> Ministers back down after hundreds of government offices insist banishing fax would be impossible
That is the problem of having a system that works. It is expensive to replace, a pain to learn for users and difficult to justify the initial investment.
Even if long-term, obviously, digital signatures and electronic mail will be a better system, that initial cost overshadows future gains.
> Japanese ministries and agencies use faxes when handling highly confidential information, including court procedures and police work, and the Hokkaido Shimbun said there were fears that exclusively online communication would result in security lapses.
And, they are not wrong. The simplicity of a one-to-one communication makes it harder to misuse. Efficiency usually is an antitheses to safety.
The digitization of Japan is inevitable. But, it is going to take a long time until a new system has the trust, the user-base and acceptance of the old fax one.
Sending a fax is a great way to legally prove someone has received a message without having to physically deliver it.
I once worked for a company that was very unreliable when it came to paying their employees, and I tried to terminate my contract with a fax. There was only a small issue, they didn't have a fax machine.
Read receipt pixel/trackers can't prove something has been read. Thunderbird for example doesn't load remote images by default, by design, as they can be used for tracking purposes (including by spammers).
IANAL, but last year a bought a house in the UK, and all the conveyancing was done by email, except for one digital signature which used some third-party secure stuff for one particular document (can't remember exactly what, I'm afraid). No faxes.
Nope, about 800.00 GPB, which is a lot, but you are also buying insurance in case they f*ck up. The price was the same if they used paper.
I don't normally like to say good things about solicitors (not estate agents, I was buying, so I didn't have to pay them, but I hate them too), but mostly they did OK.
They are still surprisingly common in the US, also. Mostly Government and other regulated things. I remember having to fax things to Ally bank as recently as last year. After rejecting it twice for being 'too dark', they let me email it, which seems to defeat the purpose.
I started my career in Medicare claims processing, which I guess has been nearly 15 years now. All claims had to be sent by dial up modem, and documents by fax at the time, for 'security reasons.' I'm unsure if that's changed, but that was a huge surprise to new billers. Many complained they couldn't even find a dial up modem to buy anymore.
A few years back, I was refinancing my house, and they wanted me to sign something and fax it back to them. I asked them what millennium they thought it was. They looked a bit surprised, but they said "Well, you can email it to us..."
I think that many places have their workflow that they want to keep using, because it's more convenient to them. But as a customer, I don't care. I'm paying you; you can use a workflow that's convenient for me, even if it's less convenient for you.
My boss, who is in his 60's, still insists on having his AIO printer hooked up to a copper phone line (!) so that we can receive or send a fax "just in case" lol. He still gets spam faxes on occasion, but we're never had to use it in the 4 years I've been here and counting.
I remember using weather fax on the Pacific Ocean. Far away from shore, using a short wave radio, you could receive weather forecasts and even weather maps, black and white.
There were thermal paper printers connected to the radio, and voila, you had a satellite weather map. Later on you could connect it to your laptop.
I wonder if they still transmit?
Why can't they just be replaced with what is essentially a normal/embedded PC, in the form factor of a printer/fax machine? Sending the "fax" simply emails a PDF of the scanned pages over the internet and then prints the "fax" automatically?
This question reminds me of the now infamous comment[1] asking why Dropbox exists when you can just use an SFTP server.
Just because there are technologically superior solutions is hardly what matters.
You need to factor in the experience of the users.
Besides that, there is still no replacement for phone numbers. A phone number immediately returns if it is available to receive a transmission, and a fax on the other end confirms that it is set up, and you can be pretty sure that it isn't just going to languish in an unread mailbox somewhere. A phone number also takes more effort to set up, so will probably be treated better.
Under certain circumstances, I would be more comfortable faxing documents somewhere than emailing a pdf somewhere.
No, this is the opposite of what the parent said. They said that they could *keep the UX* but improve the underlying technology. This would remove the dependence on the phone system, and open up some users, departments and offices from moving away from fax slowly.
They aren't suggesting that every user sets up their own raspberry PI, but instead suggesting that IT can transparently replace the technology.
I thought it was clear that I was opposed to moving away from phone numbers. Of course if the system that OP was talking about was almost completely identical to a fax experience, then what I am saying does not apply.
This is what the OP said:
> Sending the "fax" simply emails a PDF of the scanned pages over the internet and then prints the "fax" automatically?
Which, I read as implying that the user would have to enter something like an email address, to which I replied:
> Besides that, there is still no replacement for phone numbers. A phone number immediately returns if it is available to receive a transmission, and a fax on the other end confirms that it is set up, and you can be pretty sure that it isn't just going to languish in an unread mailbox somewhere. A phone number also takes more effort to set up, so will probably be treated better.
