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Ask HN: Why can't I send faxes from my phone?

218 points by throwlaplace 6y ago

on occasion i've had need to send faxes. most of the time i don't have access to a fax machine and so i end up paying some service that'll let me upload a pdf and charge me $10 for 50 pages. what is it about fax technology that i can't just program my phone to send a fax? what are fax machines doing that i can't emulate in software???

aurizon 6y ago
To send a fax you need access to a handhshaked landline. A direct wire between the stations. Faxes synchronize themselves, send data and test the bit, makeing sure it is properlt placed in the data queue, and send the next and so on =handshake. Suggest you look up old fax synchronization and I tossed my last muirhead rotary in 1982 - used it for weather maps.https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/fax/history-of-fax3.htm https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/fax/history-of... Newspapers have used it since the 1800's in one for or another. Wire-Photo https://antique-photos.com/en/helpful-info/476-wire-photos.html https://antique-photos.com/en/helpful-info/476-wire-photos.h... This is a relic of the old Muirhead rotary scanning fax machines abd the same standard persists. This is hard to do via radio. So radios send a pdf to a fax service. I have a fax service for $10 a month, I send it via desktop or mobile, and receive the same way as a pdf. With a mobile printer or office printer you get hard copy. https://www.myfax.com/features https://www.myfax.com/features
- vpzom 6y ago
  What exactly makes this "hard via radio"?
  - neximo64 6y ago
    The codec used in calls to landlines disallows the bandwidth required.
  - tjohns 6y ago
    Radio spectrum is precious, so virtually any type of radio telephony is significantly compressed, either in terms of raw audio bandwidth or by applying lossy digital compression — often both. This applies to both 2-way radio and cellular telephones. There are radio-fax standards. Marine weather reports are a good example that's still in use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiofax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiofax However, the fax machines we use on our telephones were not designed with this in mind. The protocol is neither tolerant of the reduced bandwidth nor lossy compression from cellular networks... not to mention jitter if the call passes over a packet-switched network.
wmf 6y ago
The lossy compression on phone calls might prevent fax from working. Also, I don't know if you can route call audio from anywhere other than the microphone.
- mceachen 6y ago
  HQ audio quality (over 4G) is markedly better than land lines, and the fax protocol has had error correction since digital formats were adopted in the 60s and 70s. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fax https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fax My Palm Pilot (with a CDPD backpack) and candybar 2G Nokia could both send FAXes. I suspect there's no demand.
  - mappu 6y ago
    As a reference point, if you have a cellphone plan with minutes but no data plan, it's not really feasible to dial a 56k-modem endpoint, as it makes use of frequencies that are chopped by the voice codec.
  - mattrp 6y ago
    Fax has an ip protocol called t.38 however it is inconsistently implemented. Most services still rely on g.711 - essentially uncompressed voice - for transmission of fax tones. However there is no guarantee the end to end call will be g.711 even if specified during call setup. There is an app called eFax - unfortunately the service is not free but I as a subscriber routinely fax over the phone when it’s the only way to communicate (like with a doc office).
    - tjohns 6y ago
      While G.711 is uncompressed (it’s the same codec used within the PTSN backhauls), it’s still not great for fax because the fax protocol doesn’t tolerate the jitter introduced by VoIP. (Reliable latency is the one big benefit to switched networks like the PTSN.) As I understand it (and I could be wrong), T.38 solves this by emulating an independent fax modem on each side of the analog connection, and only sending the image data over IP as opposed to sending audio.
bluedino 6y ago
Would even Android allow that kind of access to your phone from a program?
- oneplane 6y ago
  It's not about the access, it's about that you can transmit over the phone network. If you can't transmit it it doesn't matter what client device you have.
emmelaich 6y ago
There used to be a free service for faxes, at tpc.int. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phone_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phone_Company The fact that it costs you so much probably just means that the demand just isn't there.
- fanf2 6y ago
  TPC.int was kind of crazy. They had a stunt DNS server that made it more convenient to use, so you could mail an address like remote-printer@441234567890.tpc.int (referring to a nonexistent number in Bedford in the usual bigendian E.164 order) and it would be automatically converted to official little-endian RFC 1528 format remote-printer@0.9.8.7.6.5.4.3.2.1.4.4.tpc.int, after which the usual DNS delegation mechanisms could model the E.164 delegations to route the fax to the nearest server.
