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Faxing is growing in popularity

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#41

Post by JohnFen »

shados wrote: post #36
degenerate wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

Faxing is a headache for a lot of people. The problem is that the industries that use fax are in a position to force it on others. Certain healthcare departments, some mortgage related stuff, financial garbage, etc. Places where if you HAVE to do business with that entity for some reason, and the say "fax this to us", you're stuck hunting down a fax machine or using an online service. They thus have no reason to chan…

> Places where if you HAVE to do business with that entity for some reason, and the say "fax this to us", you're stuck hunting down a fax machine

I just head to the local copy center when I'm forced to send (or receive) a fax, so for me "fax this to us" means "pay an extra $2 for no good reason".

Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#42

Post by JohnFen »

wolrah wrote: post #40
YeahSureWhyNot wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

im not sure about dead easy to use? i have figured out how to use all the tech devices including old school iptv cameras, smart cash registers and connecting thermal receipt printers but the fax machine is absolutely the shittiest gadget i have had to deal with in my life despite being shown how to operate it multiple times.

The people who say faxes are easier than email are like the old mechanics who complain about how EFI is complicated and carbs were so much simpler. It's not actually any better, just a lot of people learned how to use it 20 years ago and don't want to learn anything new because they're wastes of space.

This is just not true as a blanket statement. I am as cutting-edge tech-wise as anybody (it is my industry, after all), but that doesn't blind me to the fact that there do, in fact, exist use cases for which the fax is the best solution.

Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#43

Post by lotsofpulp »

newhotelowner wrote: post #21

Every single hotel that caters corporate clients in the USA still uses fax. We don't get reservations through fax, but that is the best way to get credit card authorization. A lot of corporate booking systems are automated to send out Fax for credit card authorization after they book the room online. Also, it's much better for our Front desk staff, as they don't have to constantly check the email. There is only 1 fax…

The proper solution is to implement a way to pay hotels online with the proper verification procedures. They can still require photo IDs and credit cards for incidentals at checkin, but there's no reason I shouldn't be able to use Apple Pay to pay for someone else without ever sending any documentation to the hotel other than the name of the person they should be expecting.

Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#44

Post by shliachtx »

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.

> Luckily we are moving to Epic

This may be the first time those words were used together in a sentence.

Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#45

Post by darkpuma »

dragonwriter wrote: post #20
darkpuma wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peo…

That's true. However most of what people would prefer be confidential isn't data that would be sufficiently profitable to make risking federal prison rational. e.g. medical records. I don't want my medical records made public, but nobody is going to make themselves rich by violating my privacy.

So, for example, doctors using faxes makes a lot of sense. Maybe not for doctors with high profile celebrity or politician clients who value their privacy, but for the most part.

Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#46

Post by lotsofpulp »

JohnFen wrote: post #42
wolrah wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who say faxes are easier than email are like the old mechanics who complain about how EFI is complicated and carbs were so much simpler. It's not actually any better, just a lot of people learned how to use it 20 years ago and don't want to learn anything new because they're wastes of space.

This is just not true as a blanket statement. I am as cutting-edge tech-wise as anybody (it is my industry, after all), but that doesn't blind me to the fact that there do, in fact, exist use cases for which the fax is the best solution.

Everyone has a camera on a device that can send emails. Unless the internet went down and for some reason the phone system still worked, I can't think of any scenario where fax is better than emailing photos.

Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#47

Post by miki123211 »

The implications of that to accessibility are atrocious. I had a blind friend who lived outside US and had to deal with english faxes once. That was a nightmare, both in the financial and accessibility sense. If everyone just used email...

Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#48

Post by lotsofpulp »

United857 wrote: post #30

I'm guessing part of the appeal is the simplicity. At its purest, faxing is point-to-point, and unlike email doesn't need any servers/other infra (read: potential points of failure) beyond the telephone system itself.

Are phone systems more resilient than internet and email protocols? A phone number relies on a single vendor, whereas internet and email can be accessed through a variety of vendors, and MX records can be changed by the user. If the power goes out, I can still use email via wireless providers, or I can go to a different location and use it.

Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#49

Post by gruez »

yebyen wrote: post #23
gruez wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

What about them? (Can you send a fax over those media, and are they protected similarly?) Or are you asking a different question? If it's not on a phone line, then it's not afforded those legal protections. None of those communication media you just mentioned are using a phone line as a transport mechanism. (They're also not similar to fax from a UX standpoint.)

>Or are you asking a different question?

I was asking whether those protections applied to only landlines, or all telephone conversations (eg. cellphones).

>If it's not on a phone line, then it's not afforded those legal protections.

This sounds problematic considering that for PSTN, "phone lines" only cover the last few miles of transport[1]. Does that mean you can't tap outside someone's house (where it's a phone line), but you could tap outside the CO, where it's fiber or even public internet?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_switched_telephone_netw...

Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#50

Post by newhotelowner »

wutbrodo wrote: post #33
newhotelowner wrote: post #21

Every single hotel that caters corporate clients in the USA still uses fax. We don't get reservations through fax, but that is the best way to get credit card authorization. A lot of corporate booking systems are automated to send out Fax for credit card authorization after they book the room online. Also, it's much better for our Front desk staff, as they don't have to constantly check the email. There is only 1 fax…

> I really wish there is a modern alternative to FAX What's missing from email + a couple lines of script code? (Or if you prefer, a lightweight piece of software that does the same thing). It seems like that covers all the cases you describe: automatically prints, don't have to check it, you can have only one email, etc. I mean the fact that some other parties are stuck on a legacy system is of course always a good…

- Not all hotel owner/operator can write code.

- Spam: We get tons of spam FAXes too. But compare to emails, way less spam.

- Also, most of the people who send out fax have a hard time scanning and emailing documents.

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