The absolute state of faxing in 2020
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This post in the garage:
@loopback0 said in In other news today: The Garage edition:
Fax machines aren't essential either.
Led me to a thought that I have had recently as to just how retarded regulations and technology can be.
Faxes are largely still a thing mostly because regulations in certain areas require things to be sent via fax. We see it mostly in medical and legal. When we have discussed getting rid of fax machines they say that they have to keep faxes around because regulations require them to be used to send certain documents. Because by regulations they are not allowed to send them just through email. So we move them to e-fax services.
Most of our clients that use e-fax services interact with them through email. They attach the document to be faxed to an email and send it to some email address like '8885551234@efaxingservice.com' which ingests the email, and sends it out to the '888-555-1234' number as a fax.
So we've already bypassed the "can't send them via email" by using the e-fax service. So they should just be allowed to send them via email. But they can't, because regulations. But they do, because they use an e-fax service as a workaround.
Which led me to the thought.......how many of those e-faxes that are sent are then received by an e-fax service? And just how fucking retarded is that concept when you think about it? Person A sends an e-fax to Person B who receives it via e-fax, because they can't use email, because
, so Person A attaches a PDF to an email and sends it to '8885551234@efaxingservice.com' and faxingservice.com receives it, ingests it, and places a call to otherfaxingservice.com's service who then receives the fax call, produces an image, formats it to a PDF, attaches it to an email and sends it to personb@initrode.com.So we've just used a 56k connection to send an email between two people, because
.Then it occurred to me.......what if both people use efaxingservice.com? Surely they have a routine to recognize this and bypass all the
? Surely they don't place a call from one modem to the next in the same datacenter? Right? If we assume that they do, then things are even more retarded. Now we have Person A sending an email to Person B and a fax machine or modem was never involved, and they should have been able to just send a fucking email directly between each other and bypass all this other . But they can't. Because and 
.Then I considered that if the e-faxing services are
they would have agreements between each other to somehow recognize when a fax is being sent between each other, bypass the POTS and just send directly between each other and bypass all the abstraction. Which if that is the case then people are just paying third-party services to be able to legally email documents to each other because and .Then I realized I probably needed to lay off all the coffee and Adderall and stop thinking about faxing so much.
The layers of abstraction that we find ourselves in via technology can be downright mind boggling when you really think about what is happening.
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@Polygeekery said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
Then I realized I probably needed to lay off all the coffee and Adderall and stop thinking about faxing so much.
I want to see what you come up with if you take more.
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@Polygeekery said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
Then I considered that if the e-faxing services are
they would have agreements between each other to somehow recognize when a fax is being sent between each other, bypass the POTS and just send directly between each other and bypass all the abstraction.Except this wouldn't technically be
- if someone is expecting something to be sent via fax, and there's some stupid regulation that says it must be, then they (the e-fax services) should probably be actually sending it via fax.
Even if the idea of doing so is totally pants-on-head stupid.
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It would be interesting to see if somebody ever challenged the validity of a document in a legal context where faxing matters by proving an efax service was used therefore the "chain of custody" or whatever was broken.
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There's not enough Re: . What have you done with the real
? And how?
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I'd honestly like to know the reasoning behind regulations allowing faxing, but not emailing. They are essentially the same thing. You are sending those documents electronically from point A to point B. If it security or privacy is the reasoning, that's stupid as anyone on the receiving end of a fax machine has access to what came through. And in my experience fax machines are usually in a shared space like a copy room or something, not on a single person's desk because phone lines are expensive and the thing is shared by the whole office.
Hell, e-signatures are now a valid form of signing documents which allow for all electronic documents and that's in the financial sector.
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@mikehurley said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
I want to see what you come up with if you take more.
An embolism.
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@CodeJunkie said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
I'd honestly like to know the reasoning behind regulations allowing faxing, but not emailing. They are essentially the same thing. You are sending those documents electronically from point A to point B. If it security or privacy is the reasoning, that's stupid as anyone on the receiving end of a fax machine has access to what came through. And in my experience fax machines are usually in a shared space like a copy room or something, not on a single person's desk because phone lines are expensive and the thing is shared by the whole office.
Hell, e-signatures are now a valid form of signing documents which allow for all electronic documents and that's in the financial sector.
I think the main reason behind the regulations is nobody has bothered updating them. I don't know if proposals to update to allow email for random things has actually been rejected. Though I guess I wouldn't be surprised if it was something tried 25 years ago.
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@mikehurley said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
Though I guess I wouldn't be surprised if it was something tried 25 years ago.
Very likely. And no one probably has time to care about it now.
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@Polygeekery said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@mikehurley said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
I want to see what you come up with if you take more.
An embolism.
I have a friend who has said that getting an arrhythmia is how you know you've had too much caffeine.
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@Polygeekery said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
Then I realized I probably needed to lay off all the coffee and
Adderall and stop thinking about faxing so muchput the page on the wooden table in preparation for faxing it.
