41–50 of 174 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They are viewed as "safe" for credit card information, as opposed to emails. The odds of someone obtaining credit card information from a plaintext email is a lot higher than someone decoding a VOIP SIP/T38 stream over the public internet, and reading the secrets out of that. And if its through a traditional carrier (not an Internet provider), its digital, but almost always over their internal network. It is more s…
Yes. I'm not skeptical that fax is safer than email. I'm skeptical that it's safe. I see all sorts of things I shouldn't see when searching the pile of papers on the fax machine at a large company for my fax.
Nothing is 100% safe. It is just a matter of being safer than the effort the attacker is willing to spend gaining hold of the data (or that it will take so long that the data is no longer worth having).
The shocking thing about this is that there must still be enough Faxes being sent to actually justify this new product. Where are they still used at 'scale'?
Also, fax is still used for a lot of financial and legal stuff generally, especially in countries with less developed Internet infrastructure.
The shocking thing about this is that there must still be enough Faxes being sent to actually justify this new product. Where are they still used at 'scale'?
Lawyers like faxes because it leaves a legally acknowledged written record on both sides, and they're instantaneous. So they send a lot of them. For some reason the fax is legally sounder than email.
I suspect that faxes have been around for so long, and tested in court so many times, that by this time they are as good as holding the original if a lawsuit were to happen.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of the Uber-for-food-delivery startups use them for ordering at restaurants because there is no text-based API to restaurants and the UX of receiving an automated phone call is poor. They're pervasive in finance, insurance, employee benefits, etc. They're also a good one-to-many API multiplexer. So many businesses can take a fax and have a human operate on it that many software companies can use them to add act…
> food-delivery So it's easier/cheaper for a restaurant to have a dedicated phone line for faxing (plus fax and supplies) than connect a printer to a PC? Is this because someone needs to actually print incoming emails or orders? And if yes, is there an opportunity for some kind of software solution that would always print what it receives, with no human intervention?
It requires a lot less employee training to maintain and operate a fax machine. Can you build a better mousetrap?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. I'm not skeptical that fax is safer than email. I'm skeptical that it's safe. I see all sorts of things I shouldn't see when searching the pile of papers on the fax machine at a large company for my fax.
> Yes. I'm not skeptical that fax is safer than email. I'm skeptical that it's safe. Nothing is 100% safe. It is just a matter of being safer than the effort the attacker is willing to spend gaining hold of the data (or that it will take so long that the data is no longer worth having).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of the Uber-for-food-delivery startups use them for ordering at restaurants because there is no text-based API to restaurants and the UX of receiving an automated phone call is poor. They're pervasive in finance, insurance, employee benefits, etc. They're also a good one-to-many API multiplexer. So many businesses can take a fax and have a human operate on it that many software companies can use them to add act…
My understanding is that holding a fax copy of a contract with a signature is as good in court as holding the contract itself. But holding a PDF of same is not.
The shocking thing about this is that there must still be enough Faxes being sent to actually justify this new product. Where are they still used at 'scale'?
A lot of the Uber-for-food-delivery startups use them for ordering at restaurants because there is no text-based API to restaurants and the UX of receiving an automated phone call is poor. They're pervasive in finance, insurance, employee benefits, etc. They're also a good one-to-many API multiplexer. So many businesses can take a fax and have a human operate on it that many software companies can use them to add act…
Some restaurants moved towards having tablets and receiving order via an app, but I'd guess that fax is still an option since it's difficult to integrate with a bunch of different POS systems and there are also a fair amount of restaurants that use hand written tickets to communicate orders to a kitchen.
I wouldn't be surprised if this Fax API is the same technology that those companies use to fax orders to restaurants.
Phaxio has said they can handle any number of simultaneous inbound faxes, but we haven't had a chance to try them yet. It would be nice to know if Twilio is an option.
The shocking thing about this is that there must still be enough Faxes being sent to actually justify this new product. Where are they still used at 'scale'?