Of course, if an IT department mapped an POTS phone numbers to their mail server, and then had that email print out a pdf attachment on the other end, then yes, that would be fine.
But, actually this is done already in some places anyway. My old university had a system where incoming faxes were converted into emails and forwarded as email attachments, and I don't see why the IT dept could not have also configured it to automatically print out incoming emails, or even relay to an outgoing fax line.
Yes, exactly, this is exactly what I said. Replace the internals but keep it the same externally. Quite frankly I'm sick of these bad faith arguments where someone puts words in my mouth and then creates a strawman and argues against that.
Thank you for actually understanding and explaining what I meant. It's a nice change.
Sorry, I didn't mean to mischaracterize what you said.
It sounded like you were saying you wanted to change the interface somewhat. The reason that I thought that was because if it was a 100% transparent interface identical to an existing fax experience, then there are already solutions like that, but we just don't notice them because they are so transparent.
Regular consumers sending faxes over copper already have their fax calls digitized, encrypted, and compressed. And offices have pretty simple solutions to manage fax numbers from their servers. I think Exchange server might be able to do it out of the box now.
The reason I compared it to the "dropbox" comment was that I think that it would be a case of needless over-optimization.
Possibly because the channel on which the "fax" would travel (e-mailed PDF) is not the same as an actual fax (although nowadays it is probably going to be over T.38 transported over IP, so in the end probably not much changes in terms of security). If those PDFs were properly encrypted using a widely available PKI, then it would be a better replacement for an outdated technology. There might also be legal requirements preventing the unencrypted transmission of some type of documents (e.g. court documents) over the Internet.
There is also iFax, which is supported by several vendors, which is essentially like a fax over e-mail. Many multipurpose fax/printer/scanner machines support it.
> Why can't they just be replaced with what is essentially a normal/embedded PC, in the form factor of a printer/fax machine?
That is effectively what a modern dedicated fax machine is. They are very cheap commodity items. The issue here is not the hardware, but the use of faxes at all.
Fax initially was used to transmit writing when the code space was too large. It was huge in Asia before it became popular in the West, because at the time there was too small a Morse Code (or other telegraph encoding) code space to capture many Asian languages.
I believe they used a wax cylinder and a make-or-break stylus switch. The cylinder rotated, the stylus progressed down the image in a slow spiral fashion, dropping into the grooves the author had made in the wax. The signal was used on the other end in a similar apparatus with a pen, which would make marks when the stylus dropped into a wax divot (part of a letter) and raise the pen when no mark was detected. The resulting image was a sort of raster-scan of the original.
... and in the UK apparently. I just took delivery of a new HP colour laser printer/scanner which comes with fax software and a phone jack & cable. I can't see me using it though.
>> Japanese ministries and agencies use faxes when handling highly confidential information, including court procedures and police work, and the Hokkaido Shimbun said there were fears that exclusively online communication would result in security lapses.
I like this. I used to be Anti-Fax, or basically Pro Digital All things when I was young. Now increasingly I want to go back to the good old Analog world.
My most romantic memories go back to that fax machine that called me at 3 a.m. every f*** night (without revealing its number). I was almost about to learn its hiss language just to end this.
Similar story with a company I was struggling to contact (in 2019?) to solve an invoicing problem. Phone calls and e-mails were no success, I was always getting useless answers (when I got any) and interminable wait lines. Magically the problem solved a day after I faxed them a letter.
Thing is, nowadays faxes are used so rarely that when they are, they immediately catch the attention of the recipient (assuming they don't end up as PDF in some mailbox that nobody opens... this happens too).
One reason they get so much attention is that they are a sign that this person is trying to create a legal paper trail that they reached out and contacted you or submitted something to you and you received it.
That is the problem of having a system that works. It is expensive to replace, a pain to learn for users and difficult to justify the initial investment.
Even if long-term, obviously, digital signatures and electronic mail will be a better system, that initial cost overshadows future gains.
> Japanese ministries and agencies use faxes when handling highly confidential information, including court procedures and police work, and the Hokkaido Shimbun said there were fears that exclusively online communication would result in security lapses.
And, they are not wrong. The simplicity of a one-to-one communication makes it harder to misuse. Efficiency usually is an antitheses to safety.
The digitization of Japan is inevitable. But, it is going to take a long time until a new system has the trust, the user-base and acceptance of the old fax one.