Re: Is Fax Dead Yet?

Spehro Pefhany wrote:

On Tue, 22 Apr 2008 23:10:04 +0200 (CEST), Nomen Nescio
<nobody@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Paul wrote:

Email and the modern scanner has made the FAX
a dinosaur.

You must not spend much time in the business world. I recently had
to manage a major project for a world wide banking conglomerate
that everyone knows by name, and everything "important" was done
using FAX. Absolutely nothing sensitive could be transmitted via
email, encrypted or otherwise.

I also recently went through a credit card dispute after being
swindled on a Christmas present purchase (bastards!). Every scrap
of paper and every statement I made had to be faxed. They wouldn't
even give me an email address, or even surf to the web site I built
that had everything nicely organized, documented, and explained in
detail. A web site hosted tight in my own living room no less.

I also do quite a bit of work for a largish law firm dealing
primarily with international property and copyright law. They've
gone largely paperless internally, but I'd estimate over 90% of
their external (non-hardcopy) correspondence is still FAX. They
actually decrypt archived documents before transmission and use a
networked Xerox "all in one" to FAX documents when it would
actually be *easier* to email them if their clients would only put
in place a free server and exchange keys properly. The whole thing
could be done transparently, and documents would be delivered
directly to the "addressee" rather than routed through whoever
happens to "check the FAX machine" that hour. ;-)

FAX dead? Not from where I sit it isn't. I can only guess at why
it's so, but if I had to my best would be that crypto is a "black
box" and FAX feels more "natural". FAX is (allegedly) a direct
transmission too, while everyone seems to have at least some small,
if sometimes alarmist, grasp of how "evil" email can be because it's
routed through every Tom, ***, and Jane server on the planet. FAX
transmissions are simply trusted more than email and crypto, and
oddly enough, for some valid reasons.

With a FAX transmission you get a receipt with a CSID that
"proves" it was actually sent and received by the correct recipient.

That's a good point, even though CSID is about as easy to spoof as a
From: header. ;)


And it's still faster to get some things across with a fax than by any
other remote method. Most substantial businesses will have a fax and a
photocopier for some time to come.

Agreed. Although I'm not so sure about the "speed" issue given the fact
that throughput is drastically faster for email, and you could if you
wanted trivially configure things so a hard copy is produced as the
email is received. IOW, email can be used as a super-fast FAX and still
benefit from strong encryption with a centralized key escrow.



Best regards,
Spehro Pefhany

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