Fax: Technology That Refuses to Die Under Attack

securitas writes "The BBC Magazine's Paul Rubens reports on the ever-growing popularity of the fax machine, despite the widespread availability of e-mail and digital document/photo scanners. Why is fax still so popular? Partly because it is a mature technology that has legal weight and because of the emergence of Internet and Web e-mail-to-fax and fax-to-e-mail gateways, not to mention the relative lack of spam faxes. But that is changing. The New York Times Technology's Lisa Napoli reports that Infoseek founder Steve Kirsch is waging a battle against purveyors of illegal junk faxes (IHT) like Fax.com, which Kirsch has sued for $2.2 trillion, detailed at junkfax.org. Also joining the fight are lawyer and Telephone Consumer Protection Act co-author Gerard Waldron - he won $2.25 million from Fax.com. Finally consumer advocate Robert Braver's junkfaxes.org has 36 lawsuits pending against the junk fax industry. More evidence that spammers are among the lowest forms of life on Earth."

Re:Trillion

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, found this [junkfax.org] just after posting my question...

Re:Legal Documents

[Phoenixhunter]

There are 33.6k baud fax machines ya know...there are even *color* fax machines.

Re:Legal Documents

[jonbryce]

My fax machine can transmit at 33.6k, on the rare occasion that it meets another 33.6k fax machine at the other end of the line.

Who can remember 50bps Telex

[dbouius]

Telex, that thing that the fax replaced. That required a number of years to die off after faxes became populer. It was fast, it could almost keep up with a fast typest.

The two big things that telex had over a fax is that
1. A telex message was a legel document a copy of the telex message was keeped a both ends.
2. A telex would work here faxes could not (bad phone systems, old exchanges, ship to shore)

Telex is not dead yet, just almost.

Re:Who can remember 50bps Telex

[enronman]

Telex still exists and is used. I know that you can STILL send ExxonMobil a Telex, and they still send them out to get messages to some parts of the world. I got a telex as recently as '99.

Re:Faxes won't die because

[InfiniteWisdom]

You'll never hear "I don't know, I didn't get a fax from you"
Guess you've never sent faxes to offices where they have one common fax machine shared by lots and lots of people.

IMHO QoS is a non-issue when it comes to fax-like things. Unlike voice, a fax doesn't have to be real-time. A few seconds delay is perfectly acceptible. I think the real problem is that e-mail offers no usable confirmation of delivery. I'm sure there are softwares out there that can do this but no standard.

With always-on connection being almost a given in offices these days there is no reason a successor to e-mail with fax-like semantics can't be designed. The key points to address would be:
1. Confirmation of delivery
2. Standard format... say postscript or a basic PDF or maybe even a png or jpeg

Third world faxes

[ThesQuid]

I do a lot of business with small factories in China. Most if not all of these factories don't have any sort of connectivity other than fax. It's going to be quite some time before faxes are replaced in such situations.

Plus, with languages like chinese, japanese etc., it's always been easier to write something out by hand and send a fax than fight with a computer. In major metro centers, sure, it's changing, but fax will have a place there for a good long time.

Urgh..

[slittle]

Ignore those Start -> run -> calc posts.

Win-R -> calc.

Being that you don't play games at work (right? :) you won't have ripped that mofo off yet..