problem by making the “fax” step just a transparent formality to appease regulatory constraints. Users can send an email with a specially formatted subject, then the “efax” company will actually “fax” the document specified in the email to a phone number owned by the efax company, which is then emailed to the intended receiver.
- dvtrn 8y ago
  The dream is that the PSTN will be done away with entirely, with all traffic going through the internet How far off the mark am I in thinking that part of this dream you have, that was left unstated is that 'all traffic going through the internet' assumes we've fixed the last mile problem of broadband connectivity to rural areas? Because otherwise that dream effectively cuts a lot of people off from the rest of the world.
  - metildaa 8y ago
    Internet access outside of cities and suburbs is pretty awful, there are lots of businesses and residences plugging away with flakey, capped internet and lifeline phone service. Worse yet, those running what service there is can go out oof business or hang up on users they don't want, and your totally SOL: https://www.cnet.com/news/in-rural-farm-country-forget-broadband-you-might-not-have-internet-at-all/ https://www.cnet.com/news/in-rural-farm-country-forget-broad...
stevenwoo 8y ago
My insurance company mailed me a pdf to make a claim but they made me snail mail my printed copy with signature on it to them, they said they would have accepted a fax but would never accept an email with a photo of the same documents.
codingdave 8y ago
Back when I first started working in tech, in the early 90s, up to when I left enterprise IT in 2011, email-to-fax gateways were a thing. You just emailed a specific address format, something like: 999-999-9999@your.fax.gateway, and the email server would send an image of the email and attached documents to that number, via a connected fax machine. Likewise, incoming faxes to your number were received as images in an email. Do those things no longer exist? You would think, if anything, that would be easier today than it was 25 years ago.
- carlosdp 8y ago
  Twilio has a Fax API: https://www.twilio.com/fax https://www.twilio.com/fax
  - metildaa 8y ago
    We had issues faxing rural areas through Twilio, like their SMS offerings (which lack shortcode support) it seems to be a partially baked solution. I asked them about it at SeaGL in Seattle, and the staff at their booth had few suggestions.
    - carlosdp 8y ago
      Idk about the fax issues in rural areas, I'm sure it's possible cause fax is hard, but Twilio definitely has SMS Shortcode support.
- polm23 8y ago
  eFax had some patents that it used aggressively for a long time to shut down competitors, though it looks like the main one expired recently. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16660890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16660890
- wiml 8y ago
  I think that was a common and pretty simple thing to do back when businesses still had modems and POTS lines — there were several popular FOSS and commercial solutions for setting up your own local fax gateway (print-to-outgoing-fax and incoming-fax-to-email being how I remember them working). By the late 90s most consumer modems could handle faxes. I think the persistence of the fax is almost entirely a social problem, not a technical one. This article links to another, which contained this statement I found fascinating: > Lately, doctors have taken to hand-delivering the most important records. > > “We used to fax the labor and delivery records, but they didn’t get > them or they were misplacing them,” says Hilda Moreno, who manages > the office’s medical records. “We kept getting calls like, did you > send this? And we’d say we did. So we started printing them out.”
mjevans 8y ago
It's that "Faxes" are //exempt//, they are, by far: * Obsolete * Insecure (no encryption in transit) * Insecure (no recipient validation) * Insecure (no validation of sender or data integrity) * Horrid quality (200, maybe 300, DPI, monochrome) * Like PTSN interlinked phones, fairly ubiquitous. Sadly, that last line item there is why they still exist. The exempt status also precludes any real attempt at security which makes 'fax the thing' quick and easy for untrained end users. Fire, and forget until someone pokes you about a failed fax, or even claim you tried and just assume gremlins ate all record of the first (never happened) actions. There's also not a /ubiquitous/ replacement. The mere cost of telephone calls and duration makes blindly trying to fax out spam that way not-cost-effective (plus the negotiation of fax technology inhibits just recording a dumb audio file to play against VoIP lines). Email is practically free, but HORRENDOUS for file transfers, and at any corporation where data retention is required for legal discovery holding on to EVERY file transferred forever is hell. While some better standards do exist, they aren't ubiquitous and often require 'non standard' software (mostly because Microsoft is highly allergic to any protocols/formats not invented by them). Also, it needs to be part of the /default/ OS install. It would be really great if Windows Explorer (the desktop shell) understood SFTP (SSH file transfer).
vthriller 8y ago
To me, a person that doesn't (and never did) live in the US, faxes there seem to be even more ubiquitous than this article paints. Imagine my amusement when I registered an Amazon account only to get it suspended with the request to verify it by... faxing bank statements and whatnot. Internationally on a +1 number. [0] And yes, support was not been able to offer any alternative to that. [0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=201742120 https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId...
- metildaa 8y ago
  Fax has a carve out in PCI & HIPPA compliance, and there is a huge existing momentum behind continuing to use fax. Alternatives for actually secure document transmission boil down to difficult to use private messaging/"secure" email systems (that only work in their walled garden). Many in the general public get frustrated with these walled gardens, as it is another login & interface to remember, and their credit union/bank, healthcare provider, company, etc will each have its own totally unique system
