14 ms·
Pagers, faxes and cheques: Things that might seem obsolete, but aren't
- Kaibeezy 7y agoAnalog multimeters
- basicplus2 7y agoCheques can by definition can never be obsolete as they are simply "a written order directing your bank to pay money [to someone]" and don't have to be on a bank issued and numbered format.
- mantap 7y agoMaybe so but your bank is not going to send money to someone unless they have proof that you are the one sending the order. I doubt you can just mail a letter to your bank and ask them to send money out of your account.
- freeone3000 7y agoHave you tried? I bet you they would. Mine does it with a phone call!
- vincnetas 7y agohow do they authenticate over phone. Just curious. Key generator? Something else?
- pdkl95 7y agoBanks don't necessarily need strong authentication, because that isn't what they are trying to guarantee. Banks have contracts that often guarantee something closer to "eventual consistency", where the ability to rollback or correct transactions is more important than guaranteeing any single transaction is correct at first. In the unlikely event of a problem, they can fix it. The bank judges how much risk they want to take and uses whatever level of authentication they feel is necessary, which might be as little as asking your name and/or account number(s), or calling your phone listed on your account.
- ben509 7y agoSome will have you answer your own security questions. That's how I learned, red faced, to make sure my answers are something I'm comfortable reading over the phone.
- Daniel_sk 7y agoMy bank has audio biometry (Tatrabanka, Slovakia), they verify your voice during your call automatically. The voice sample is recorded when you open your account. Only if it fails they may ask for additional proof. But I never call the bank since all can be done through the app or web.
- ben509 7y agoIn theory, if you give a bank an instruction, you are the principal and they are the agent, and that means they have to follow your instructions pertaining to your account. If it's a written instruction, they do need to authenticate it, but they could call you to do so. Or they might charge a big fee for it. Or they might drag their heels by claiming you have to perform the transaction online because of some policy they have that you don't care about. But they definitely can't ignore a letter you send them.
- Nursie 7y agoAnd if your bank no longer accepts written orders like that, preferring modern electronic security measures?
- ben509 7y agoIt'd be interesting to see them refuse to accept it if it came on a law firm's letterhead.
- altmind 7y agobusiness cards punch-down patch pannels "call for quote"
- jacquesm 7y agoCall for quote to me spells 'go away'. If I have to call for a quote you are (1) going to overcharge me and (2) are afraid that your competitors can beat your price and/or (3) harass me for months afterwards with 'follow up' that I have no desire for.
- cj 7y ago> Call for quote to me spells 'go away'. There are many cases where this is by design. I was recently in the market for a new couch. I walked into a neighborhood furniture store, and I began looking around the showroom confused why there were no price tags on any of the furniture ("ask for the price"). A minute later, the sales person approached me and said "Welcome! [...] Our prices start at $4500 for a lovely sectional. Our store never has sale prices and we don't negotiate price. Our couches are custom order and are delivered 8-12 weeks from the time of purchase. May I take you around the showroom?" Since I was looking for something delivered next week (at a lower price), I walked out of the store happy that the sales person was so upfront. Some businesses do not want you as a customer, and use techniques like "Call us for a quote" to weed out customers they know won't buy. Also, some products are inherently difficult to give upfront pricing for before understanding more parameters of the purchase. Edit: This is especially true of B2B SaaS. A significant number of leads we receive request custom integrations between our internal systems and the customer's internal systems as part of their purchase. In these cases, it's literally impossible to give a quote without multiple calls understanding the complexity and set up cost.
- lostcolony 7y agoSure, but does it actually improve things for either side? That couch business wasted both your time AND the sales rep's time. Who does it help to not post prices? For B2B, sure, you can't give an exact quote until you figure out the custom logic, but the customer can at least ballpark what long term operation costs will be based on any published pricing you have. I've never talked to a SaaS vendor without some idea of ongoing price, even if we're going to need upfront work that will be priced separately.
