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The Fax Is Not Yet Obsolete

theatlantic.com

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Re: The Fax Is Not Yet Obsolete

#11

Post by dfox »

msla wrote: post #8
dfox wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is more secure as long as you regard PSTN as more secure than internet. Which is a view that has some merit.

> It is more secure as long as you regard PSTN as more secure than internet. Which is a view that has some merit. Not as long as you can send faxes from the Internet. https://faxzero.com/ FaxZero even allows you to put in the phone number the fax comes from. It's $1.99/fax to remove the FaxZero cover letter, and they accept PayPal. (Also, someone with the username iptel might know a bit about this.)

I meant it in the confidentiality sense. The fact that you can put anything on the cover sheet and header line as sender number and that it has exactly zero relevance as authenticator should be obvious to anyone who actually ever set up a fax machine.

Edit: and exactly how that differs from SMTP?

Re: The Fax Is Not Yet Obsolete

#15

Post by sokoloff »

iptel wrote: post #2

Fax is not more secure than email.

It is more secure in some senses. You can't get a PDF-borne virus from an old-school fax reception. My tax preparer only accepts mailed documents and faxed documents. It's sometimes a pain, but I have to admit that I'm a little bit happy that he's more paranoid than I am about my financial information.

Re: The Fax Is Not Yet Obsolete

#16

Post by msla »

dfox wrote: post #11
msla wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is more secure as long as you regard PSTN as more secure than internet. Which is a view that has some merit. Not as long as you can send faxes from the Internet. https://faxzero.com/ FaxZero even allows you to put in the phone number the fax comes from. It's $1.99/fax to remove the FaxZero cover letter, and they accept PayPal. (Also, someone with the username iptel might know a bit about this.)

I meant it in the confidentiality sense. The fact that you can put anything on the cover sheet and header line as sender number and that it has exactly zero relevance as authenticator should be obvious to anyone who actually ever set up a fax machine. Edit: and exactly how that differs from SMTP?

An office fax machine sitting out in the open is going to be less confidential than email on an SMTP server where only a sysadmin or the recipient can see it, yes.

Re: The Fax Is Not Yet Obsolete

#17

Post by petecox »

Only if your telco still supports it.

In Australia, perhaps not.

Our home phone service was moved from copper to VOIP as part of the NBN rollout. The technician who did the installation confirmed our multifunction laser printer would no longer fax, as the network didn't enable it.

Re: The Fax Is Not Yet Obsolete

#18

Post by frv103 »

These requirements for faxing are becoming almost silly. Not only is the PSTN infrastructure in some areas so bad (40 year old corroded copper lines and such) that there are potential problems every time it rains, but incumbent carriers are trying to do everything they can to rip down what is left of the copper infrastructure. I don’t blame them as this makes practical and financial sense (remove copper phone lines, replace with fiber, offer data and voice through the fiber).

The dream is that the PSTN will be done away with entirely, with all traffic going through the internet.

A big problem is with fax machine manufacturers simply claiming that their machines “are not voip compatible” which is ridiculous, but the extra effort involved with getting faxes to work smoothly over voip can be a nightmare, and not something any vendor wants to be involved in supporting.

The result of this is clients with $15k fax machines reporting a myriad of problems, which the fax machine vendor claims that the only solution is a PSTN phone line for the machine, which in many areas is no longer possible due to the incumbent carrier phasing out the infrastructure or making it incredibly difficult to obtain.

There are a lot of “Efax” services whose purpose is to get around this problem by making the “fax” step just a transparent formality to appease regulatory constraints. Users can send an email with a specially formatted subject, then the “efax” company will actually “fax” the document specified in the email to a phone number owned by the efax company, which is then emailed to the intended receiver.

Re: The Fax Is Not Yet Obsolete

#19

Post by cesarb »

sokoloff wrote: post #15
iptel wrote: post #2

Fax is not more secure than email.

It is more secure in some senses. You can't get a PDF-borne virus from an old-school fax reception. My tax preparer only accepts mailed documents and faxed documents. It's sometimes a pain, but I have to admit that I'm a little bit happy that he's more paranoid than I am about my financial information.

> You can't get a PDF-borne virus from an old-school fax reception.

How about a JPEG-borne virus instead? https://research.checkpoint.com/sending-fax-back-to-the-dark...

Re: The Fax Is Not Yet Obsolete

#20

Post by zamadatix »

sokoloff wrote: post #15
iptel wrote: post #2

Fax is not more secure than email.

It is more secure in some senses. You can't get a PDF-borne virus from an old-school fax reception. My tax preparer only accepts mailed documents and faxed documents. It's sometimes a pain, but I have to admit that I'm a little bit happy that he's more paranoid than I am about my financial information.

"not fax" doesn't have to mean "use one of the least secure digital formats in existence". If you're goal is to replicate a fax you should probably limit yourself to a basic bitmap encoding similar to group 3/4 encoded faxes and create a validated decoder (something many fax machines lack).
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