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Faxing is growing in popularity
- analog31 8y agoIf you have a number that can receive fax, then getting stuff into a format that you can use becomes the sender's problem.
- lcnmrn 8y agoAs long people uses faxes as printers with an attached email address I don't see them disappear anytime soon.
- degenerate 8y agoFaxing is to email as VoIP is to the PSTN Until we can get over the threshold of assuming nobody has a fax machine anymore, faxing is here to stay. Once we push that threshold, the remaining users can be forced out (by not having fax as an option, and faxing will fizzle away over time). Think of it like supporting IE6. A lot of the holdouts for IE6 were large health care organizations and VA/gov centers... the same exact places still holding onto fax.
- shados 8y agoFaxing is a headache for a lot of people. The problem is that the industries that use fax are in a position to force it on others. Certain healthcare departments, some mortgage related stuff, financial garbage, etc. Places where if you HAVE to do business with that entity for some reason, and the say "fax this to us", you're stuck hunting down a fax machine or using an online service. They thus have no reason to change.
- tomjen3 8y agoDepends. Quite often people think they _have_ to do as they are told, where you can quite often come back with an alternative.
- JohnFen 8y ago> Places where if you HAVE to do business with that entity for some reason, and the say "fax this to us", you're stuck hunting down a fax machine I just head to the local copy center when I'm forced to send (or receive) a fax, so for me "fax this to us" means "pay an extra $2 for no good reason".
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoLast time I did business with someone who told me to fax them something, I asked them what millennium they thought it was. They promptly suggested an alternative. We did it that way. Just because they prefer fax doesn't (usually) mean that it's the only way it can work. It doesn't mean you have to do it their preferred way.
- snarfy 8y ago"I can't send a fax from where I'm at" "Where are you?" "2019. I'm in the year 2019"
- mtmail 8y agoThe study (https://www.opentext.com/file_source/OpenText/en_US/PDF/opentext-idc-survey-fax-market-pulse%20-en.pdf https://www.opentext.com/file_source/OpenText/en_US/PDF/open...) as sponsored by OpenText (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenText https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenText) It shows growing fax usage in the segment of large companies. At the same time need for integrating fax into other systems and cloud. It sound more like OpenText will use the finding (and list of companies surveyed) in their sales process.
- Animats 8y agoThe intelligence community has been intercepting faxes for decades.[1] It's not very secure. Even worse, VoIP systems recognize fax modem signals, decode them, transmit them as data, and re-encode them as fax modem signals.[2] They have to; VoIP has such awful jitter and bandwidth that you can't send modem signals over it. So it's easy to peel off the fax data and log it. This is done routinely using fax servers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_site#The_Onyx-intercepted_fax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_site#The_Onyx-intercepte... [2] https://www.dialogic.com/-/media/products/docs/whitepapers/11148-reliable-fax-voip-wp.pdf https://www.dialogic.com/-/media/products/docs/whitepapers/1...
- reaperducer 8y agoHow secure do I need my restaurant take-out order to be?
- cbhl 8y agoThere are jurisdictions outside of the US that transmit health records by fax to avoid them being subject to the USA PATRIOT Act when they transit routers in the United States.
- tim333 8y ago>By one private firm’s estimate, the fax accounts for about 75 percent of all medical communication https://www.vox.com/health-care/2017/10/30/16228054/american-medical-system-fax-machines-why https://www.vox.com/health-care/2017/10/30/16228054/american...
- jak92 8y agoPeople think it's secure, but it's worse now than ever since many faxes are now emailed as PDFs
- grumpy-cowboy 8y agoFax machine -> fax machine : secure And fax machines are easy to use. Securing document exchange by email is a PITA for 99.9% users. Explain to your mother how to use PGP/GPG to encrypt the email she have to send to financial institutions, government, ... And imagine the government employee receiving the encrypted email. He will probably just delete it. :)
- jak92 8y agoWell, completely unencrypted, but depends on what you consider the threat to be.
