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The Fax Is Not Yet Obsolete

theatlantic.com

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Re: The Fax Is Not Yet Obsolete

#41

Post by wiml »

codingdave wrote: post #24

Back when I first started working in tech, in the early 90s, up to when I left enterprise IT in 2011, email-to-fax gateways were a thing. You just emailed a specific address format, something like: 999-999-9999@your.fax.gateway, and the email server would send an image of the email and attached documents to that number, via a connected fax machine. Likewise, incoming faxes to your number were received as images in an…

I think that was a common and pretty simple thing to do back when businesses still had modems and POTS lines — there were several popular FOSS and commercial solutions for setting up your own local fax gateway (print-to-outgoing-fax and incoming-fax-to-email being how I remember them working). By the late 90s most consumer modems could handle faxes.

I think the persistence of the fax is almost entirely a social problem, not a technical one. This article links to another, which contained this statement I found fascinating:

> Lately, doctors have taken to hand-delivering the most important records. > > “We used to fax the labor and delivery records, but they didn’t get > them or they were misplacing them,” says Hilda Moreno, who manages > the office’s medical records. “We kept getting calls like, did you > send this? And we’d say we did. So we started printing them out.”

Re: The Fax Is Not Yet Obsolete

#42

Post by patrickg_zill »

Aloha wrote: post #36
frv103 wrote: post #18

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,…

Anyone who does claim that fax works well over VoIP is full of shit - in my opinion. If you're an occasional faxer, and only send short faxes you'll likely have pretty good luck with VoIP - but in most cases, you'll have better luck with a dirty but functional PSTN line (V.34 modems are pretty tolerant of noise) I'll note though, in many cases, the desire by the carriers isn't to replace copper - its just to eliminat…

It can work, but there are many ways it can fail.

Even with the T38 protocol: this protocol is simply not very robust and does not have much error-correction built into it.

Re: The Fax Is Not Yet Obsolete

#43

Post by kgwxd »

I just dealt with American Public Life. I had to mail or fax (I went mail, fax is harder for me) all my forms and documents to get a claim started. Several days later, I was able to see that my claim required more information online by manually checking the site several times a day, no email notice about a claim update, I also got a notice in the mail 3 days later. I was able to ask them, via a contact web form, "is there a way to send docs electronically?" to which I got a "secured" reply to my email via "proofpoint" stating I must mail or fax all documents. Noticing there was an option to attach a file in proofpoint system, I ignored the requirements and sent the PDFs anyway. They accepted them but with a stern warning that I should mail or fax all documents if I want to ensure they will be associated with my claim. All this printing, signing, mailing, waiting, waiting, waiting, rinse, repeat, is a huge waste of resources and human life.

Re: The Fax Is Not Yet Obsolete

#44

Post by dc_gregory »

gpm wrote: post #38

During the hiring process for my previous internship a problem with my credit score was discovered (equifax had someone else under my SIN). This ended up delaying my start date. The only way to fix it in any "reasonable" (weeks) amount of time was to fax them a bunch of documents.

Possibly a naive question, but why would you need a credit score for being hired, especially as an intern? I can (somewhat) see the need for privileged positions (i.e. CFO or similar).

Re: The Fax Is Not Yet Obsolete

#45

Post by gpm »

dc_gregory wrote: post #44
gpm wrote: post #38

During the hiring process for my previous internship a problem with my credit score was discovered (equifax had someone else under my SIN). This ended up delaying my start date. The only way to fix it in any "reasonable" (weeks) amount of time was to fax them a bunch of documents.

Possibly a naive question, but why would you need a credit score for being hired, especially as an intern? I can (somewhat) see the need for privileged positions (i.e. CFO or similar).

It was a bank, that was just standard procedure for everyone. Technically I was a contractor not a intern (and it "just happened" to be for a summer between two semesters of university), but I doubt being an official intern would have changed anything.

Re: The Fax Is Not Yet Obsolete

#46

Post by Spooky23 »

dvtrn wrote: post #28
frv103 wrote: post #18

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,…

The dream is that the PSTN will be done away with entirely, with all traffic going through the internet How far off the mark am I in thinking that part of this dream you have, that was left unstated is that 'all traffic going through the internet' assumes we've fixed the last mile problem of broadband connectivity to rural areas? Because otherwise that dream effectively cuts a lot of people off from the rest of the w…

It’s already happening. My parents regularly deal with days long outages with PSTN service. Hell, in the middle of Albany, NY Verizon landlines were broken for 1-6 weeks due to some legacy hardware failure.