  - jamieweb 6y ago
    For those wondering, the domain tpc.int was registered before `.int` domain registrations required an established international treaty. It was grandfathered in when this requirement was added.
csecdaemon 6y ago
as aurizon stated you have to have an intermediary. There are several reputable email to fax services like fax.plus that will allow you to send up to 10 pages for free each page after that is .20 cents. apologies, it's frustrating when you can't other forms of e comms.
fortran77 6y ago
My IP phone provider, Voyant, offers a fax api: https://www.voyant.com/product/fax/ https://www.voyant.com/product/fax/ So if you can write an app that accesses this API, you can send faxes. It would be easiest to do this as a web service that you can access from your phone via a web page.
weiming 6y ago
I've had good luck with Hellofax (YC company) for sending a fax from time to time. Not literally using your phone, however.
indymike 6y ago
Faxburner is free.
- autonoshitbox 6y ago
  And of course this comment has no replies and is 1500 pixels below the dozens of others marketing their paid service.
  - dubcanada 6y ago
    Have you used faxburner? Most of the comments above are people talking about other services they have founded or used. Also I personally would prefer a paid service, faces typically are secure private documents I would want some level of guaranteed and privacy.
    - autonoshitbox 6y ago
      Faxburner has a premium account service.
gumby 6y ago
The fax requires a 56KHz channel which has not been used for mobile telephony since the 1980s (when AMPS and GSM were developed. Before then it was just a radio link through an operator). That’s why you can’t use a high speed modem either. Some gsm phones had the ability to transmit a fax but they actually used a different protocol to talk to a fax gateway. I never saw one of these in the wild. I haven’t been in that “biz” for a couple of decades but nowadays a different approach will be used anyway (pdf via IP to a fax gateway -> POTS)
- kevin_nisbet 6y ago
  CDMA also had a fax technology, under I think IS-95 data, but I didn't work on it myself. I've been out of the industry a couple years myself, but there were still a handful of customers using it that kept delaying the shutdown of the old tech, and there wasn't really an upgrade path. IIRC from the water cooler talk, one of the remaining customers was a lighthouse, that had to send a daily report, things like that.
  - Piskvorrr 6y ago
    There were cellphones capable of sending/receiving a fax, in 2000 IIRC. Apparently it was used by about ~0 people worldwide, so the capability was discontinued.
- throwlaplace 6y ago
  >The fax requires a 56KHz channel hmm so you're basically saying that fax machines only listen to data coming across on a 56KHz carrier wave? i guess that makes sense since the same device (a fax machine) can function both as a telephone and fax (and you'd need to distinguish in hardware which mode you were operating in upon "picking up the phone"). but what i don't understand is the telephony (i'm not a network engineer): when i make a phone call from either a fax or a phone isn't there, at this point in time, a hop through a digital connection? so doesn't some interchange between me and the person i'm calling ultimately decide what frequency carrier the receiver hears?
  - 6y ago
rabidonrails 6y ago
Founder of Phaxio here. Doing fax well is an annoying problem because the protocols are finicy and the carriers don't usually want to spend time troubleshooting issues. Give our API a shot and shoot me a note for some extra credits as a h/t to a fellow HNer. (See profile for email.)
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  Great product. No affiliation, just a satisfied user.
  - rabidonrails 6y ago
    Thanks! Our team works really hard so that every user feels like this :)
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  I used your service a few times when buying a house. One cURL call and it was done. Super easy and much appreciated.
  - colinbartlett 6y ago
    I am amused and impressed that you chose an API and cURL to send a fax than any of the many apps and services built on top of that API.
    - scop 6y ago
      I am likewise amused and completely agree with the idea. Every fax app I have used is either clunky, overpriced, or both. I hadn’t heard of Phaxio until now and am look forward to cURLing my next fax. However, there is some dark part of me that wants to make a clunky bash script for it nonetheless in order to keep me from enjoying sending a fax.
    - ceejayoz 6y ago
      At the time, all the ones I could find were like $1/page or more like a $30/month subscription. $0.05/page was well worth a cURL call, especially when the docs had great examples that just needed me to swap out the file name for mine.