- pintxo 8y agoI feel with you. I was shocked to learn that fax is still the default for Doctor 2 Doctor communication here in Germany. Turns out the reason is rather simple: the law explicitly requires phone lines to be confidential in terms of eavesdropping. (You need a warrant, else it‘s illegal). While all other means of transport are not covered by this. So everyone who wants to legally cover his ass, would rather use the legally privileged, but technically wide open phone line over technically sound solutions missing such a legal framework.
- gruez 8y ago>Turns out the reason is rather simple: the law explicitly requires phone lines to be confidential in terms of eavesdropping. (You need a warrant, else it‘s illegal). While all other means of transport are not covered by this. What about VOIP? Cell phones? WIFI calling?
- yebyen 8y agoWhat about them? (Can you send a fax over those media, and are they protected similarly?) Or are you asking a different question? If it's not on a phone line, then it's not afforded those legal protections. None of those communication media you just mentioned are using a phone line as a transport mechanism. (They're also not similar to fax from a UX standpoint.)
- jngreenlee 8y agoIT's a 0-trust system!
- argd678 8y agoThe IRS also only accepts faxes for sending documents directly to an agent. If you have a fax machine maybe it’s secure, but the internet services are very shady and using a local store I’m still concerned the machines store the documents in memory after sending them (not 100% sure if that’s the case but I see no reason for the manufacturers to care to wipe them).
- giarc 8y agoI work in healthcare and in my office we likely receive 100-200 pages of faxes everyday. Every single microbiology report in my large urban hospital prints out (including preliminary results. This includes a cover page for every single fax. It's a huge waste of paper. Luckily we are moving to Epic and all results will come through that system instead.
- jedimastert 8y agoI'm mildly concerned with how many people that aren't directly involved with my medical care could read those reports. It's not like they have to break open an envelope or a filing cabinet or something either. Just another piece of paper to be casually picked up and scanned for filing.
- reaperducer 8y agoI'm not the OP, but I do work pushing buttons in healthcare. In our company incoming faxes are OCR'ed and routed to the proper person by e-mail. I can't say how well it works because nobody's faxed me (nor should anyone), but since every employee gets HIPAA training, I don't think there's much cause for worry about misdirected faxes.
- conanbatt 8y agoWhat did you use for OCR? Can you identify patients or do you only use it to identify document types?
- TheOtherHobbes 8y agoI know someone whose medical records - including full details of the removal of her brain tumour - were faxed to a hairdresser because the operator swapped a couple of digits in the number.
- jedimastert 8y agoThat thought gives me so much anxiety.
- tracker1 8y agoIt comes down to convenience and ease of use... put your pages in, enter a phone number, hit send. Verses scanning pages using a computer, compositing into a PDF, or otherwise emailing loose pages... and since network monitoring is more likely than phone taps (except the govt) may be more secure fax to fax over pots. It's more a matter of ergonomics. I've also used fancier systems that scan to pdf and email or drop location internally, then you have to email the document out. Frankly, faxing direct is usually far easier.
- basch 8y agoYou pay for this in data entry. Sending pages, means that someone has to retype the data into a database compared to sending it in some kind of data structure that can be imported. Or worse the data doesnt get entered, and it ends up in a filing cabinet.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago>Or worse the data doesnt get entered, and it ends up in a filing cabinet. God forbid that data not be vacuumed up never to be seen again except by the advertisers. /s A file cabinet in the back office probably handles most people's use cases for documents they receive by fax 90% as well as any digital solution with a heck of a lot less effort.
- basch 8y agoIn the context of medical records, as a patient, id like to be able to download and transport my records without an office needing to pull out paper and copy it for me.
- fiddlerwoaroof 8y agoThey can always scan them and send you the image.
