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Ask HN: Why can't I send faxes from my phone?

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Re: Ask HN: Why can't I send faxes from my phone?

#111

Post by DonHopkins »

orf wrote: post #110
DonHopkins wrote: post #109

When I first applied for the Apple Developer Program from the Netherlands in the early days of the iPhone when they first published the SDK, Apple insisted that I fax my registration in to them in the UK, so I had to print it out, and take it by a shop that had a fax machine, and pay several euros to send an international fax to Apple. More than 10 years later, there's still not an app for that.

There are several apps on the App Store that allow you to do just that?

For a fee (which Apple gets 30% of).

The point is that there was no reason for Apple to insist I send them a Fax to join their developer program, but they did anyway. I guess somebody at Apple thought it was more "business like" to introduce another hoop to jump through to make it harder to join the developer program, because just paying $50 was not enough.

Re: Ask HN: Why can't I send faxes from my phone?

#112

Post by avipars »

kvee wrote: post #102
amelius wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps someone could start a relay service.

We made http://mailprincess.com/ a while ago which is $1 per fax Also made http://maleprincess.com/ for fun

You should really get an SSL Cert. They are free these days

Re: Ask HN: Why can't I send faxes from my phone?

#113

Post by DonHopkins »

gambiting wrote: post #37
talles wrote: post #19

Genuine question: why there are folks still using fax?

It seems to be the same as cheques and magstrip-only cards - uniquely American thing that rest of the world hasn't seen in years. I do remember not that long ago opening an apple developer account required filling out a form with your card details and faxing it to some US-based number. It was madness back then already.

Aha, another Apple developer who remembers that! So I wasn't confabulating.

Re: Ask HN: Why can't I send faxes from my phone?

#114

Post by numpad0 »

closeparen wrote: post #74
tjohns wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, once your call gets to the central office it's moved onto a digital connection -- essentially an ISDN line. Notably, the entire telephone network is standardized on G.711 as a codec, which is raw PCM audio at 64 kbps, from 300–3400 Hz sampled at 8,000 samples/sec. (There's some regional differences that determine whether the network uses G.711u or G.711a, but that's not really important here.) Also relevant: The…

>The digital telephone network is exclusively a switched (not packet-based) network, so you're guaranteed near-zero latency. Seems like this fact could be exploited more often in internet applications. High bandwidth channel for static assets, low latency channel for e.g. player movement data?

One of the professors when I was in a university was from ex-national telco R&D, and he was very vocal about those “real” bandwidth/latency/privacy assured telecom techs, “far superior” than “toys” like TCP/IP.

And that was for the sake of education. He’d hold his lab meetings in Skype, not over a multipoint ISDN video calls on circuit switched wireless ATM. Only when the show is on, speaking to us undergrads through the mic, he declined to admit that IP is more adopted.

Circuit switched data looks pretty on paper, that’s true, but at the end of the day no one pays for or bother with it.

Re: Ask HN: Why can't I send faxes from my phone?

#116

Post by hiergiltdiestfu »

perl4ever wrote: post #83
snarfy wrote: post #43

I give up and tell them I can't send a fax where I'm from. When they ask where I'm from, I tell them I'm from the year 2020.

The thing is, when I'm asked to send sensitive documents over unencrypted email or something, then I'd rather use the fax option. And I don't trust any internet gateway, I go to some local store with actual fax machines. I kinda sorta think of it as more secure than the internet, still?

IIRC, automated character recognition / word alerts in FAX transmissions has been built-in in Echelon since the 1970ies. FAX is as insecure as emails are, under certain threat models. Pretty sure this is mentioned in this nice crypto history overview: https://alternativlos.org/30/

Re: Ask HN: Why can't I send faxes from my phone?

#117

Post by Piskvorrr »

kevin_nisbet wrote: post #20
gumby wrote: post #13

The fax requires a 56KHz channel which has not been used for mobile telephony since the 1980s (when AMPS and GSM were developed. Before then it was just a radio link through an operator). That’s why you can’t use a high speed modem either. Some gsm phones had the ability to transmit a fax but they actually used a different protocol to talk to a fax gateway. I never saw one of these in the wild. I haven’t been in that…

CDMA also had a fax technology, under I think IS-95 data, but I didn't work on it myself. I've been out of the industry a couple years myself, but there were still a handful of customers using it that kept delaying the shutdown of the old tech, and there wasn't really an upgrade path. IIRC from the water cooler talk, one of the remaining customers was a lighthouse, that had to send a daily report, things like that.

There were cellphones capable of sending/receiving a fax, in 2000 IIRC. Apparently it was used by about ~0 people worldwide, so the capability was discontinued.

Re: Ask HN: Why can't I send faxes from my phone?

#118

Post by Piskvorrr »

bluesign wrote: post #107
closeparen wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The digital telephone network is exclusively a switched (not packet-based) network, so you're guaranteed near-zero latency. Seems like this fact could be exploited more often in internet applications. High bandwidth channel for static assets, low latency channel for e.g. player movement data?

It is already used with QoS [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_service

Which is traffic prioritization on the same channel. Having an extra link for high-priority traffic would be...exotic...but workable, sure.

Re: Ask HN: Why can't I send faxes from my phone?

#119

Post by bawolff »

perl4ever wrote: post #83
snarfy wrote: post #43

I give up and tell them I can't send a fax where I'm from. When they ask where I'm from, I tell them I'm from the year 2020.

The thing is, when I'm asked to send sensitive documents over unencrypted email or something, then I'd rather use the fax option. And I don't trust any internet gateway, I go to some local store with actual fax machines. I kinda sorta think of it as more secure than the internet, still?

What type of threat model is this?

Even standard unencrypted email is largely opportunisticly encrypted these days. Security properties of that is "debatable", but a fax isn't encrypted at all...

Re: Ask HN: Why can't I send faxes from my phone?

#120

Post by tinus_hn »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #98
perl4ever wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, when I'm asked to send sensitive documents over unencrypted email or something, then I'd rather use the fax option. And I don't trust any internet gateway, I go to some local store with actual fax machines. I kinda sorta think of it as more secure than the internet, still?

It’s more secure in one specific way, a warrant is required to wiretap a phone line, but not the internet.

Then again most phone lines run over the internet these days. No idea how that works out with snooping laws.
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