talles 6y ago
Genuine question: why there are folks still using fax?
- briandear 6y ago
  A very good question. It’s like using email to send a telegram.
- TylerE 6y ago
  Because legally it's the same as a physical document. Which is not true for printouts, emails, etc. There is no technical reason for it to be so, but it is what it is. Fax is actually ancient tech, predating the phone way back into the telegraph days. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantelegraph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantelegraph
  - cosmotic 6y ago
    Considering a fax is a print, I'm not sure what the printout comment is regarding. The presence and non-exclusion of email/IP gateways show how backwards the law surrounding this is.
    - toast0 6y ago
      The law is not based on reality. If I sent you a fax, and your fax machine (of whatever type) printed it out, that copy is legally as good as the original. If I scan, then email, and you print it out, it is not legally as good as the original. It doesn't matter if it makes sense, it is what it is.
      - TylerE 6y ago
        I wouldn’t be quite so hard on the law here. The law is based on precedent. Fax was a new technology. For the first time a signed document could be sent over the wire in minutes, instead of having a courier go via train and take days. This is 100 years before computers were common. When computers became common fax was already well established so there was no good reason to add a second exception.
LeoPanthera 6y ago
This used to be possible over GSM, at least in the UK, and so I assume most places that use(d) GSM. I did it from various generations of the Nokia Communicator. The phone would initiate a special kind of phone call (from memory, the same AT string used to start an ISDN connection) and then send digital data over the link, not audio tones directly. This would emerge onto the analogue phone network as fax tones. I suppose it's possible that the cellular networks simply don't support this anymore, but my first guess would be that it's handsets that lack the software to do it, now.
- techsupporter 6y ago
  This was called circuit-switched data (CSD). The handset would emulate a serial modem to the attached computer and the mobile network would know how to emit the correct "noises" to the far end of the connection. It was brilliant for getting into systems I managed via a dial-in modem before Internet access was broadly available. In its twilight years, carriers that had a tariff to support it would charge something like $1.35/minute to discourage its use until the tariff could be updated.
- AnssiH 6y ago
  Yeah, I had fax on my mobile plan in Finland as well (and if it just requires CSD I'd guess it still works). Never had any use for it, though. There was also an optional assigned special phone number to have it work in reverse (receiving faxes via your connection).
CyberFonic 6y ago
The technology problem is at the fax machine end. Fax machines have embedded modems which decode and respond with a complex set of tones to transmit and receive data that makes up the facsimile image (yup, it's all images to the fax and that's why they still use them). Smartphones are all digital so you need a gateway to convert digital signals to suitable analog tones to satisfy the fax machine's modem. Conceptually you could implement the gateway functionality as an app because we can still transmit and receive tones, i.e. voice calls. Quantisation and delays might still introduce errors, but the fax protocol does have some basic error checking and re-transmit capabilities.
reaperducer 6y ago
Some older cell phones were capable of sending faxes. I don't know why today's phones don't have that option anymore. My wife had one of them in the mid-2000's. It was a SonyEricsson, but I don't remember the model number. All I remember was that it was mustard in color and impossibly small. A quick internet search shows that the SonyEricsson T39 had a GSM modem capable of faxing, but the pictures of it aren't what I remember from my wife's phone.
JshWright 6y ago
Given the percentage of "faxing" that is eFax to eFax, I wonder if we'll even notice when the last fax machine is turned off...
tyingq 6y ago
Not the most elegant solution, but the price is right. Anveo.com has plans for about $2/month for their VoIP service. And a web based outbound fax that has worked well for me. No extra charge for the outbound fax.
baxtr 6y ago
This question feels and reads from the past...
anon9001 6y ago
I wonder if you could hold up your smart phone to a landline handset like an acoustic coupler to send a fax?
snarfy 6y ago
I give up and tell them I can't send a fax where I'm from. When they ask where I'm from, I tell them I'm from the year 2020.
- nerdbaggy 6y ago
  Just wait till the year 3000 when we all live under water.
- perl4ever 6y ago
  The thing is, when I'm asked to send sensitive documents over unencrypted email or something, then I'd rather use the fax option. And I don't trust any internet gateway, I go to some local store with actual fax machines. I kinda sorta think of it as more secure than the internet, still?