- Mountain_Skies 7y agoChecks are almost a specialty item now. I was shocked at how much they cost even from the discount mail order printers. If I keep the same bank, this order, the smallest they produce, likely will last the rest of my life. Guess they have to cover their costs on what is no longer a high volume business.
- robert_foss 7y agoI'm reminded of their existence when visiting Canada / US. Their continued existence is baffling.
- non-entity 7y agoMy (soon to be) former apartment complex only accepted checks or money orders for rent payments
- 5555624 7y agoMy last apartment complex was the same way. They looked at allowing people to pay electronically; but, that would mean passing on the credit card charge to residents. The first apartment complex I lived in, which allowed you to pay by credit card, charged 3.3% to do so. If I save $40 by writing a check, I'll write a check.
- scurvy 7y agoHousekeepers and babysitters like to be paid in cash. Sometimes it's more than we have on hand, so we write a check. I've pleaded with my housekeeper to accept CashApp or Venmo, but he refuses. He wants a check. He's, perhaps rightfully, distrusting of new payment tech. Babysitters are 50/50 on Venmo.
- Gunax 7y agoIsn't venmo just ACH underneath?
- 7y ago
- ryukafalz 7y agoThe fact that pagers are still in use by hospitals is a bit scary. POCSAG isn't encrypted, and it's possible to intercept messages in the area. One of my former coworkers did that as an art project: https://brannondorsey.com/project/holy-pager https://brannondorsey.com/project/holy-pager
- Dayshine 7y agoWhy is an unencrypted pager message any more scary than an announcement over the loudspeakers? Aren't pages generally just "go here" or "get to a phone"?
- ryukafalz 7y agoMostly due to the range (well outside the hospital itself) and the content. Pages can be just "get to a phone" but that's evidently not universally true: https://brannondorsey.com/assets/holypager/holypager-03.jpg https://brannondorsey.com/assets/holypager/holypager-03.jpg
- Scoundreller 7y agoRight, but the point is that you can use them without revealing any personal health info.
- grecy 7y agoI worked at a large telco until 2015, and they had a written policy where it was their goal to get a fax line added to every home.
- Scoundreller 7y agoAs I’ve said before: pagers are great: batteries last months. Easy to pass around and know when you’re the one on-call. Limited teaching required to understand their use. Can take a beating. Work well in disaster scenarios because its network is far less fragile than the cellular network’s. They don’t leak your location. Their signal penetrates extremely well. They make sure the person on-call doesn’t go too far from where they’re supposed to be on-call when they’re required to be within x km of base.
- BlackFingolfin 7y agoBut they have major drawbacks, too. Like: no encryption and authentication. And that means that e.g. critical medical data about a lot of people can be trivially snooped from the airwaves. This is not just hypothetical, it really works, and you can find multiple newspaper articles and reports online on this subject by googling a bit. Worse, it is trivial to tamper with this and insert forged pager messages. A lot of harm could be done with this, possibly even leading to death of patients.
- mattr47 7y agoWhat medical data is sent via pages? All the times I've used them it is a simple code, and possibly a location.
- cheeseprocedure 7y agoA recent Canadian example: > The data being broadcast includes the patients name, age, gender marker, diagnosis, their attending doctor and room number. Other broadcasts regarding medical tests such as x-rays are often associated with a patients last name or medical number, exposing their progression through hospital departments. https://openprivacy.ca/blog/2019/09/09/open-privacy-discovers-vancouver-patient-medical-data-breach/ https://openprivacy.ca/blog/2019/09/09/open-privacy-discover...
- Scoundreller 7y ago
- IshKebab 7y agoI mean, they are all obsolete. Just because people still haven't upgraded doesn't mean they're not obsolete. Also surprised they didn't mention the use of tapes by the police: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20556330 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20556330
- Zenst 7y agoAdvantages of tape for evidence is that it is way easier to prove that it was an original, not tampered with than a digital form. WIth that, I worked at the BBC in the early 2k period on a project to replace the last bastions of tapes in radio towards a complete digital system. Remarkably one of the drivers of this move was that the tapes used had stopped being manufactured. Ironically though like many things tech that from a user perspective - just work, parts of that system are still in use today. But then like many things - if it works, why change it does seem to play out more often than not.