  - Zak 8y ago
    > Alternatives for actually secure document transmission boil down to difficult to use private messaging/"secure" email systems (that only work in their walled garden). Oh bloody hell. Begin rant. We've had PGP for 27 years. Twenty seven years. Since 1991. Why the hell haven't we, the tech community, gotten the rest of the world to use it? I think the only person I've had a PGP-encrypted email exchange with is my mother. It's not a walled garden, and it solves the problem described here perfectly. We could have vote-by-email (using the key registered when registering to vote). We could have universal passwordless login. We could have virtually all communications secure from eavesdropping all the time. But no, nobody uses it outside of a few computer geeks, spies, and journalists.
    - metildaa 8y ago
      I use PGP, but it is a pain in the ass to use, severely stunting its usr. Normal people can't effectively use PGP without significant training, hence no one outside some DMCA notice bots using PGP in production for the common person to see. Even Riot with its fucked up key mismanagement is easier to use as a normie than PGP, though its looking like Riot will fix most of those trusted key management issues soon with the PRs that are about to land. Signal is the gold standard for secure, easy to use crypto at this point IMO. Hopefully Briar continues to improve tho, normie friendly metadata free communication is highly alluring, and the key management is a middle ground between Riot and Signal.
rootusrootus 8y ago
My desk phone at work has automatic inbound fax detection and reception. And one of the local medical firms has a phone number with a prefix that is one digit off from my desk phone direct line. You can guess what happens. It's kind of amazing what kinds of things they will put in a fax. Stuff I would find very personal, for sure, and wouldn't want to have faxed around carelessly.
- metildaa 8y ago
  Inbound fax detection is pretty easy to script, I've gotten lots of sensitive faxes from insurers despite emailing them to cease and desist faxing me. Very annoying!
ianai 8y ago
And I’ve had two employers furnish me with pagers.
gpm 8y ago
During the hiring process for my previous internship a problem with my credit score was discovered (equifax had someone else under my SIN). This ended up delaying my start date. The only way to fix it in any "reasonable" (weeks) amount of time was to fax them a bunch of documents.
- dc_gregory 8y ago
  Possibly a naive question, but why would you need a credit score for being hired, especially as an intern? I can (somewhat) see the need for privileged positions (i.e. CFO or similar).
  - gpm 8y ago
    It was a bank, that was just standard procedure for everyone. Technically I was a contractor not a intern (and it "just happened" to be for a summer between two semesters of university), but I doubt being an official intern would have changed anything.
    - marcosdumay 8y ago
      Were they advancing you any money? If not, it's a stupid procedure that should be regarded as harassment.
      - gpm 8y ago
        They were not. I don't particularly think it counts as harassment. They can add any non-discriminatory stupid terms to the contract that they want. And there are certainly lots of jobs in a bank where it makes sense to minimize insider risk (say, if you're the one approving peoples loans...).
    - dc_gregory 8y ago
      Ah, working with money would make some sense, as a risk reduction strategy. Thanks for answering my question.
kgwxd 8y ago
I just dealt with American Public Life. I had to mail or fax (I went mail, fax is harder for me) all my forms and documents to get a claim started. Several days later, I was able to see that my claim required more information online by manually checking the site several times a day, no email notice about a claim update, I also got a notice in the mail 3 days later. I was able to ask them, via a contact web form, "is there a way to send docs electronically?" to which I got a "secured" reply to my email via "proofpoint" stating I must mail or fax all documents. Noticing there was an option to attach a file in proofpoint system, I ignored the requirements and sent the PDFs anyway. They accepted them but with a stern warning that I should mail or fax all documents if I want to ensure they will be associated with my claim. All this printing, signing, mailing, waiting, waiting, waiting, rinse, repeat, is a huge waste of resources and human life.
okonomiyaki3000 8y ago
Japan still loves its faxes. Gotta maintain a sense of tradition, I guess. Take pride in doing things the same way their forefathers did.
- jacobush 8y ago
  It's also a thing there to write stuff with a pen, which translates better to fax culture than email?
cknight 8y ago
IT Manager of a large medical centre in Australia here. I've been spending quite a lot of time trying to minimise the number of faxes we send and receive but there's only so far I can go. Email and fax-to-email services are generally frowned upon by the relevant medical accreditation boards, as they consider these to be insecure unless PGP is used. Email addresses have the ease of use and interoperability that fax numbers have, but PGP throws that right out the window. Beyond the technical discussion, I remember reading that fax is considered "secure" from a regulatory/legal standpoint because fax lines are subject to wiretapping laws just as a regular phone line is. An email however, sent in plain text, can be legally read by anyone along the line who has the authority to do so. No surprises there, we know what GMail does. What we've ended up with in Australia is a trio of internet-based secure messaging systems which have only just recently been in discussions about interoperability between themselves. I believe two of them are just end-client software which automates the PGP encryption/decryption of a given email address that you register, sending and receiving directly from your practice's clinical management system. Uptake has been kinda miserable. Until the systems are interoperable and have a large centralised directory of all health practitioners in the country, uptake will remain low. It's also only for medical practices and hospitals. It doesn't cover all the crap we get from legal and insurance firms. Other legal issues are also stymieing progress. I have been told specifically by the CEO of a large specialist group that they won't be using any of the above systems, because having the software available means they might get electronic referrals directly from GPs.This would be instead of paper referral letters that simply go with the patient. This changes the legal onus of who is responsible for following up with patients who don't make that specialist appointment when referred. It matters when a patient decides not go do anything with a given referral, and then finds out they're terminal months later. And so, we fax and get faxed. And it sucks.