7 ms·

Genuine question: why there are folks still using fax?

by talles 6y ago

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.
      - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
        I realize the fax predates POTS. But to say "When computers became common fax was already well established" is not really accurate. If you mean the 1970s (personal/home computer revolution), then no one had a fax machine at home back then. They just were not around. Few offices had them, too -- teletypes were more common than fax machines, even though teletypes didnt do graphics like fax. I've read that police departments had fax machines for mug shots or maybe fingerprints, but i have no first-hand knowledge. Anyway, I'm just trying to relate history to you from someone who was there. Wikipedia articles or retrospectives don't always get the nature of things right, even if they do get the hard facts like dates right. Another example: you could say television was invented in the first decade of the 1900s. But they weren't household items until the 1950s, maybe late 1940s if you want to count NYC specifically.
        TylerE 6y ago
        Faxes date from just after the civil war area. They were in common usage for transmitting contracts by the 1880s. Photographic material by the 1920s This equipment would have typically been installed at a telegraph office, not at the end user site, but the basic technology is far older than most people assume.
        TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
        I know how old the technology is. You completely missed my point. They were NOT in coomon use even in the 1970s, even if am article on the internet claims it. I was there. Were you?
      - drdeadringer 6y ago
        All hail to fax, but only now in the time of COVID-19 has the Supreme Court Of The United States accepted that telephones exist -- let alone as a means of communication, but also as a matter of legal deliberation. I wonder how long it shall take to have electronic communication to be accepted, legally, as normal and standard across the board.
    - cosmotic 6y ago
      The point I was trying to make is that you sending the fax could be pdf > email > fax service > pots > fax service > email > pdf. The end result is a lower quality replication compared to email > email. There's no way the law says either the fact that it looks worse than the email or that someone can point to a contract that says it took place over pots makes the transmission more valuable.
    - 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.
cgrealy 6y ago
Unfortunately, sometimes you have no choice. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/04/nyregion/coronavirus-ny-unemployment-benefits.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/04/nyregion/coronavirus-ny-u... I think everyone would love fax to just go away and die, but there are still places where it's used (I believe pharmacies are an example?)
SubiculumCode 6y ago
Legacy procedures, some legally mandated I think. I'm thinking about the CA DMV, who had ancient and byzantine computer systems that were quite difficult to replace, both from a technical and from a bureaucratic stand point.
GlennS 6y ago
I think this may be something that varies to region. I lived in the UK for 32 years and never sent a fax or even saw a fax machine outside of a museum. Couple of years ago I moved to Australia. Got a credit card for travel with Bankwest. In order to set up a direct debit to pay it off I had to fax them. In the end I got them to fax themselves my details. I'm not sure whether Bankwest is just incompetent, or if they deliberately make this difficult so that more people will miss their payments.
- discordance 6y ago
  Weird. My experience with Australian banks has been the opposite. Sign up and ID verification online/in-app, and within a few minutes I have a new bank account I can transfer money in and out of.
  - GlennS 6y ago
    Guess it varies per bank. My main accounts are with NAB, and they seem pretty up to date. Maybe Bankwest in particular are stuck in the past.
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
gambiting 6y ago
It seems to be the same as cheques and magstrip-only cards - uniquely American thing that rest of the world hasn't seen in years. I do remember not that long ago opening an apple developer account required filling out a form with your card details and faxing it to some US-based number. It was madness back then already.
- rsynnott 6y ago
  I remember in an old job we didn’t have a fax machine... Until we started opening a US office, because apparently it’s pretty much mandatory there.
- DonHopkins 6y ago
  Aha, another Apple developer who remembers that! So I wasn't confabulating.
kristopolous 6y ago
I'm waiting for faxing to come back like cassettes: Artists draw pictures and robodial a secret fan list (through a POTS modem and some 90s software) of fax machines where insiders can get exclusive limited physical copies of the art and the copies with the earliest timestamps become the most valued. People will just be sitting around their house and they hear the fax machine starting to unexpectedly print something on a Saturday afternoon. Then, like some tactile version of a phone alert, they slowly watch the paper slide out of the machine with the latest artwork. The lost joy of anticipation in the 30 or so seconds of waiting as you see the thing slowly form in front of you, recaptured once again. Alternatively they hear from their friend that a new artwork is out and they anticipate going home and checking the tray of their fax machine to see their own copy. This should be a thing, it sounds fun
- battery_cowboy 6y ago
  You do it and I'll be the first subscriber, as long as i can afford it :)
  - kristopolous 6y ago
    I'm not really an artist but ok sure. I can certainly fax some doodles. I'll think about how to pitch and present it. I'll register artsyfax.com this week and throw something together. I even have a pnp modem and a pots line. There's probably Linux fax software nobody has used in 15 years that can import vcards and be scripted with lua or something.
  - kristopolous 6y ago
    do you have a way of receiving a fax? I don't have a way of testing this thing.
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.
  - 6y ago
dragonwriter 6y ago
> Genuine question: why there are folks still using fax? In healthcare, because despite the technical reality that it is electronic, it's not considered “electronic media” under HIPAA, so security and transaction & code sets standardization rules that apply to electronic transactions do not apply to transactions conducted by fax. It's a giant compliance hole in HIPAA that entities in the healthcare space ruthlessly exploit. (Various incentives to move to mechanism that are considered electronic under HIPAA have chipped away at it, but the compliance hole still keeps people using it.)
tikwidd 6y ago
A lot of deaf people still use fax machines to do things like place orders (often older deaf folks that can't or won't use email... or when trying to deal with orgs that don't check their email). It's a very accessible technology (except for the blind I suppose). This was the case when I was working with some deaf people around 8 years ago, maybe things have changed since then as fax machines have become less common. But fax is still very popular in Japan IIRC. For a while, it was handy to be able to fax forms to Studylink and WINZ (New Zealand social security/student loans orgs), but they have recently set up a website where you just scan or photograph documents and upload them.
rubyfan 6y ago
many legacy businesses have institutional technical debt and higher priorities that makes it easier to not deal with faxes.

