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The Fax Is Not Yet Obsolete

theatlantic.com

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Re: The Fax Is Not Yet Obsolete

#101

Post by tomjen3 »

sokoloff wrote: post #15
iptel wrote: post #2

Fax is not more secure than email.

It is more secure in some senses. You can't get a PDF-borne virus from an old-school fax reception. My tax preparer only accepts mailed documents and faxed documents. It's sometimes a pain, but I have to admit that I'm a little bit happy that he's more paranoid than I am about my financial information.

Funny, if somebody had told me they only accepted mail documents I would ask for their email. Not to be annoying or whatever, but because today I assume mail means e-mail, not snail or physical mail.

Re: The Fax Is Not Yet Obsolete

#102

Post by goguy »

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…

They absolutely exist. A previous company I worked for had the same system as a legacy product but it still got plenty of traffic.

We also had fax -> email. Believe it or not there were plenty of accounts sending email -> fax which they had configured to forward using fax -> email. ‍️

They incured costs on both ends rather than just sending an email. Stupidity knows no bounds...

Re: The Fax Is Not Yet Obsolete

#103

Post by cknight »

tomjen3 wrote: post #96
cknight wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All our fax machines are already using Cisco ATAs to connect to our VoIP system anyway. Only problem I've ever had with that aspect was a dud ATA. I know many practices use eFax though, even though it uses email and hence is against accreditation standards. Small one- or two-practitioner clinics don't have the means to trudge through the RACGP's information security standards like we do. I did trial a local Australia…

Would a physical fax machine that saved the incoming faxes as a searchable PDF on a network drive make sense? It could literally just have a folder you put things in and then you could select the recipient on some webmanager.

At the moment we have non-searchable PDFs coming in to a network drive. These are manually reviewed and sent to the relevant GP's inbox (or to nursing or to management) as necessary, with the relevant patient selected so all the doctor has to do is read it and hit "accept" or "seen". They're not willing to do more than that, of course.

Adding in OCR to make the documents searchable doesn't help a lot on its own. Just because one of our GP's names is listed on a fax doesn't mean it's actually for them, nor does another name mean it is the patient in question. A lot of names get put on these documents. Every fax we get is laid out differently, there's no consistency of any kind. Faxes being unreliable means we are sent plenty of duplicates, half-sent documents, and upside down ones too.

Nothing can beat an electronic message that contains the recipient doctor's ID, the patient's name and birth date (we have plenty with same names), and all the other relevant info. It's the only way forward.

Re: The Fax Is Not Yet Obsolete

#104

Post by dc_gregory »

gpm wrote: post #45
dc_gregory wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah, working with money would make some sense, as a risk reduction strategy. Thanks for answering my question.

Re: The Fax Is Not Yet Obsolete

#105

Post by mlindner »

Zak wrote: post #50
metildaa wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mot…

> We could have vote-by-email (using the key registered when registering to vote).

This doesn't work. You still have all the problems of denial of service, hidden hacking leaking of keys, among many other issues.

Re: The Fax Is Not Yet Obsolete

#106

Post by brokenmachine »

askvictor wrote: post #61
cknight wrote: post #49

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 nu…

I wonder how this squares with the NBN, given that, once activated, the traditional phone line ceases to exist, and you use VoIP instead. And that the POTS will be entirely deactivated (in theory) once rollout is complete.

>I wonder how this squares with the NBN, given that, once activated, the traditional phone line ceases to exist, and you use VoIP instead. And that the POTS will be entirely deactivated (in theory) once rollout is complete.

Talking more about citizens phone lines than medical stuff now, but...

Surprise, surprise, all of a sudden there's no warrant necessary for wiretapping.

Wonder how many of our elected representatives are working long hours to fix that curious oversight?

Re: The Fax Is Not Yet Obsolete

#107

Post by carlosdp »

metildaa wrote: post #34
carlosdp wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twilio has a Fax API: https://www.twilio.com/fax

We had issues faxing rural areas through Twilio, like their SMS offerings (which lack shortcode support) it seems to be a partially baked solution. I asked them about it at SeaGL in Seattle, and the staff at their booth had few suggestions.

Idk about the fax issues in rural areas, I'm sure it's possible cause fax is hard, but Twilio definitely has SMS Shortcode support.

Re: The Fax Is Not Yet Obsolete

#108

Post by ocrcustomserver »

cknight wrote: post #103
tomjen3 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would a physical fax machine that saved the incoming faxes as a searchable PDF on a network drive make sense? It could literally just have a folder you put things in and then you could select the recipient on some webmanager.

At the moment we have non-searchable PDFs coming in to a network drive. These are manually reviewed and sent to the relevant GP's inbox (or to nursing or to management) as necessary, with the relevant patient selected so all the doctor has to do is read it and hit "accept" or "seen". They're not willing to do more than that, of course. Adding in OCR to make the documents searchable doesn't help a lot on its own. Just…

If this is important to you (extraction of information like ID/name/date from non-searchable PDFs), you could send me an email and we could discuss it further.

I might be able to help you with this.

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