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > I have been told specifically by the CEO of a large specialist group that they won't be using any of the above systems, because having the software available means they might get electronic referrals directly from GPs.This would be instead of paper referral letters that simply go with the patient. This changes the legal onus of who is responsible for following up with patients who don't make that specialist appointment when referred. It matters when a patient decides not go do anything with a given referral, and then finds out they're terminal months later. Oh my. The unexpected legal implications and associated perverse incentives. Thanks for sharing that! Reminds me of what I heard about information security space, where some large companies don't want to know their risks too well, as if something would happen, they wouldn't be able to say "we didn't/couldn't have predicted that".
mrweasel 8y ago
If someone was to build a device that could clamp on to the phone line and listen for incoming faxes and copy the signal and sent it of to a remote server, would that force us to rethink the use of faxes? Sadly I think the answer is no. One argument that could be made for the fax is the lack of availability. Some government office in Denmark have been known to email sensitive information to wrong email addresses, because of poor spelling. Some guy owns anders.dk and have a catch-all email address, and employees of the city of Randers sometimes do check that they actually typed randers.dk and not anders.dk. That guy receives have received a boat load of sensitive data. The solution is to block his domain in the citys Exchange server.... Yeeeah. Neither fax, phone or email is particularly well suited for transmitting sensitive information, but the fax is seen as more secure, because when was the last time someone received a fax by mistake.
- Nursie 8y ago
  > If someone was to build a device that could clamp on to the phone line and listen for incoming faxes and copy the signal and sent it of to a remote server, Pretty sure that fax-to-email gateways have existed at least since the early 90s, most consumer-grade modems could send and receive faxes (with software to save them as images). Hooking that up to an email sender seems trivial. Hell, back in '96 an old friend needed to get a signed letter to the bank by close of business one day, so he used a tablet to sign a document and then the modem to 'fax' it over. --edit-- I misunderstood, you were talking about a MITM attack to prove the insecurity of faxes. Ignore me, carry on :)
- alex_young 8y ago
  You can man in the middle a fax by walking into a phone closet a mile away from either party. Same thing with a voice call. Don't send anything you don't want to post publicly via fax people.
  - tim333 8y ago
    I realise it's technically possible but are there any documented instances of someone doing that?
- 8y ago
odiroot 8y ago
It is still omnipresent in Germany.Even startups have to use (usually just a cloud service).
VSpike 8y ago
It makes me wonder what other legacy telecom systems are still in use somewhere. Are there any public X25 networks still in use? What about telex? Telex over HF? Inmarsat C? Any X400 gateways still running? Can you still send a UUCP mail? This kind of digital archaeology has a strange fascination to it.
- informatimago 8y ago
  X.25 and x.400 do support encryption and sender/receiver certificates (x.509). Uucp can still be used when you have intermitent connectivity.
- tim333 8y ago
  Radioteletype (RTTY) started around 1922 and is still going https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioteletype https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioteletype
- tomjen3 8y ago
  Technically all that is required for UUCP is a phone connection between two computers and the willingness to run it. There are a bunch of nostalgia computer geeks on youtube, but I haven't seen any of them focus on unix yet. Could be fun though.
tyingq 8y ago
I keep an account at Anveo for incoming and outgoing faxes. It's very cheap. $2/month, I think, if you just need a phone number that can send/receive faxes. There's a simple web interface to send a pdf as a fax.
alkonaut 8y ago
Don't forget that in the US utility bills are still often used as proof of living address. signatures are compared in some cases of identity verification (e.g. voting). Paper checks are still used as means of payment, even in retail. It's hardly surprising that fax machines are still used.
- paulie_a 8y ago
  On the plus side I have noticed an upward trend to not allowing checks at retail locations.
  - Spivak 8y ago
    Seems silly not to when they just end up being slightly more cumbersome to use debit cards. Like it's not that bad in the grand scheme of things.
    - paulie_a 8y ago
      It is substantially better per transaction. Insert card, wait a few seconds, type pin. Vs fumble for check book, find a pen, write all the details and sign it, then because most business have fraud issues with checks. run it through a third party processing to verify the check is valid. I'm guessing debit vs check is probably at least 3 times longer for check. Also the merchant has to pay the additional fees that are higher vs debit.
dejaime 8y ago
And I bet they use Microsoft Windows.

