They were sending drawings through telegram lines for newspapers during the American Civil War. Thus, the fax is older than the phone. But in terms of general population use, of course most people encountered a phone before they encountered a fax.
Telegrams were always expensive but the price now is outrageous. I followed the link and chose Norway as the destination country and was told that it would cost GBP 22 + 67p/word! Even worse for Mexico: GBP53 + 67p/word.
That doesnt sound like fax. Or better, if you include this and fax together, you’d have to describe it as a generic technology that allows sending images remotely. Which may actually survive the telephone.
Backing up the original point of the parent post's spirit, I actually see fax lasting longer. It's special cased in a lot of regulatory structures as 'secure' and has quite a bit more use than the HN crowd might think.
Fax is the cheapest way to get forecast if you sail offshore through a service called "weather fax". Alternatives works through satellite with hefty monthly subscriptions. That service is the reason I bought yet another raspberry pi with a software defined radio module.
It kind of makes you feel ridiculous about the amount of work that we put into securing even systems that are in no way critical and then the world runs on unsecured mailboxes, homes which can be broken into by someone willing to kick hard enough, Social Security cards with no security features whatsoever, funds transfer that only requires your account and routing number to withdraw, and so on.
It's not that ridiculous. Securing stuff on computers is more important due to the scale at which attacks can occur. On the internet, you can gather information on millions of users in little time and without putting yourself in a place where you could easily be caught. And for a machine that isn't connected to the internet, it can still give you far more data than you could get by stealing paper that takes up the same amount of physical space.
I'd say most of the parents' comment is applicable to the same scale. People can abuse your social security number or bank account and routing numbers across the Internet. Phone numbers being relatively easy to spoof and/or hijack makes fax trivial to mess with internationally as well.
I think you are understating the extent to which mailboxes and homes are secured by men with guns. Sure; there’s very little preventing someone from kicking their way into someone’s house, but if someone did so, they would very likely end up in a jail cell or even, in some places, dead.
Unfortunately, you can’t physically harm people over the internet, so different security measures must be taken.
Your odds are very good stealing from my mailbox and not that bad burglarizing my house. Maybe you have much more vigilant police where you live. What’s more, unauthorized access to computer systems is also a crime.
The odds of getting caught robbing a single mailbox are not high, but if you do it on a large scale, it starts to get pretty risky.
The odds of getting caught attacking a Russian computer from the US or attacking a US computer from Russia are essentially zero for any scale small enough to not have major foreign policy implications.
Homes are massively protected by people’s goodwill, not by the judicial system. In most of Europe and more than you suspect in US too, if you call the police, they come more than 30 minutes later (especially in France where they have no right to use their guns and don’t risk their own security), and if you “handle the matter yourself”, you are in just as much problems as the thieve, particularly in US where you still have to use a lawyer to prove your innocence. No, what really holds houses from being broken into, is mostly that people don’t do it (hence the use of a society where people earn enough to not be willing to risk physical fight).
Most forms of security rely on the goodwill of most people in society; the entire problem consists of handling the minority of people who lack goodwill. These people exist in every society.