  - grawprog 6y ago
    As far as I know, most modern fax machines keep a record of things received and transmitted on them. At least the ones at my old work did. We could bring up a week's worth of faxes or something and reprint them.
    - ballenf 6y ago
      So your threat vector is still like maybe a few dozen people who have access to the fax machine vs. the entire world? And all those fax machines have a "private" mode where the images don't get saved. On the machines I used. And most only save the cover sheet for sent faxes.
      - grawprog 6y ago
        I suppose, I was just more referring to the parent's usage of public fax machines at local stores as being safe for sensitive information. The attack vector might be smaller, but if he's choosing public locations to make sensitive faxes believing it's totally safe, that's not entirely true. The owner of the fax machine, employees in the store and possibly other customers may have access to this info.
stcredzero 6y ago
How about a service that can grab a document out of your Dropbox or other cloud account, then fax it for you? $10 for 50 pages could result in hella margins, if it's done right. (Everything done digitally, of course.) The account could even be managed from a phone app.
- jlgaddis 6y ago
  I don't recall which one but years ago I used one of the many email-to-FAX services. I'd just attach a PDF to an email message addressed to <phone number>@<myaccountname>.example.com and I'd get the acknowledgement page back via e-mail (as another PDF) a few minutes later.
afandian 6y ago
You could when your tablet was a Newton.
- iso947 6y ago
  Certainly saved the secret nuclear reactor under Washington dc from being blown up.
ajb 6y ago
Faxes rely on modems. modems rely on precise timing and aren't able to cope with any slippage. There's actually a protocol, T.38, which is used on modern VoIP based systems to allow faxes to be transmitted. At each end it actually decodes the fax data and sends it as ordinary data packets. Implementations play some tricks on the fax modem at each end, in order to prevent it dropping out of sync if the data packets are delayed. You could communicate with one of these from phone, but you'd need a T.38 gateway a the other end. More practical is to cut out the middleman and use twilio's fax gateway at $0.01/page (+ sip trunking cost, which should be similarly trivial): https://www.twilio.com/fax/pricing https://www.twilio.com/fax/pricing
fastily 6y ago
It doesn't have to be expensive or complicated. I've written a simple web app that wraps Twilio's fax capabilities. https://github.com/fastily/fax-machine https://github.com/fastily/fax-machine The whole thing is designed to run on a raspberry pi. The setup costs $1 a month (for the twilio number) and a couple cents per page.
dingo_bat 6y ago
You can send an email or whatsapp. Better than fax in every way.
SStephano 6y ago
hellofax.com works for this. I just used it a couple weeks ago took a minute to send a fax live to the receptionist.
jraby3 6y ago
Faxzero is a great mostly free solution.
DonHopkins 6y ago
When I first applied for the Apple Developer Program from the Netherlands in the early days of the iPhone when they first published the SDK, Apple insisted that I fax my registration in to them in the UK, so I had to print it out, and take it by a shop that had a fax machine, and pay several euros to send an international fax to Apple. More than 10 years later, there's still not an app for that.
- orf 6y ago
  There are several apps on the App Store that allow you to do just that?
  - DonHopkins 6y ago
    For a fee (which Apple gets 30% of). The point is that there was no reason for Apple to insist I send them a Fax to join their developer program, but they did anyway. I guess somebody at Apple thought it was more "business like" to introduce another hoop to jump through to make it harder to join the developer program, because just paying $50 was not enough.
    - tinus_hn 6y ago
      It used to be that faxes had some kind of legal power emails did not, perhaps that was the reason.
      - m000 6y ago
        I'd bet that any "privileges" faxes might had stem from the fact that they were automatically printed. This makes life a lot easier in a paper-backed office, so they made it a requirement to fax any "formal" communications.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
drdeadringer 6y ago
I am partially confused. Is "fax by email" dead or otherwise unattractive?
g123g 6y ago
Already a solved problem - https://www.ringcentral.com/fax/features/how-it-works.html https://www.ringcentral.com/fax/features/how-it-works.html
apotatopot 6y ago
I remember a long time ago when I worked for a voip phone company, two of our customers asked for fax-to-email and email-to-fax. I found out they were trying to fax each other documents because of some archaic requirement and thought it was the most hilarious thing ever. Totally just sending each other emails with extra steps for no reason.