The companies want to replace the copper with wireless service because the regulatory environment is more profitable, even though they sell fully depreciated copper at $40/mo.

Re: The Fax Is Not Yet Obsolete

#47

Post by Spooky23 »

codingdave wrote: post #24

Back when I first started working in tech, in the early 90s, up to when I left enterprise IT in 2011, email-to-fax gateways were a thing. You just emailed a specific address format, something like: 999-999-9999@your.fax.gateway, and the email server would send an image of the email and attached documents to that number, via a connected fax machine. Likewise, incoming faxes to your number were received as images in an…

Inane bureaucracy and primadonna users make change difficult.

Doctors can’t be bothered doing anything differently, and they often don’t work for the place they are providing service at, and don’t have reliable access to email.

As doctors get swallowed up by medical networks/cartels, fax will shift to EMRs and patient portals that will leave you wishing for a fax machine.

Re: The Fax Is Not Yet Obsolete

#49

Post by cknight »

IT Manager of a large medical centre in Australia here. I've been spending quite a lot of time trying to minimise the number of faxes we send and receive but there's only so far I can go.

Email and fax-to-email services are generally frowned upon by the relevant medical accreditation boards, as they consider these to be insecure unless PGP is used. Email addresses have the ease of use and interoperability that fax numbers have, but PGP throws that right out the window.

Beyond the technical discussion, I remember reading that fax is considered "secure" from a regulatory/legal standpoint because fax lines are subject to wiretapping laws just as a regular phone line is. An email however, sent in plain text, can be legally read by anyone along the line who has the authority to do so. No surprises there, we know what GMail does.

What we've ended up with in Australia is a trio of internet-based secure messaging systems which have only just recently been in discussions about interoperability between themselves. I believe two of them are just end-client software which automates the PGP encryption/decryption of a given email address that you register, sending and receiving directly from your practice's clinical management system. Uptake has been kinda miserable. Until the systems are interoperable and have a large centralised directory of all health practitioners in the country, uptake will remain low. It's also only for medical practices and hospitals. It doesn't cover all the crap we get from legal and insurance firms.

Other legal issues are also stymieing progress. I have been told specifically by the CEO of a large specialist group that they won't be using any of the above systems, because having the software available means they might get electronic referrals directly from GPs.This would be instead of paper referral letters that simply go with the patient. This changes the legal onus of who is responsible for following up with patients who don't make that specialist appointment when referred. It matters when a patient decides not go do anything with a given referral, and then finds out they're terminal months later.

And so, we fax and get faxed. And it sucks.

Re: The Fax Is Not Yet Obsolete

#50

Post by Zak »

metildaa wrote: post #30
vthriller wrote: post #27

To me, a person that doesn't (and never did) live in the US, faxes there seem to be even more ubiquitous than this article paints. Imagine my amusement when I registered an Amazon account only to get it suspended with the request to verify it by... faxing bank statements and whatnot. Internationally on a +1 number. [0] And yes, support was not been able to offer any alternative to that. [0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/…

Fax has a carve out in PCI & HIPPA compliance, and there is a huge existing momentum behind continuing to use fax. Alternatives for actually secure document transmission boil down to difficult to use private messaging/"secure" email systems (that only work in their walled garden). Many in the general public get frustrated with these walled gardens, as it is another login & interface to remember, and their credit unio…

> Alternatives for actually secure document transmission boil down to difficult to use private messaging/"secure" email systems (that only work in their walled garden).

Oh bloody hell. Begin rant.

We've had PGP for 27 years. Twenty seven years. Since 1991. Why the hell haven't we, the tech community, gotten the rest of the world to use it? I think the only person I've had a PGP-encrypted email exchange with is my mother. It's not a walled garden, and it solves the problem described here perfectly.

We could have vote-by-email (using the key registered when registering to vote). We could have universal passwordless login. We could have virtually all communications secure from eavesdropping all the time. But no, nobody uses it outside of a few computer geeks, spies, and journalists.

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