- basch 8y ago
- newhotelowner 8y agoEvery single hotel that caters corporate clients in the USA still uses fax. We don't get reservations through fax, but that is the best way to get credit card authorization. A lot of corporate booking systems are automated to send out Fax for credit card authorization after they book the room online. Also, it's much better for our Front desk staff, as they don't have to constantly check the email. There is only 1 fax number, and anyone can send out the fax and whoever is working at the front desk gets a printed copy without doing anything. I really wish there is a modern alternative to FAX. Edit: What I mean by a modern alternative to Fax is that the sender can send high-resolution color documents without going through multiple steps. Scan documents to a computer, convert to PDF, Send an email with an attachment, Check email periodically, Print Email. I have converted most of our documents to digital forms, and sync to all computers. Yet all my employees rather copy documents as they think its much faster and convenient. They will make 100s of copies of the document. We accept all documents through email or fax. Last week we received an email with a one-page contract that was broken into 4 images. We asked to send it again and they rescanned and send it again the same way. I used a word to print 4 images into one page and call it a day.
- devoply 8y agoImagine a future where faxes are a private alternative form of communication. Image machines specifically designed to send encrypted data using phone lines. Maybe there is room innovation there, fax 2.0 is encrypted private alternative form of communication when all others have been exhausted. Maybe we can attach a typewriter to them as well so you can get all your private communication needs in one package. I know hipsters will be all over this. Heck we could even use shortwave radio to transmit these: http://hamfax.sourceforge.net/ http://hamfax.sourceforge.net/
- TheOtherHobbes 8y agoYou may joke about SW, but there are not a few applications for a secure encrypted channel that is difficult to MITM and doesn't go through nation-state infrastructure.
- zamadatix 8y ago
- gamblor956 8y agoOne of my former clients was eFax, which parlayed the money it earned from eFax subscriptions into becoming a publicly-traded internet holding company behemoth. They own dozens of second-tier internet media and e-telecommunications sites. There's a lot of money in fax.
- United857 8y agoI'm guessing part of the appeal is the simplicity. At its purest, faxing is point-to-point, and unlike email doesn't need any servers/other infra (read: potential points of failure) beyond the telephone system itself.
- lotsofpulp 8y agoAre phone systems more resilient than internet and email protocols? A phone number relies on a single vendor, whereas internet and email can be accessed through a variety of vendors, and MX records can be changed by the user. If the power goes out, I can still use email via wireless providers, or I can go to a different location and use it.
- conanbatt 8y ago> Are phone systems more resilient than internet and email protocols? When was it the last time a land-line had an interruption of service. I can't even recall it happening to me.
- sigi45 8y agoGermany 2018: oohh you like to cancel your online account for our service? Her is our fax number: 0FUCK / YOU Yes I send one fax per year for most stupid reasons. Like: hey I have to send more documents to my state for taxes which I originally sent digitally through there secured service page: yes no problem here is our fax number...
- JohnFen 8y agoFaxing provides some advantages that can't be easily matched by competing communications tech: it's solid tech that works well, it can operate without requiring access to a computer network, it's cheap, it's dead easy to use, etc. I'm not surprised to hear that it is growing in popularity. I think that we'll find an increasing number of other "antique" technologies that will find a resurgence for the same reasons.
- YeahSureWhyNot 8y agoim not sure about dead easy to use? i have figured out how to use all the tech devices including old school iptv cameras, smart cash registers and connecting thermal receipt printers but the fax machine is absolutely the shittiest gadget i have had to deal with in my life despite being shown how to operate it multiple times.
- wolrah 8y agoThe people who say faxes are easier than email are like the old mechanics who complain about how EFI is complicated and carbs were so much simpler. It's not actually any better, just a lot of people learned how to use it 20 years ago and don't want to learn anything new because they're wastes of space.
- JohnFen 8y agoThis is just not true as a blanket statement. I am as cutting-edge tech-wise as anybody (it is my industry, after all), but that doesn't blind me to the fact that there do, in fact, exist use cases for which the fax is the best solution.
