Faxing is growing in popularity • Hacker News Board

Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#11

Post by darkpuma » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 5:14 PM UTC

jak92 wrote: post #6

grumpy-cowboy wrote: post #5

Fax machine -> fax machine : secure And fax machines are easy to use. Securing document exchange by email is a PITA for 99.9% users. Explain to your mother how to use PGP/GPG to encrypt the email she have to send to financial institutions, government, ... And imagine the government employee receiving the encrypted email. He will probably just delete it. :)

Well, completely unencrypted, but depends on what you consider the threat to be.

So it turns out the US Postal Service is very easy to trick. You merely fill out a simple form with no real verification and get them to forward somebody else's mail to your address, which enables all manner of profitable fraud.

HOWEVER doing that is a hardcore crime. You can be sent to federal prison for years for doing that. So the USPS is not secure in any sort of mathematical sense, but in practice most people trust it most of the time, because security isn't just about technical implementation details like encryption.

Similarly wiretapping telephone lines may be straight forward, but you'd have to be exceptionally daring or stupid to actually do it.

Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#12

Post by gruez » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 5:14 PM UTC

grumpy-cowboy wrote: post #5

Fax machine -> fax machine : secure And fax machines are easy to use. Securing document exchange by email is a PITA for 99.9% users. Explain to your mother how to use PGP/GPG to encrypt the email she have to send to financial institutions, government, ... And imagine the government employee receiving the encrypted email. He will probably just delete it. :)

>Fax machine -> fax machine : secure

Great in theory, until you realize that most people don't have fax machines, so they use some online fax service that's probably less secure than sending email.

Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#13

Post by gruez » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 5:16 PM UTC

pintxo wrote: post #8

jak92 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, completely unencrypted, but depends on what you consider the threat to be.

I feel with you. I was shocked to learn that fax is still the default for Doctor 2 Doctor communication here in Germany. Turns out the reason is rather simple: the law explicitly requires phone lines to be confidential in terms of eavesdropping. (You need a warrant, else it‘s illegal). While all other means of transport are not covered by this. So everyone who wants to legally cover his ass, would rather use the lega…

>Turns out the reason is rather simple: the law explicitly requires phone lines to be confidential in terms of eavesdropping. (You need a warrant, else it‘s illegal). While all other means of transport are not covered by this.

What about VOIP? Cell phones? WIFI calling?

Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#14

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 5:17 PM UTC

grumpy-cowboy wrote: post #5

Fax machine -> fax machine : secure And fax machines are easy to use. Securing document exchange by email is a PITA for 99.9% users. Explain to your mother how to use PGP/GPG to encrypt the email she have to send to financial institutions, government, ... And imagine the government employee receiving the encrypted email. He will probably just delete it. :)

[deleted]

Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#15

Post by jedimastert » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 5:18 PM UTC

giarc wrote: post #10

I work in healthcare and in my office we likely receive 100-200 pages of faxes everyday. Every single microbiology report in my large urban hospital prints out (including preliminary results. This includes a cover page for every single fax. It's a huge waste of paper. Luckily we are moving to Epic and all results will come through that system instead.

I'm mildly concerned with how many people that aren't directly involved with my medical care could read those reports. It's not like they have to break open an envelope or a filing cabinet or something either. Just another piece of paper to be casually picked up and scanned for filing.

Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#16

Post by dragonwriter » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 5:19 PM UTC

grumpy-cowboy wrote: post #5

Fax machine -> fax machine : secure And fax machines are easy to use. Securing document exchange by email is a PITA for 99.9% users. Explain to your mother how to use PGP/GPG to encrypt the email she have to send to financial institutions, government, ... And imagine the government employee receiving the encrypted email. He will probably just delete it. :)

> Fax machine -> fax machine : secure

Fax-to-fax is completely vulnerable to all kinds of attacks (even before considering situations where what seems to be fax-to-fax involves one end or the other actually being a gateway to some insecure system that pretends to be a fax machine), because:

(1) phone number hijacking is a thing,

(2) phone lines can be eavesdropped on,

(3) fax lacks authentication between endpoints,

(4) fax lacks encryption.

OTOH, in HIPAA environments it's often preferred because fax is not considered “electronic media”, so it is not covered by either the transaction standards or security standards that apply to transactions conducted via electronic media.

Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#17

Post by tracker1 » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 5:21 PM UTC

It comes down to convenience and ease of use... put your pages in, enter a phone number, hit send. Verses scanning pages using a computer, compositing into a PDF, or otherwise emailing loose pages... and since network monitoring is more likely than phone taps (except the govt) may be more secure fax to fax over pots.

It's more a matter of ergonomics. I've also used fancier systems that scan to pdf and email or drop location internally, then you have to email the document out. Frankly, faxing direct is usually far easier.

Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#18

Post by tracker1 » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 5:22 PM UTC

giarc wrote: post #10

I work in healthcare and in my office we likely receive 100-200 pages of faxes everyday. Every single microbiology report in my large urban hospital prints out (including preliminary results. This includes a cover page for every single fax. It's a huge waste of paper. Luckily we are moving to Epic and all results will come through that system instead.

For what it's worth, paper is a renewable resource, and trashing it is literally burying carbon from the atmosphere. (not using bleached-white paper would be an improvement though)

Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#19

Post by degenerate » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 5:23 PM UTC

lcnmrn wrote: post #2

As long people uses faxes as printers with an attached email address I don't see them disappear anytime soon.

Faxing is to email as VoIP is to the PSTN

Until we can get over the threshold of assuming nobody has a fax machine anymore, faxing is here to stay. Once we push that threshold, the remaining users can be forced out (by not having fax as an option, and faxing will fizzle away over time).

Think of it like supporting IE6. A lot of the holdouts for IE6 were large health care organizations and VA/gov centers... the same exact places still holding onto fax.

Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#20

Post by dragonwriter » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 5:25 PM UTC

darkpuma wrote: post #11

jak92 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, completely unencrypted, but depends on what you consider the threat to be.

So it turns out the US Postal Service is very easy to trick. You merely fill out a simple form with no real verification and get them to forward somebody else's mail to your address, which enables all manner of profitable fraud. HOWEVER doing that is a hardcore crime. You can be sent to federal prison for years for doing that. So the USPS is not secure in any sort of mathematical sense, but in practice most people tr…

> HOWEVER doing that is a hardcore crime. You can be sent to federal prison for years for doing that. So the USPS is not secure in any sort of mathematical sense, but in practice most people trust it most of the time, because security isn't just about technical implementation details like encryption.

But if your data is such that it would be a “hardcore crime” to seek access to it fraudulently, or the main reason people would do so is to commit a “hardcore crime”, using an information channel that is only considered secure because of the social safeguard that breaching it's trivial protection is itself a “hardcore crime” is probably foolhardy, since engaging in such a crime is cost already accepted by the attackers you are concerned about.