tjohns 6y ago

Yes, once your call gets to the central office it's moved onto a digital connection -- essentially an ISDN line. Notably, the entire telephone network is standardized on G.711 as a codec, which is raw PCM audio at 64 kbps, from 300–3400 Hz sampled at 8,000 samples/sec. (There's some regional differences that determine whether the network uses G.711u or G.711a, but that's not really important here.) Also relevant: The digital telephone network is exclusively a switched (not packet-based) network, so you're guaranteed near-zero latency. This is particularly important for fax modems, which don't tolerate any jitter. The end result is a connection that might not sound the best (due to the narrow bandwidth), but has call quality characteristics that are standardized and guaranteed across the network. (At some point in the future the telephone network will upgrade codecs to G.722 and AMR-WB, which will give higher voice quality. This is the "HD Voice" feature you see on VoLTE phones. But it'll be a while before that's universal.)

closeparen 6y ago
>The digital telephone network is exclusively a switched (not packet-based) network, so you're guaranteed near-zero latency. Seems like this fact could be exploited more often in internet applications. High bandwidth channel for static assets, low latency channel for e.g. player movement data?
- bluesign 6y ago
  It is already used with QoS [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_service https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_service
  - Piskvorrr 6y ago
    Which is traffic prioritization on the same channel. Having an extra link for high-priority traffic would be...exotic...but workable, sure.
- numpad0 6y ago
  One of the professors when I was in a university was from ex-national telco R&D, and he was very vocal about those “real” bandwidth/latency/privacy assured telecom techs, “far superior” than “toys” like TCP/IP. And that was for the sake of education. He’d hold his lab meetings in Skype, not over a multipoint ISDN video calls on circuit switched wireless ATM. Only when the show is on, speaking to us undergrads through the mic, he declined to admit that IP is more adopted. Circuit switched data looks pretty on paper, that’s true, but at the end of the day no one pays for or bother with it.
  - closeparen 6y ago
    Low jitter is a luxury for the document web, but if approximately all human social interaction is going to be through digital video for the foreseeable future, we might start to care...

anticensor 6y ago

Legally admissible digital signatures do exist, and you can infinitely photocopy a digitally signed document, though. Not so with fax, where a photocopy would count as a different document.

drdeadringer 6y ago
I have done this and am thankful for it. I have gone so far as to have a digital copy of my analogue signature to drag-drop into an electronic document. And this has been accepted as legal. Courtroom legal. IRS legal. "Don't fuck with this" type of legal. I hope this continues into the future.
- anticensor 6y ago
  > digital copy of my analogue signature to drag-drop into an electronic document This will not work in Europe. You need proper public-key cryptosigning here. That was what I meant when I wrote "legally admissible digital signature". What you wrote is called "digitised signature" here, and would only be useful as a decorative sign.
  - drdeadringer 6y ago
    What type of middleman blesses a "legally admissible digital signature"? This sounds like the same, if not a similar, rabbit hole folks in the US conjure up against voting machines.
    - anticensor 6y ago
      You bless maths, not the middlemen in digital signatures. Electronic signature infrastructures are usually based on strong public key infrastructures, which I call them legally admissible digital signatures. The primary problem with electronic voting is no possible enforcement of no coercive force rule, not tallying security. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_signature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_signature to start.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - drdeadringer 6y ago
        > The primary problem with electronic voting is no possible enforcement of no coercive force rule, not tallying security. How is this not "blessed by maths" as not in the previous problem? Someone somewhere has to bless something, be it a valid vote or a valid digital signature. If there is a "Pope" for one, there should be a "Pope" for the other. Medical, government, religious ... someone somewhere must have a magic "I Bless This" magic wand and all henceforth below shall must be valid. Why is the branch of "digital signature" considered "good" in this respect but "voting" not? "Medical" not"? I viciously hate to say the term, yet ... this seems so "tri-cameral" ... and in terms of schizophrenia of illogic.
        anticensor 6y ago
        Coercive forces that cause vote buying cannot be stopped by mathematical axioms. Only way out is to adopt a permanent consensus-free self-stabilising social system, but that algorithm becomes the keystone of whole society then.

gumby 6y ago

In the US, clinical medicine and law firms use it because it has an unusual legal status: it’s considered secure and positively delivered if some device at the other end acknowledges it. In Japan many businesses are still wedded to a fax. It’s much easier to scribble a take out order on a piece of paper.