- Scoundreller 7y agoFaxes are better than email because you know it didn’t get filtered out from the inbox for some reason. My employer reports that 99% of the emails it gets are blocked. And many employers are tightening up further to prevent malware attacks. If I need to send a purchase order, it’s nice to know it was received and have an automatic copy of it without having to think to print a confirmation.
- mindslight 7y agoI've come to appreciate the pragmatic utility of faxing, because many businesses will accept a faxed signature and/or notary stamp in place of a mailed hardcopy. On the other hand, the image quality is terrible. I'm in a three month long process to recover a check lost due to a fax image quality issue, presumably between two document management systems - a "5" was transmuted to a "6" in a postal address. The receiver of the fax has said it is a clear "6" - I'm not sure if this is due to that well-known glyph-based compression bug in one of the document management systems or something else. I've also had occurrences of businesses accepting faxes, only to have the person actually doing the work request a higher resolution scan be emailed. Some businesses have moved to plainly announcing the acceptance of scanned documents by email, but really everyone should.
- Nursie 7y agoDo you know? I've worked in places where incoming faxes were automatically converted to pdf and sent as email attachments.
- _red 7y agoYes or the alternative: All faxes pile up in copy room in huge disorganized piles (page 4 of this mixed in with page 2 of that) which no one can disentangle so they are eventually all ignored / thrown away.
- grawprog 7y ago>Faxes are better than email because you know it didn’t get filtered out from the inbox for some reason. Not necessarily. I faxed information for a hotel reservation last year, showed up around 9pm on Friday to check in, they apparently hadn't received any of the info, despite having confirmed the reservation and emailing me a confirmation. It ended up being a big hassle. In the end it was because the person working that day hadn't bothered checking the fax machine and it had been thrown away. They were pretty rude about it in the end and never stopped acting like it was our fault. Even after everything was figured out. We finally got into our room at around 11pm after some tense waiting around not being sure where we were going to stay that night.
- rudolph9 7y agoThe last time I saw Richard Stallman talk he had a pager. I’m actually interested in getting one, it would be cool to get push notifications for things I normally get on my phone. I wish there was a watch that had pager service.
- Zenst 7y agoRemarkably, what you describe was the foundation of Research In Motion. They started out in pagers, advanced along with push email and then like most, feature bloated chasing a consumer market into the annals of history.
- Scoundreller 7y agoThey should have stuck with consumer markets, but clinged to hardware when what they had was winning software. If they stuck with messaging software (BBM), they could have been WhatsApp. Which was sold for 6x what they’re worth now. They only made it platform-independent way too late.
- Zenst 7y agoTheir core business was Business customers, the company grew out of that. They then pivoted around the time of the pearl towards a consumer market, which was also a couple of years into launching a consumer service BIS, as opposed to BES which required you to have the backend BES software. That was when the focus shifted and at a time in which the Apple and Google offerings started to appear and the rest is all she wrote. They did offer their messaging software for other phones for a while in the early days, Microsofts CE offering with blackberry connect (iirc the name). It worked, yet didn't traction that well as anybody who really needed it, would be better of buying an older RIM phone and using that and many did stick with the older phones come the rise of the colour screen and onwards. What they did do well was effecient comms over 2G, once 3G became palatable for chipsets and more so, cost of use, that along with the rise in alternatives from the likes of Apple and Google, helped Blackberry push themselves into an also ran for trying to compete instead of focusing upon the real bread and butter - the Business customers. But life is always full of what-if's. But all companies have their retrospective if we knew then what we know now moments.