67 points by rustcharm 8y ago

iptel 8y ago

Fax is not more secure than email.

dfox 8y ago
It is more secure as long as you regard PSTN as more secure than internet. Which is a view that has some merit.
- msla 8y ago
  > It is more secure as long as you regard PSTN as more secure than internet. Which is a view that has some merit. Not as long as you can send faxes from the Internet. https://faxzero.com/ https://faxzero.com/ FaxZero even allows you to put in the phone number the fax comes from. It's $1.99/fax to remove the FaxZero cover letter, and they accept PayPal. (Also, someone with the username iptel might know a bit about this.)
  - dfox 8y ago
    I meant it in the confidentiality sense. The fact that you can put anything on the cover sheet and header line as sender number and that it has exactly zero relevance as authenticator should be obvious to anyone who actually ever set up a fax machine. Edit: and exactly how that differs from SMTP?
    - msla 8y ago
      An office fax machine sitting out in the open is going to be less confidential than email on an SMTP server where only a sysadmin or the recipient can see it, yes.
sokoloff 8y ago
It is more secure in some senses. You can't get a PDF-borne virus from an old-school fax reception. My tax preparer only accepts mailed documents and faxed documents. It's sometimes a pain, but I have to admit that I'm a little bit happy that he's more paranoid than I am about my financial information.
- cesarb 8y ago
  > You can't get a PDF-borne virus from an old-school fax reception. How about a JPEG-borne virus instead? https://research.checkpoint.com/sending-fax-back-to-the-dark-ages/ https://research.checkpoint.com/sending-fax-back-to-the-dark...
- zamadatix 8y ago
  "not fax" doesn't have to mean "use one of the least secure digital formats in existence". If you're goal is to replicate a fax you should probably limit yourself to a basic bitmap encoding similar to group 3/4 encoded faxes and create a validated decoder (something many fax machines lack).
- rustcharm 8y ago
  Actually, you can! There was a presentation at DEFCON this year (DEFCON 26) showing exactly this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLCE8spVX9Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLCE8spVX9Q > "See for yourself first-hand as we give a live demonstration of the first ever full fax exploitation, leading to complete control over the entire device as well as the network, using nothing but a standard telephone line. " Maybe it's time for you to find another tax preparer. Mine accepts encrypted documents with her public key.
  - sokoloff 8y ago
    I need my tax guy to be an expert on tax law way more than I need them to be on the cutting edge of computer communications and security. If he wants to stick to his old-school fax machine and keeps me on the right side of the tax agencies, I can accommodate his preferences on tech.
- 8y ago

ams6110 8y ago

Purchasing departments still use fax also. Where I work, most purchase orders with established vendors are sent by fax.