Genuine question: why there are folks still using fax?

by 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.
    - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
      I realize the fax predates POTS. But to say "When computers became common fax was already well established" is not really accurate. If you mean the 1970s (personal/home computer revolution), then no one had a fax machine at home back then. They just were not around. Few offices had them, too -- teletypes were more common than fax machines, even though teletypes didnt do graphics like fax. I've read that police departments had fax machines for mug shots or maybe fingerprints, but i have no first-hand knowledge. Anyway, I'm just trying to relate history to you from someone who was there. Wikipedia articles or retrospectives don't always get the nature of things right, even if they do get the hard facts like dates right. Another example: you could say television was invented in the first decade of the 1900s. But they weren't household items until the 1950s, maybe late 1940s if you want to count NYC specifically.
      - TylerE 6y ago
        Faxes date from just after the civil war area. They were in common usage for transmitting contracts by the 1880s. Photographic material by the 1920s This equipment would have typically been installed at a telegraph office, not at the end user site, but the basic technology is far older than most people assume.
        TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
        I know how old the technology is. You completely missed my point. They were NOT in coomon use even in the 1970s, even if am article on the internet claims it. I was there. Were you?
    - drdeadringer 6y ago
      All hail to fax, but only now in the time of COVID-19 has the Supreme Court Of The United States accepted that telephones exist -- let alone as a means of communication, but also as a matter of legal deliberation. I wonder how long it shall take to have electronic communication to be accepted, legally, as normal and standard across the board.
  - cosmotic 6y ago
    The point I was trying to make is that you sending the fax could be pdf > email > fax service > pots > fax service > email > pdf. The end result is a lower quality replication compared to email > email. There's no way the law says either the fact that it looks worse than the email or that someone can point to a contract that says it took place over pots makes the transmission more valuable.
  - 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.

cgrealy 6y ago

Unfortunately, sometimes you have no choice. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/04/nyregion/coronavirus-ny-unemployment-benefits.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/04/nyregion/coronavirus-ny-u... I think everyone would love fax to just go away and die, but there are still places where it's used (I believe pharmacies are an example?)