rsynnott 6y ago
Due to the GDPR (most regional regulators do not consider normal fax to be secure, and of course it creates otherwise unnecessary paper copies of data) medical systems in Europe are being slowly weaned off it. I gather a lot of doctors are putting up a fight.
colejohnson66 6y ago
How is it secure though? It’s unencrypted!
- detaro 6y ago
  It's considered secure by the law (probably because historically the phone network was considered mostly secure). Doesn't matter if it isn't really until the law changes or some court overthrows it.
- netsharc 6y ago
  Somehow institutions are still pretending the emperor is wearing the nicest looking clothes, they're pretending fax is secure from "photoshopping"/data tampering.
- uranium 6y ago
  It's point-to-point. Unless someone is tapping your phone line, or you dial the wrong number, where's the insecurity? Contrast that with email, which goes through any number of emails, sits in queues, gets backed up, etc. Of course some of the time you're actually faxing a fax-to-email gateway, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    > where's the insecurity? All of the other security issues aside, how about simply walking over to the unprotected fax machine and leaving with a stack of "private" records? Not sure you want to die on the hill of defending fax security.
    - ballenf 6y ago
      Again the threat vector is the people within physical vicinity. People who would then be subject to trespassing or theft charges. And likely caught on camera. Versus the entire world on the internet. Yeah, I'll take fax security over normal email security, thanks.
      - Spivak 6y ago
        But the current standard for normal email security is TLS at every leg from inbox to inbox? I mean I get the dream of not having the consider the network as an adversarial entity but surely they're about the same?
drdeadringer 6y ago
> In Japan many businesses are still wedded to a fax. It’s much easier to scribble a take out order on a piece of paper. I recall reading how noodle shops in Japan take orders [at least To Go and//or Pick Up] via fax.

vegardx 6y ago

Up until very recently my grandpa would use fax to send complaints to just about anything. It was about as stereotypical grumpy old man as you can imagine. He's a good person, just old-school formal when he writes. Comes of as a bit ... harsh. I thought it was going to end when they dismantled the analog network, and his fax machine with it, but somehow it just got worse. You see, on fax machines you rarely got spam, but on email that's another story. It's hilarious to see the email exchanges he has with some spammers. They've met their worst enemy. He is more than capable to identify spam, but he doesn't fully understand that, while sent to him, it's nothing personal. He takes it very personal. Very personal. Like, call me late in the evening or during work hours (unheard of for someone in his school) to discuss this outrageous claim that someone made about him. He, like a lot of senior citizen, has a lot of free time. So he naturally replies back. And we're talking full page replies, going into great detail about how they are bad people for doing this to someone like him.

iandanforth 6y ago
I can't wait to be old and have this much free time. I'm going to annoy the heck out of some youngsters.
- drdeadringer 6y ago
  "Waste what life I have left? I'll not only waste yours but also the potential of what you've got ahead of you."
waste_monk 6y ago
>You see, on fax machines you rarely got spam When I entered the workforce I was surprised to see how much fax spam there was, usually a sheet or two every week. It's tapered off to ~ a couple of sheets per fortnight in recent times though. It is kind of amusing to see fax phishing with personalised cover notes attached to some spam about light furnishings etc. I wish I could do the old "faxing sheets of black paper taped into a loop" trick but I'm sure the scammers are using e-fax now.
- Taniwha 6y ago
  I used to have a fax number one off of a pharmacy .... I got someone's prescription every week or so ....
drfuchs 6y ago
Au contraire; fax spam was a reasonably big problem: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/2-2-trillion-lawsuits-go-after-junk-fax-king-2779390.php https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/2-2-trillion-lawsuits...

bawolff 6y ago

What type of threat model is this? Even standard unencrypted email is largely opportunisticly encrypted these days. Security properties of that is "debatable", but a fax isn't encrypted at all...

kalleboo 6y ago
> Even standard unencrypted email is largely opportunisticly encrypted these days I hadn't looked at Google's email encryption report probably since it came out, was very happily surprised to see it's over 90% now[0]. Still doesn't say anything about the issues with accepting self-signed certificates etc though. [0] https://transparencyreport.google.com/safer-email/overview https://transparencyreport.google.com/safer-email/overview
perl4ever 6y ago
I think it's about the difference between being able to expect a certain level of service or not; regardless of what the actual average is. And about the worst-case scenario and the perception for me of a point-to-point architecture. If I email something, then if it's "largely" encrypted, that is no consolation if that doesn't hold. I'd feel it was on me for doing it. On the other hand, if I fax something, and someone who shouldn't sees it, it's likely an insider at the destination location, and in any case, it's not my fault as long as faxing is regarded as reasonably secure.
- bawolff 6y ago
  I still dont think that makes sense. Every attack you can do against email you can do against fax. MITM the connection - even ignoring opportunistic encryption, almost certainly easier to physically witetap some random office than it is to wiretap the internet connection between google's data center and microsoft's data center (picked as two random big email providers) Insider at destination: your email account has a password and audit logs. Fax machines sit in the middle of a room. Usually anyone can just walk over Insider at source: most people have their own computer/email account set up. Going to some sketchy shop with a public fax machine that any malicious party could have secretly modified is much worse.