- Scoundreller 7y agoEven though the US has moved to e-prescribing, there have been some arbitrary limits imposed that didn’t exist on paper. E.g. the instructions line was limited to 140 characters on one major hospital EHR.
- tzs 7y agoAnother limit is that it is harder to shop around with an e-prescription. I cannot find a way to get Kaiser's pharmacy to tell me what a given drug will cost out of pocket on my Kaiser plan unless I present them with an actual written prescription. Then they can tell me what it would cost to fill it right there. So I have my Kaiser doctor, who can easily send e-prescriptions to any pharmacy I choose, instead write me paper prescriptions just so I can find out the Kaiser price, and then decide if I want to fill it there or take somewhere else and use a GoodRx coupon or pay cash.
- mauvehaus 7y agoSincere question about cheques: How do people in the UK (or other cheque-less places) deal with the transfer of large amounts of money between private or nearly private parties? I own a small business and have worked for small businesses, and it's my experience that checks make the world go around in the woodworking field. All of the shops I've worked for have paid me by check - nobody wants to screw around setting up direct deposit for one or two employees. Several of them pay suppliers by check; suppliers don't want to take the hit on credit card fees. And all of them take checks for payment from customers regularly (and I do to), for the same reason, among others. The only downsides I see to cheques is that they're insecure and that there might be insufficient funds. If you're dealing with a trusted party (or at least somebody you reasonably believe to be acting in good faith), those are basically non-issues. The upsides are pretty extensive: 1) They don't require carrying around large amounts of cash 2) They don't require third party cooperation (at least to write) 3) They don't require internet access 4) They don't require any sort of set-up, which reduces the friction for one-time or infrequent transfers. 5) There's basically no fee for the volume we use them in [0] except for buying the cheques. 6) If a payer does bounce a check (unintentionally) the payee can insist on a more guaranteed form of payment in the future. The friction is added to the party that screwed up in the first place. Edited for formatting and to add: All of this requires an informal web of trust. I've definitely used cash for one-time large transactions with people I don't have in my network. I've sold a car for cash to a random private person and bought a bicycle with cash from a different random private person, for instance. [0] My business checking allows enough free transactions a month that I should be covered for a while; if I start exceeding that, I probably won't be super-worried about the cost of the fees) [1] A buddy worked at a cabinet shop whose plywood supplier wouldn't take their checks. They switched to counter checks or money orders, or something else that guaranteed sufficient funds at the time of issuance. Hypothetically they could have gone to another supplier. In practice, finding a good supplier is a lot of effort, there aren't many in the first place, and word gets around fast if you make a habit of burning people without making it right.
- Tomte 7y ago> nobody wants to screw around setting up direct deposit for one or two employees Then it's obviously too difficult to set up in America. Other countries do direct deposit, exclusively. A company trying to pay in any other way would look very shady over here.
- Luc 7y agoWhat's the Tamagotchi to get nowadays (in Europe)? I would like to buy some as gifts. There's a whole bunch of different models and I'm a bit lost.
- lostcolony 7y ago7.1 cheques per household? I understand a rent check, but what are those others? Or, since that's an average, is it that most households write just one, but then enough elderly people are writing checks at the store (that I invariably am stuck behind) that it inflates the average?
- ghaff 7y agoI don't know the last time I've written a check in the store and I have a lot of things set to autopay but I still do write a few a few checks every month: housekeeper, various money I owe my neighbor, pay people for food on weekend trips, furnace maintenance, contractors, etc. (If you count the checks my bank writes and mails for me, then I'm certainly up in the 7 or 8 a month range.)
- Scoundreller 7y agoI write them sometimes for vendors I don’t like. Like my local electricity utility that charges me demand charges as if I were an industrial user.
- closeparen 7y agoFamily gifts and settlement between friends. Middle aged people use plastic but definitely not Venmo. Medical billing is also a big one. Most practices will also let you write down your credit card number on a piece of paper, but at that point a check is nicer. Charity. A check means your whole contribution goes to the organization, instead of having Visa take a cut.
