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Faxing is growing in popularity

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Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#51

Post by newhotelowner »

zamadatix wrote: post #27
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…

Mail delegation covers "anyone can send it out" and 'there is only 1 fax number". Automatically print covers "paper automatically appears" and "don't have to constantly check the email". What exactly are you hoping to modernize (other than "technology A has been around longer than technology B"). If it's hardware e.g. a physical fax machine with a physical line and you want to get rid of that line there are existing…

> "fax is insecure"

Fax is not secure.

Something like "Sender goes to the machine, and he punches my number or identification and it prints the document at my hotel"

Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#52

Post by amaccuish »

You need to look at countries like Estonia with strong cryptographic signatures for how to effectively move away from faxes (I believe crpytographic signatures are far better than "digital signatures", i.e. a jpg of your handwriting)

Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#53

Post by newhotelowner »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #43
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.

A lot of small business owner has one company credit card. They send the credit card information to us through fax for the employees that are checking in without the company credit card. Employees are still using their personal card for incidentals.

Big companies use travel agencies. They fax a virtual credit card. Depending upon the company, the credit card in the reservation won't authorize. We can only charge the credit card in the fax.

Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#54

Post by lotsofpulp »

newhotelowner wrote: post #53
lotsofpulp wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A lot of small business owner has one company credit card. They send the credit card information to us through fax for the employees that are checking in without the company credit card. Employees are still using their personal card for incidentals. Big companies use travel agencies. They fax a virtual credit card. Depending upon the company, the credit card in the reservation won't authorize. We can only charge the…

Yes, my point is all of that can be obviated if the hotel offered an online payment system where you can just pay online, same as you can with Expedia.com or Hotel Tonight or Priceline or Amazon.com

However, the major brands would rather have all of their hotel guests be inconvenienced and have people's personal information and ID scans flying around insecure systems operated by minimum wage hotel personnel with high turnover.

This is so that they (Hyatt, Marriott, Hilton, IHG, Choice, Wyndham, etc) can offload the chargeback risks and payment processing costs onto the franchisees.

Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#55

Post by dragonwriter »

darkpuma wrote: post #45
dragonwriter wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

> However most of what people would prefer be confidential isn't data that would be sufficiently profitable to make risking federal prison rational.

(1) Don't assume you know all potential criminals’ utility functions (especially, don't assume all of their utility is financial), and, more important

(2) Don't presume crime is usually rational, in the first place.

Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#56

Post by wutbrodo »

newhotelowner wrote: post #50
wutbrodo wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Not all hotel owner/operator can write code.

Yea, dont worry, I wasn't going for the "lol why doesn't everyone just learn Python and spin up a Docker container on ECS" trope. That's why I specified a lightweight piece of software, which is how everything used to work before the rise of the Web and mobile devices changed software distribution.

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

Yes, this is the legacy third parties thing I was talking about. But this constraint doesn't have anything to do with the lack of a modern replacement for fax. On top of that, there are plenty of services (including free ones) that fake a fax number if necessary, with the standard caveat that inserting a service layer into your business workflow introduces risk.

Note that I'm not suggesting that you switch: when the road meets the rubber, it's often the rational choice for businesses to stick with old technologies for a variety of reasons. I was just puzzled by your more-general wish for a modern equivalent of fax, when there have existed "modern equivalents of fax" for decades that are superior on pretty much every axis.

Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#58

Post by darkpuma »

dragonwriter wrote: post #55
darkpuma wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

> However most of what people would prefer be confidential isn't data that would be sufficiently profitable to make risking federal prison rational. (1) Don't assume you know all potential criminals’ utility functions (especially, don't assume all of their utility is financial), and, more important (2) Don't presume crime is usually rational, in the first place.

It's not so much a presumption as an observation that the system works most of the time for most people. Yes there are edge cases, nobody would deny that.

Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#59

Post by dsfyu404ed »

basch wrote: post #32
tracker1 wrote: post #17

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 l…

You pay for this in data entry. Sending pages, means that someone has to retype the data into a database compared to sending it in some kind of data structure that can be imported. Or worse the data doesnt get entered, and it ends up in a filing cabinet.

>Or worse the data doesnt get entered, and it ends up in a filing cabinet.

God forbid that data not be vacuumed up never to be seen again except by the advertisers. /s

A file cabinet in the back office probably handles most people's use cases for documents they receive by fax 90% as well as any digital solution with a heck of a lot less effort.

Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#60

Post by giarc »

shliachtx wrote: post #44
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.

I work in Alberta and we have 5 distinct health care regions although we all work under one umbrella organization. All regions use different EMR systems, some regions and major hospitals are still not currently using any system, and all orders are written by hand. So an opinion on Epic as an EMR is perhaps minor compared to EMR vs hand written systems.
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