shaklee3 8y ago

I noticed real estate also heavily relies on it. Everything still seems to be done with paper and fax.

mdanger007 8y ago
Why not scan the paper to email?
- Roboprog 8y ago
  Hopefully the upload was to a secure web site.
- bugbie 8y ago
  http://27bslash6.com/overdue.html http://27bslash6.com/overdue.html
- beatgammit 8y ago
  Well, a fax definitely isn't secure...
thrower123 8y ago
I was somewhat amazed that my bank was fine with me using my phone to take pictures of signed forms and uploading them the images for my mortgage refinance.
ardy42 8y ago
That seems to be changing. I recently bought a house and literally all of the paperwork I had to do before closing was done using Docusign or a similar website.

crushcrashcrush 8y ago

My company deals with medical professionals and we absolutely need to maintain a fax line. The IRS loves faxes, too.

reustle 8y ago

> Law and Medicine Still Rely on the Device And a vast number of businesses in Japan, unfortunately

u801e 8y ago
It looks like the movie Back to the Future part 2 got something right regarding faxes: https://youtu.be/UlEFqR4SaVA?t=60 https://youtu.be/UlEFqR4SaVA?t=60

Roboprog 8y ago

FAXes have legal standing in California. As much as I hate supporting them :-)

petecox 8y ago

Only if your telco still supports it. In Australia, perhaps not. Our home phone service was moved from copper to VOIP as part of the NBN rollout. The technician who did the installation confirmed our multifunction laser printer would no longer fax, as the network didn't enable it.

ObsoleteNerd 8y ago
Yeah our building (Melbourne) doesn't even have copper going to it, we just have FTTB then CAT5 to each apartment.

frv103 8y ago

These requirements for faxing are becoming almost silly. Not only is the PSTN infrastructure in some areas so bad (40 year old corroded copper lines and such) that there are potential problems every time it rains, but incumbent carriers are trying to do everything they can to rip down what is left of the copper infrastructure. I don’t blame them as this makes practical and financial sense (remove copper phone lines, replace with fiber, offer data and voice through the fiber). The dream is that the PSTN will be done away with entirely, with all traffic going through the internet. A big problem is with fax machine manufacturers simply claiming that their machines “are not voip compatible” which is ridiculous, but the extra effort involved with getting faxes to work smoothly over voip can be a nightmare, and not something any vendor wants to be involved in supporting. The result of this is clients with $15k fax machines reporting a myriad of problems, which the fax machine vendor claims that the only solution is a PSTN phone line for the machine, which in many areas is no longer possible due to the incumbent carrier phasing out the infrastructure or making it incredibly difficult to obtain. There are a lot of “Efax” services whose purpose is to get around this problem by making the “fax” step just a transparent formality to appease regulatory constraints. Users can send an email with a specially formatted subject, then the “efax” company will actually “fax” the document specified in the email to a phone number owned by the efax company, which is then emailed to the intended receiver.

dvtrn 8y ago
The dream is that the PSTN will be done away with entirely, with all traffic going through the internet How far off the mark am I in thinking that part of this dream you have, that was left unstated is that 'all traffic going through the internet' assumes we've fixed the last mile problem of broadband connectivity to rural areas? Because otherwise that dream effectively cuts a lot of people off from the rest of the world.
- metildaa 8y ago
  Internet access outside of cities and suburbs is pretty awful, there are lots of businesses and residences plugging away with flakey, capped internet and lifeline phone service. Worse yet, those running what service there is can go out oof business or hang up on users they don't want, and your totally SOL: https://www.cnet.com/news/in-rural-farm-country-forget-broadband-you-might-not-have-internet-at-all/ https://www.cnet.com/news/in-rural-farm-country-forget-broad...

stevenwoo 8y ago

My insurance company mailed me a pdf to make a claim but they made me snail mail my printed copy with signature on it to them, they said they would have accepted a fax but would never accept an email with a photo of the same documents.

codingdave 8y ago

Back when I first started working in tech, in the early 90s, up to when I left enterprise IT in 2011, email-to-fax gateways were a thing. You just emailed a specific address format, something like: 999-999-9999@your.fax.gateway, and the email server would send an image of the email and attached documents to that number, via a connected fax machine. Likewise, incoming faxes to your number were received as images in an email. Do those things no longer exist? You would think, if anything, that would be easier today than it was 25 years ago.