- alkonaut 7y agoCheques and faxes died with the phone booth 20 years ago in Europe and the developed world outside the US, right?
- Scoundreller 7y agoIt was a bit easier because I think prescriptions by fax never took off outside of N. America, but it was the better way.
- MrMorden 7y agoUnless DEA hasn't bothered to update their website, they still require prescriptions for scheduled drugs to be on paper or via fax. If they actually cared about security (which they don't; nobody in the US government does with the possible exception of the NRC) they'd only allow electronic prescriptions signed by an accredited CA.
- theandrewbailey 7y agoJapan says 'Hi'.
- tlarkworthy 7y agoCalafornian state department insist on cheques or cash. Now I live in Europe I cannot issues cheques, and I cannot mail cash internationally via courier (law). So how the Dickens do I get my children's birth certificates apostilled (born in US)? (Ans use a person I trust in the US, but without a social network it's beauracratically impossible)
- mey 7y agoWould they accept a wire transfer or Western Union?
- tlarkworthy 7y agoNo, just cash or cheque
- clintonb 7y agoUse a bill pay service. Most US-based banks offer a bill pay service that will mail a check to the payee. I'm not sure if such a thing exists outside of the US, or if your European bank will mail a USD check.
- tlarkworthy 7y agoEuro banks do not issue checks. Maybe bill service could work, can they forward the cheque along with documents like birth certificate originals?
- detaro 7y ago> Euro banks do not issue checks is not entirely universally true: at least here in Germany, especially business accounts might be able to write cheques, because businesses sometimes have to deal with companies in places were cheques are normal. Do you really need to send it in the same letter as the documents? That makes it harder, since many banks will have a partner bank in the US directly send it instead of handing it to you, but the latter also is possible with some banks. So it could be worth researching if you can use such a banks services, e.g. through someone trusted locally. Bit of a long shot, but ...
- clintonb 7y agoChecks will be around for a while, especially for B2B transactions in the US. Checks are the easiest way to move a large amount of money with minimal fees. Accounts payable departments already have their workflows setup to use checks. Also, banks don't make it easy to do transfers. ACH and wire transfers can take as little as 24 hours, but some banks don't expose this functionality on the web to make the transfers easy to initiate. The Federal Reserve conducts a triennial payments study to track the number and value of non-cash payments made by U.S. consumers and businesses. The 2017 annual supplement[0] reports that checks account for approximately 17.9 billion payments worth an estimated $29 trillion dollars, give or take a few million. Unsurprisingly, these numbers are trending down over time; however, according to a 2016 survey published by the Association for Financial Professionals [1], 51% of B2B payments are still made with checks. [0] https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/2017-December-The-Federal-Reserve-Payments-Study.htm#xtable1-growthratesbypaymenttype2015-30039a65 https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/2017-December-... [1] (fee login required) https://www.afponline.org/publications-data-tools/reports/guides/afp-payments/Detail/not-going-anywhere-why-checks-still-matter/ https://www.afponline.org/publications-data-tools/reports/gu...
- pintxo 7y agoHow can a paper check be the easiest and cheap option? Doing the same transfer of money via electronic means should be significantly cheaper to execute. And it should be cheaper for all participants. No paper to print, transfer, read, process, send to the bank (physically!). Honest question, why do Banks in the US do not replace this process with something cheaper?
- clintonb 7y agoPaper checks are cheap for recipients, depending on volume, because the processing fees are really low. An individual simply needs to scan the check with their phone. Processing large volumes of checks (e.g. thousands per month) as a merchant can be outsourced to a lockbox facility if needed. Payers can write and mail a single check in a couple minutes or use a bill pay service that will do it all for you with a few clicks. Banks are trying to replace checks. Zelle, which sits atop ACH, is an effort to simplify P2P transfers. Real time payments (RTP) are on the way, and will have some invoicing functionality (e.g. line items). The challenge is to get enough banks, covering enough of the population, to make the system feasible. Zelle or RTP don't succeed if I have to fall back to using a check or cash because my friend's small bank/credit union does not support the service. Also, this all requires an investment of time and money to upgrade backend systems. That investment is easier for some institutions than others.