SubiculumCode 6y ago

Legacy procedures, some legally mandated I think. I'm thinking about the CA DMV, who had ancient and byzantine computer systems that were quite difficult to replace, both from a technical and from a bureaucratic stand point.

GlennS 6y ago

I think this may be something that varies to region. I lived in the UK for 32 years and never sent a fax or even saw a fax machine outside of a museum. Couple of years ago I moved to Australia. Got a credit card for travel with Bankwest. In order to set up a direct debit to pay it off I had to fax them. In the end I got them to fax themselves my details. I'm not sure whether Bankwest is just incompetent, or if they deliberately make this difficult so that more people will miss their payments.

discordance 6y ago
Weird. My experience with Australian banks has been the opposite. Sign up and ID verification online/in-app, and within a few minutes I have a new bank account I can transfer money in and out of.
- GlennS 6y ago
  Guess it varies per bank. My main accounts are with NAB, and they seem pretty up to date. Maybe Bankwest in particular are stuck in the past.

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

gambiting 6y ago

It seems to be the same as cheques and magstrip-only cards - uniquely American thing that rest of the world hasn't seen in years. I do remember not that long ago opening an apple developer account required filling out a form with your card details and faxing it to some US-based number. It was madness back then already.

rsynnott 6y ago
I remember in an old job we didn’t have a fax machine... Until we started opening a US office, because apparently it’s pretty much mandatory there.
DonHopkins 6y ago
Aha, another Apple developer who remembers that! So I wasn't confabulating.

kristopolous 6y ago

I'm waiting for faxing to come back like cassettes: Artists draw pictures and robodial a secret fan list (through a POTS modem and some 90s software) of fax machines where insiders can get exclusive limited physical copies of the art and the copies with the earliest timestamps become the most valued. People will just be sitting around their house and they hear the fax machine starting to unexpectedly print something on a Saturday afternoon. Then, like some tactile version of a phone alert, they slowly watch the paper slide out of the machine with the latest artwork. The lost joy of anticipation in the 30 or so seconds of waiting as you see the thing slowly form in front of you, recaptured once again. Alternatively they hear from their friend that a new artwork is out and they anticipate going home and checking the tray of their fax machine to see their own copy. This should be a thing, it sounds fun

battery_cowboy 6y ago
You do it and I'll be the first subscriber, as long as i can afford it :)
- kristopolous 6y ago
  I'm not really an artist but ok sure. I can certainly fax some doodles. I'll think about how to pitch and present it. I'll register artsyfax.com this week and throw something together. I even have a pnp modem and a pots line. There's probably Linux fax software nobody has used in 15 years that can import vcards and be scripted with lua or something.
- kristopolous 6y ago
  do you have a way of receiving a fax? I don't have a way of testing this thing.

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.
- 6y ago

dragonwriter 6y ago

> Genuine question: why there are folks still using fax? In healthcare, because despite the technical reality that it is electronic, it's not considered “electronic media” under HIPAA, so security and transaction & code sets standardization rules that apply to electronic transactions do not apply to transactions conducted by fax. It's a giant compliance hole in HIPAA that entities in the healthcare space ruthlessly exploit. (Various incentives to move to mechanism that are considered electronic under HIPAA have chipped away at it, but the compliance hole still keeps people using it.)

tikwidd 6y ago

A lot of deaf people still use fax machines to do things like place orders (often older deaf folks that can't or won't use email... or when trying to deal with orgs that don't check their email). It's a very accessible technology (except for the blind I suppose). This was the case when I was working with some deaf people around 8 years ago, maybe things have changed since then as fax machines have become less common. But fax is still very popular in Japan IIRC. For a while, it was handy to be able to fax forms to Studylink and WINZ (New Zealand social security/student loans orgs), but they have recently set up a website where you just scan or photograph documents and upload them.

rubyfan 6y ago

many legacy businesses have institutional technical debt and higher priorities that makes it easier to not deal with faxes.