carlosdp 8y ago
Twilio has a Fax API: https://www.twilio.com/fax https://www.twilio.com/fax
- metildaa 8y ago
  We had issues faxing rural areas through Twilio, like their SMS offerings (which lack shortcode support) it seems to be a partially baked solution. I asked them about it at SeaGL in Seattle, and the staff at their booth had few suggestions.
  - carlosdp 8y ago
    Idk about the fax issues in rural areas, I'm sure it's possible cause fax is hard, but Twilio definitely has SMS Shortcode support.
polm23 8y ago
eFax had some patents that it used aggressively for a long time to shut down competitors, though it looks like the main one expired recently. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16660890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16660890
wiml 8y ago
I think that was a common and pretty simple thing to do back when businesses still had modems and POTS lines — there were several popular FOSS and commercial solutions for setting up your own local fax gateway (print-to-outgoing-fax and incoming-fax-to-email being how I remember them working). By the late 90s most consumer modems could handle faxes. I think the persistence of the fax is almost entirely a social problem, not a technical one. This article links to another, which contained this statement I found fascinating: > Lately, doctors have taken to hand-delivering the most important records. > > “We used to fax the labor and delivery records, but they didn’t get > them or they were misplacing them,” says Hilda Moreno, who manages > the office’s medical records. “We kept getting calls like, did you > send this? And we’d say we did. So we started printing them out.”

mjevans 8y ago

It's that "Faxes" are //exempt//, they are, by far: * Obsolete * Insecure (no encryption in transit) * Insecure (no recipient validation) * Insecure (no validation of sender or data integrity) * Horrid quality (200, maybe 300, DPI, monochrome) * Like PTSN interlinked phones, fairly ubiquitous. Sadly, that last line item there is why they still exist. The exempt status also precludes any real attempt at security which makes 'fax the thing' quick and easy for untrained end users. Fire, and forget until someone pokes you about a failed fax, or even claim you tried and just assume gremlins ate all record of the first (never happened) actions. There's also not a /ubiquitous/ replacement. The mere cost of telephone calls and duration makes blindly trying to fax out spam that way not-cost-effective (plus the negotiation of fax technology inhibits just recording a dumb audio file to play against VoIP lines). Email is practically free, but HORRENDOUS for file transfers, and at any corporation where data retention is required for legal discovery holding on to EVERY file transferred forever is hell. While some better standards do exist, they aren't ubiquitous and often require 'non standard' software (mostly because Microsoft is highly allergic to any protocols/formats not invented by them). Also, it needs to be part of the /default/ OS install. It would be really great if Windows Explorer (the desktop shell) understood SFTP (SSH file transfer).

vthriller 8y ago

To me, a person that doesn't (and never did) live in the US, faxes there seem to be even more ubiquitous than this article paints. Imagine my amusement when I registered an Amazon account only to get it suspended with the request to verify it by... faxing bank statements and whatnot. Internationally on a +1 number. [0] And yes, support was not been able to offer any alternative to that. [0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=201742120 https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId...

metildaa 8y ago
Fax has a carve out in PCI & HIPPA compliance, and there is a huge existing momentum behind continuing to use fax. Alternatives for actually secure document transmission boil down to difficult to use private messaging/"secure" email systems (that only work in their walled garden). Many in the general public get frustrated with these walled gardens, as it is another login & interface to remember, and their credit union/bank, healthcare provider, company, etc will each have its own totally unique system
- Zak 8y ago
  > Alternatives for actually secure document transmission boil down to difficult to use private messaging/"secure" email systems (that only work in their walled garden). Oh bloody hell. Begin rant. We've had PGP for 27 years. Twenty seven years. Since 1991. Why the hell haven't we, the tech community, gotten the rest of the world to use it? I think the only person I've had a PGP-encrypted email exchange with is my mother. It's not a walled garden, and it solves the problem described here perfectly. We could have vote-by-email (using the key registered when registering to vote). We could have universal passwordless login. We could have virtually all communications secure from eavesdropping all the time. But no, nobody uses it outside of a few computer geeks, spies, and journalists.
  - metildaa 8y ago
    I use PGP, but it is a pain in the ass to use, severely stunting its usr. Normal people can't effectively use PGP without significant training, hence no one outside some DMCA notice bots using PGP in production for the common person to see. Even Riot with its fucked up key mismanagement is easier to use as a normie than PGP, though its looking like Riot will fix most of those trusted key management issues soon with the PRs that are about to land. Signal is the gold standard for secure, easy to use crypto at this point IMO. Hopefully Briar continues to improve tho, normie friendly metadata free communication is highly alluring, and the key management is a middle ground between Riot and Signal.