- __MatrixMan__ 7y agoWhere I work we move a lot of money around via ACH (which might as well be via cheque). We treat the account number as a secret and encrypt it because here in the US the extent to which a bank needs to authenticate the source of an ACH transaction is largely left to the discretion of that bank. We're integrating with a company in Germany that is confused by our request for their public key (so we can encrypt the account numbers on capture for their eyes only). As it turns out, in Germany it's common to share your account number on your web site so that your customers can more easily pay you. They have an authentication step that is separate from the account number. This of course makes our system look pretty silly. We give account numbers to everybody we write a cheque to, but then treat them like private keys in other contexts. Maybe this is to be expected, as ACH and SEPA (which is the equivalent-ish system in the EU) are separate systems after all, but further research shows that there are other regional differences within the SEPA network re: whether the account number is a secret. If we had a competitor trying to do the same thing with a system where authentication and addressing were both separate and part of the protocol (e.g. any cryptocurrency), they'd be done by now and making money. We've been at this for more than a year and we're getting nowhere. The moral of this story is that cheques may not be obsolete yet, but the protocol that backs them will probably soon be. It has fundamental flaws that open the door for fraud and incur other overhead costs as well. Once there is a viable competitor it doesn't stand a chance.
- clintonb 7y agoACH will eventually be replaced by real time payments (RTP)[1] [1] https://www.theclearinghouse.org/payment-systems/rtp https://www.theclearinghouse.org/payment-systems/rtp
- Gunax 7y agoIn the finance world 'eventually' is a long time. This is an industry that I am sure will 'eventually' eliminate mainframes from its tech stack. My guess is that ACH systems will be maintained for a few decades as a legacy payment rail with countless promises of phasing it 'inn the next five years'.
- __MatrixMan__ 7y ago
- bbanyc 7y agoThe nice thing about a check is that you can give it to anyone. You don't need to know where they have a bank account or even if they have a bank account. (Check cashers may charge usurious fees but I'm glad they exist, as a backstop if nothing else.) On the other hand I can't send money via PayPal to someone who only has a Venmo account, or vice versa, and PayPal and Venmo are the same company! The inter-bank services like Zelle and Popmoney might be a little better, though I've never used them and don't know if they're really catching on. Can you send money via Zelle to an account at a non-Zelle bank? I know it's all ACH under the hood (even most checks get turned into ACH these days) but I don't really know how the permissions around that work. As for the unbanked, there's always cash.
- josteink 7y ago> The nice thing about a check is that you can give it to anyone. I live in Europe. I haven’t seen a single place accept checks for at least 3 decades. But hey, we have working banking systems. Maybe that helps explain it?
- rtkwe 7y agoIt can work with anyone which was OPs point, a lot of places just don't accept them because they're essentially extending credit to every person they accept checks from because they can't be instantly cleared.
- bbanyc 7y agoAIUI, the paper giro was a direct interbank transfer decades before ACH was even a thing. They were widely used in Europe but never introduced in America. That might be part of it. Also, America has a lot more banks per capita than the rest of the world. Until the 1990s banks weren't allowed to operate in more than one state, and although there's been a big wave of consolidation since then there are still a bunch of tiny banks in out-of-the-way small towns that are very set in their ways and don't want to spend money on newfangled technology. In the rest of the world, you get the major commercial banks on board, and maybe the dominant network of savings funds/cooperative banks/credit unions, and that covers just about everybody.
- satya71 7y agoFaxes have one crucial advantage over email. The police need a wiretap authorization to intercept them. Of course if your fax machine is connected to the internet (as most are today), they can get around that by hacking.