- lotsofpulp 8y agoEveryone has a camera on a device that can send emails. Unless the internet went down and for some reason the phone system still worked, I can't think of any scenario where fax is better than emailing photos.
- miki123211 8y agoThe implications of that to accessibility are atrocious. I had a blind friend who lived outside US and had to deal with english faxes once. That was a nightmare, both in the financial and accessibility sense. If everyone just used email...
- amaccuish 8y agoYou need to look at countries like Estonia with strong cryptographic signatures for how to effectively move away from faxes (I believe crpytographic signatures are far better than "digital signatures", i.e. a jpg of your handwriting)
- adulau 8y agoTalking about FAX machines, Hack.lu 2018: What The Fax?! - Eyal Itkin and Yaniv Balmas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aahHbliwfm0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aahHbliwfm0
- gumby 8y agoYou read it here first: Faxing is the new Vinyl. (Seriously: I like how it talked about fax being more secure than email while also talking about computer-based fax services.)
- mywittyname 8y ago> What happened was that competing companies deliberately created incompatible systems. Doctors’ offices and hospitals that use different records databases can’t communicate with each other digitally — but they can via fax. I cannot imagine why people prefer an established, well-documented, open exchange format over some closed, proprietary, and probably obfuscated one.
- vxNsr 8y agoSays someone in a world where slack and facebook are prevalent. The reason in this case is because the purchasing admin isn't the user and most certainly doesn't have a clue when it comes to tech, they liked the lunch the Epic rep provided and went with their gut (pun intended).
- nradov 8y agoDirect Project secure messaging is an established, well-documented, open exchange format that works over SMTP. It is specifically designed to replace faxing for the healthcare industry. http://wiki.directproject.org/ http://wiki.directproject.org/
- conanbatt 8y agoDictatorship of the minority. If you have a subset that uses fax, then everyone needs to support fax, because otherwise you cant work.
- knob 8y agoThis hits close to home. Anybody has thought of sending faxes with QR codes? Receiving systems that have the ability can get the fax's information quickly via QR code, instead of having to OCR the fax. If the system doesn't support the capability, it's just ignored (by the fax machine and humans). Might be helpful.
- conanbatt 8y agoAlready exists. Not a silver bullet. Each place has to transform the incoming fax format into their own emr format.
- robbrit 8y agoIt's been so long since I've heard about faxing that reading the headline I thought "Faxing" was some fancy new tech that all the kids are playing with.
- shmerl 8y ago> What happened was that competing companies deliberately created incompatible systems. Doctors’ offices and hospitals that use different records databases can’t communicate with each other digitally — but they can via fax. Yeah, that's a common failure, which impedes progress. Anti-competitive NIH and lock-in. And indeed, bad players usually fall in line only when they have no choice.
- submeta 8y agoInterestingly I started using a web based Fax solution in Germany two years ago when I realized that Doctor‘s offices won‘t answer the phone anymore whenever I wanted to get an appointment. Good Doctors are drowning in emails requesting an appointment. And their phones are ringing from nine to five, so its super hard to get through. Sometimes I was on hold for half an hour witout success. Even though I am able to afford the most expensive Doctors I would not get a chance to make an appointment! So phone won‘t work, neither would they reply to emails, generally. Then I realized that all of them have Fax machines! For various (legacy and regulatory) reasons. When I started requesting an appoitment or a callback via Fax I was delighted to see that they would reply almost immediately! So now whenever I need to get in contact with a Doctor‘s office in Germany or public authorities, I don’t even try to call, but send a Fax immediately.
- dwd 8y agoSome countries never moved away from the fax: Japan and Israel in particular. For legal documents that have to be sent in a timely manner and give you a verifiable receipt of delivery, you need to go with a fax rather than email. Your fax isn't going to disappear without a trace due your email server not being reputable enough or looking like spam, or exceeding your delivery rate.
- ArtDev 8y agofaxzero.com is awesome. Free for the sender.