rootusrootus 8y ago

My desk phone at work has automatic inbound fax detection and reception. And one of the local medical firms has a phone number with a prefix that is one digit off from my desk phone direct line. You can guess what happens. It's kind of amazing what kinds of things they will put in a fax. Stuff I would find very personal, for sure, and wouldn't want to have faxed around carelessly.

metildaa 8y ago
Inbound fax detection is pretty easy to script, I've gotten lots of sensitive faxes from insurers despite emailing them to cease and desist faxing me. Very annoying!

ianai 8y ago

And I’ve had two employers furnish me with pagers.

gpm 8y ago

During the hiring process for my previous internship a problem with my credit score was discovered (equifax had someone else under my SIN). This ended up delaying my start date. The only way to fix it in any "reasonable" (weeks) amount of time was to fax them a bunch of documents.

dc_gregory 8y ago
Possibly a naive question, but why would you need a credit score for being hired, especially as an intern? I can (somewhat) see the need for privileged positions (i.e. CFO or similar).
- gpm 8y ago
  It was a bank, that was just standard procedure for everyone. Technically I was a contractor not a intern (and it "just happened" to be for a summer between two semesters of university), but I doubt being an official intern would have changed anything.
  - marcosdumay 8y ago
    Were they advancing you any money? If not, it's a stupid procedure that should be regarded as harassment.
    - gpm 8y ago
      They were not. I don't particularly think it counts as harassment. They can add any non-discriminatory stupid terms to the contract that they want. And there are certainly lots of jobs in a bank where it makes sense to minimize insider risk (say, if you're the one approving peoples loans...).
  - dc_gregory 8y ago
    Ah, working with money would make some sense, as a risk reduction strategy. Thanks for answering my question.

kgwxd 8y ago

I just dealt with American Public Life. I had to mail or fax (I went mail, fax is harder for me) all my forms and documents to get a claim started. Several days later, I was able to see that my claim required more information online by manually checking the site several times a day, no email notice about a claim update, I also got a notice in the mail 3 days later. I was able to ask them, via a contact web form, "is there a way to send docs electronically?" to which I got a "secured" reply to my email via "proofpoint" stating I must mail or fax all documents. Noticing there was an option to attach a file in proofpoint system, I ignored the requirements and sent the PDFs anyway. They accepted them but with a stern warning that I should mail or fax all documents if I want to ensure they will be associated with my claim. All this printing, signing, mailing, waiting, waiting, waiting, rinse, repeat, is a huge waste of resources and human life.

okonomiyaki3000 8y ago

Japan still loves its faxes. Gotta maintain a sense of tradition, I guess. Take pride in doing things the same way their forefathers did.

jacobush 8y ago
It's also a thing there to write stuff with a pen, which translates better to fax culture than email?

cknight 8y ago

IT Manager of a large medical centre in Australia here. I've been spending quite a lot of time trying to minimise the number of faxes we send and receive but there's only so far I can go. Email and fax-to-email services are generally frowned upon by the relevant medical accreditation boards, as they consider these to be insecure unless PGP is used. Email addresses have the ease of use and interoperability that fax numbers have, but PGP throws that right out the window. Beyond the technical discussion, I remember reading that fax is considered "secure" from a regulatory/legal standpoint because fax lines are subject to wiretapping laws just as a regular phone line is. An email however, sent in plain text, can be legally read by anyone along the line who has the authority to do so. No surprises there, we know what GMail does. What we've ended up with in Australia is a trio of internet-based secure messaging systems which have only just recently been in discussions about interoperability between themselves. I believe two of them are just end-client software which automates the PGP encryption/decryption of a given email address that you register, sending and receiving directly from your practice's clinical management system. Uptake has been kinda miserable. Until the systems are interoperable and have a large centralised directory of all health practitioners in the country, uptake will remain low. It's also only for medical practices and hospitals. It doesn't cover all the crap we get from legal and insurance firms. Other legal issues are also stymieing progress. I have been told specifically by the CEO of a large specialist group that they won't be using any of the above systems, because having the software available means they might get electronic referrals directly from GPs.This would be instead of paper referral letters that simply go with the patient. This changes the legal onus of who is responsible for following up with patients who don't make that specialist appointment when referred. It matters when a patient decides not go do anything with a given referral, and then finds out they're terminal months later. And so, we fax and get faxed. And it sucks.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
> I have been told specifically by the CEO of a large specialist group that they won't be using any of the above systems, because having the software available means they might get electronic referrals directly from GPs.This would be instead of paper referral letters that simply go with the patient. This changes the legal onus of who is responsible for following up with patients who don't make that specialist appointment when referred. It matters when a patient decides not go do anything with a given referral, and then finds out they're terminal months later. Oh my. The unexpected legal implications and associated perverse incentives. Thanks for sharing that! Reminds me of what I heard about information security space, where some large companies don't want to know their risks too well, as if something would happen, they wouldn't be able to say "we didn't/couldn't have predicted that".

