7 ms·
I wonder how many people reading this comment are thinking, "what's a fax machine?" :o) I like the analogy, but I wonder how effective it is on anyone under th
by mstade 6y ago
I wonder how many people reading this comment are thinking, "what's a fax machine?" :o)
I like the analogy, but I wonder how effective it is on anyone under the age of what, 35?
- zxexz 6y agoYou might be surprised how many of us under-35s still have to use Fax machines on a regular basis ;)
- castwide 6y agoEspecially anyone who works in law, government, banking, or healthcare.
- PeterStuer 6y agoor Microsoft
- yakubin 6y agoCounts as government.
- TheRealDunkirk 6y agoI love that some of the most-sensitive information users are the ones hanging on to a completely-unsecured transmission method. Sure, tell me again about all those HIPAA and SOX requirements when we still have fax machines.
- pwg 6y agoYou have to keep in mind the time when these requirements to "use fax" for security came about. There was a single telephone company (or it was shortly after there were plural "baby-bells") and the telephone network was a completely private, isolated, network that only the phone company (or baby-bells) even had access to. It was also a network that was heavily regulated such that the possibility of a random attacker from half a world away being able to tap into a phone call as it happened simply did not exist. In that environment, placing a phone call was considered "secure" (or at least as secure as network isolation and regulation could cause it to become [I'm ignoring NSA style 'state secret' taps, those have likely always been available to NSA style agencies]). So it would have been seen, at that time, as reasonable to use fax machines for document exchange, because the "phone network" was considered to be secure against having a man-in-the-middle tapping off one's communications. Wind the clock forward thirty years, and have the once isolated and highly regulated telephone network more or less become just another packet protocol on the general Internet, and the choice of using "fax" for secure document exchange sounds ludicrous. The issue is that the regulations those environments operate under have not been updated in the ensuing thirty years to account for the fact that "phone network" is no longer the once isolated, mostly secure, network it once was. And if the regulations don't get updated, no lowly clerk at the front lines is going to lose their job by _not_ using the comm. system called for by the regulations.
- gumby 6y agoEspecially in Japan.
- megablast 6y ago> You might be surprised This is such a meaningless statement.
- jsilence 6y agoThis below 35 yr old discovered a fax machine. You won't believe what happened next! Better?
- pants-no-pants 6y agoMy bank still accepts fax documents. All I would have to do is find a fax machine ...
- wtetzner 6y agoThere are online services that let you upload a PDF, and they'll fax it for you.
- mixmastamyk 6y agoEven in the 90s a lot of folks didn't send a "physical" fax, you could print it thru your modem. Or something similar, memory fuzzy, only did it once I think.
- dylan604 6y agoOr going to a shop like Kinkos or a local print/copy shop. They offered sending/receiving faxes or FaaS before _aaS was a term of "endearment".
- gaius_baltar 6y ago> My bank still accepts fax documents. All I would have to do is find a fax machine ... On linux you can use [efax](https://linux.die.net/man/1/efax https://linux.die.net/man/1/efax) and a modem and... ooops, good luck finding a modem. I did this for real ~10 years ago when a stupid company didn't accept a scanned PDF by email and required a fax of the actual document "because security". The difference is that I had a modem in an old laptop at that time, so I just send them the same scanned PDF. Now I'm wondering if there is a provision for sending faxes somewhere in the GSM/3G/4G rabbit hole of standards.
- unilynx 6y agoI’m not sure if it required anything from the network, but my Siemens C35 could send faxes
- 6y ago
- dyingkneepad 6y agoI had to use a Fax machine in 2018. In the United States. As the only acceptable way to submit certain documents. I should also point to non-Unitedstatians that checks (that physical paper worth as much money as you write and sign on it) are still in use in the USA.
- 14 6y agoChecks still in use in Canada as well. I had a person today tell me they had 3 checks stolen and cashed and my response was “people still use checks?”.
- ghostpepper 6y agoIn Canada it's spelled cheque, I have no idea why. </pedantry>
- ryandrake 6y agoThe demise of checks is greatly exaggerated. I've written about 70 or so checks in the last 5 years. Mostly: Property taxes, home improvement contractors, dues for various clubs and social groups, kids activities, and some mail-in retailers who simply don't take credit card. That's leaving out the "automatic bill pay" function of my bank's web site, which, for most payees, at the end of the day results in physical paper checks being printed and sent in envelopes.
- wastholm 6y ago> The demise of checks is greatly exaggerated. That varies a lot by jurisdiction. I'm 50 and I haven't written a single check in my entire life. (Sweden.)
- wdb 6y agoYeah, only cashed in checks from US and U.K. Each time I need to find out how to do it! Think three checks in 40years ain’t bad
- 6y ago
- jdhzzz 6y agoI'm old enough to remember (like New Coke) ZapMail by FedEx where you would send documents by FedEx and FedEx would Fax it on their equipment to a location near the recipient for physical delivery. Obligatory Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapmail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapmail. Hey, most businesses didn't have one of those newfangled FAX machines.
- culopatin 6y agoI’m in the age group you mention and although I’ve only used a fax twice, I can totally understand the analogy.
- neltnerb 6y agoEasy enough to just use "text messages" since it was not very long ago that you had to pay to receive them but had no ability to block them without disabling them entirely. At least for those of us that were late adopters of text messages.
- bialpio 6y agoThis also depends on where you're from - I had a cell phone for the past ~20years and only learned that you pay for receiving texts in the US when I first visited, ~9 years ago.
- dialamac 6y agoPharmacy, nursing, and medical students will find out soon enough.
- at-fates-hands 6y agoA small business owner I used to work for got sued for fax blasting people when the marketing company he hired was sending out some 2K faxes per day to unsuspecting business owners. I still laugh about how he got several cease and desist letters and still continued sending the same businesses stuff. Ahhhhhhh yeah, the good old days.
- WinterHoursTF 6y agoI'm 21 and I know what a fax is.