mrweasel 8y ago

If someone was to build a device that could clamp on to the phone line and listen for incoming faxes and copy the signal and sent it of to a remote server, would that force us to rethink the use of faxes? Sadly I think the answer is no. One argument that could be made for the fax is the lack of availability. Some government office in Denmark have been known to email sensitive information to wrong email addresses, because of poor spelling. Some guy owns anders.dk and have a catch-all email address, and employees of the city of Randers sometimes do check that they actually typed randers.dk and not anders.dk. That guy receives have received a boat load of sensitive data. The solution is to block his domain in the citys Exchange server.... Yeeeah. Neither fax, phone or email is particularly well suited for transmitting sensitive information, but the fax is seen as more secure, because when was the last time someone received a fax by mistake.

Nursie 8y ago
> If someone was to build a device that could clamp on to the phone line and listen for incoming faxes and copy the signal and sent it of to a remote server, Pretty sure that fax-to-email gateways have existed at least since the early 90s, most consumer-grade modems could send and receive faxes (with software to save them as images). Hooking that up to an email sender seems trivial. Hell, back in '96 an old friend needed to get a signed letter to the bank by close of business one day, so he used a tablet to sign a document and then the modem to 'fax' it over. --edit-- I misunderstood, you were talking about a MITM attack to prove the insecurity of faxes. Ignore me, carry on :)
alex_young 8y ago
You can man in the middle a fax by walking into a phone closet a mile away from either party. Same thing with a voice call. Don't send anything you don't want to post publicly via fax people.
- tim333 8y ago
  I realise it's technically possible but are there any documented instances of someone doing that?
8y ago

odiroot 8y ago

It is still omnipresent in Germany.Even startups have to use (usually just a cloud service).

VSpike 8y ago

It makes me wonder what other legacy telecom systems are still in use somewhere. Are there any public X25 networks still in use? What about telex? Telex over HF? Inmarsat C? Any X400 gateways still running? Can you still send a UUCP mail? This kind of digital archaeology has a strange fascination to it.

informatimago 8y ago
X.25 and x.400 do support encryption and sender/receiver certificates (x.509). Uucp can still be used when you have intermitent connectivity.
tim333 8y ago
Radioteletype (RTTY) started around 1922 and is still going https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioteletype https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioteletype
tomjen3 8y ago
Technically all that is required for UUCP is a phone connection between two computers and the willingness to run it. There are a bunch of nostalgia computer geeks on youtube, but I haven't seen any of them focus on unix yet. Could be fun though.

tyingq 8y ago

I keep an account at Anveo for incoming and outgoing faxes. It's very cheap. $2/month, I think, if you just need a phone number that can send/receive faxes. There's a simple web interface to send a pdf as a fax.

alkonaut 8y ago

Don't forget that in the US utility bills are still often used as proof of living address. signatures are compared in some cases of identity verification (e.g. voting). Paper checks are still used as means of payment, even in retail. It's hardly surprising that fax machines are still used.

paulie_a 8y ago
On the plus side I have noticed an upward trend to not allowing checks at retail locations.
- Spivak 8y ago
  Seems silly not to when they just end up being slightly more cumbersome to use debit cards. Like it's not that bad in the grand scheme of things.
  - paulie_a 8y ago
    It is substantially better per transaction. Insert card, wait a few seconds, type pin. Vs fumble for check book, find a pen, write all the details and sign it, then because most business have fraud issues with checks. run it through a third party processing to verify the check is valid. I'm guessing debit vs check is probably at least 3 times longer for check. Also the merchant has to pay the additional fees that are higher vs debit.

dejaime 8y ago

And I bet they use Microsoft Windows.