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@CodeJunkie said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
I'd honestly like to know the reasoning behind regulations allowing faxing, but not emailing. They are essentially the same thing. You are sending those documents electronically from point A to point B. If it security or privacy is the reasoning, that's stupid as anyone on the receiving end of a fax machine has access to what came through. And in my experience fax machines are usually in a shared space like a copy room or something, not on a single person's desk because phone lines are expensive and the thing is shared by the whole office.
Beyond all of that, email should be sent via SSL the entire way so should in theory be more secure than faxing is. In comparison to breaking SSL to intercept messages, MITM on a POTS system is trivial. Tap in to the wire anywhere between point A and point B and you could intercept all faxes on that line.
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@Polygeekery This gets even worse when you consider why some regulations still require fax (at least in the cases I was exposed to), which is because they want a document with an actual signature on it (some are slowly moving to accepting e-signatures but the whole point of your post is when processes can't/aren't updated... so some still don't).
My own experience therefore started by printing out the PDF to sign it, then scanning it (or taking a picture of it to add the Wooden Table
) and finally (!) going through what you describe. At the other end, the PDF is also very likely to get printed again because The Process requires a physical copy (I know that some administrations do that because some stuff still needs to be physically sent in anywhere between 3 and 7 identical copies...).So it goes:
PDF form filled on your computer -> print out, sign -> PDF -> email to fax service -> convert PDF to crappy fax resolution -> phone call -> convert crappy fax back to PDF -> email to recipient -> print out forarchivingthrowing in the bin
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@mikehurley said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
I think the main reason behind the regulations is nobody has bothered updating them.
It also probably made sense at the time. Back when emails were for all intensive porpoises just fired off in to the ether unencrypted and the general advice of the time was to never send anything over email that you wouldn't want published on the front page of the New York Times, sending legal or medical documents over email would have been a very bad idea.
These days those regulations are forcing people to use transmission methods that are even worse than email.
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@CodeJunkie said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
I'd honestly like to know the reasoning behind regulations allowing faxing, but not emailing. They are essentially the same thing. You are sending those documents electronically from point A to point B. If it security or privacy is the reasoning, that's stupid as anyone on the receiving end of a fax machine has access to what came through. And in my experience fax machines are usually in a shared space like a copy room or something, not on a single person's desk because phone lines are expensive and the thing is shared by the whole office.
Hell, e-signatures are now a valid form of signing documents which allow for all electronic documents and that's in the financial sector.
When I worked for an EDI company (which ran into the fax issue on a regular basis and thus being forced to resort to OCR and machine learning to get from fax to proper invoice in an at least somewhat automated way), the provided reason was:
Because fax provides a receipt when it has sent the whole document
I.e. it wasn't so much about signatures but about being able to ascertain whether your document has reached its destination.
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@remi said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@Polygeekery This gets even worse when you consider why some regulations still require fax (at least in the cases I was exposed to), which is because they want a document with an actual signature on it
In the past I have created PNGs with transparent backgrounds that look suspiciously like a person's signature. I don't know why they wanted me to do such a thing because I never asked and told them not to tell me what it would be used for.
On an entirely unrelated note, I bet you could scan your signature, convert it to PNG, use an image manipulation program to crop it and clip out all the whitespace and leave a transparent background and then you could pass that off as a physical signature and bypass all those shenanigans. If only such a thing were legal to do..... If only......
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@Rhywden said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
forced to resort to OCR and machine learning to get from fax to proper invoice in an at least somewhat automated way
Oh god, I can only begin to imagine the ways in which that could go horribly wrong in a hurry.
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@Polygeekery said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@Rhywden said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
forced to resort to OCR and machine learning to get from fax to proper invoice in an at least somewhat automated way
Oh god, I can only begin to imagine the ways in which that could go horribly wrong in a hurry.
What if I told you that SAP was also involved?
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@remi said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
print out for
archivingthrowing in the bin
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@Rhywden said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@Polygeekery said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@Rhywden said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
forced to resort to OCR and machine learning to get from fax to proper invoice in an at least somewhat automated way
Oh god, I can only begin to imagine the ways in which that could go horribly wrong in a hurry.
What if I told you that SAP was also involved?
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@Rhywden said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@Polygeekery said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@Rhywden said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
forced to resort to OCR and machine learning to get from fax to proper invoice in an at least somewhat automated way
Oh god, I can only begin to imagine the ways in which that could go horribly wrong in a hurry.
What if I told you that SAP was also involved?
Well, now I can't even begin to imagine.
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@Polygeekery said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
Most of our clients that use e-fax services interact with them through email. They attach the document to be faxed to an email and send it to some email address like '8885551234@efaxingservice.com' which ingests the email, and sends it out to the '888-555-1234' number as a fax.
I find your faith in technology disturbing.
Do you know for a fact that efaxingservice.com doesn't just have a person that periodically checks the email, prints it out on paper, walks to the fax machine and sends it from there?
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@cvi What's the 90th percentile of their faxes sent per day?
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@Applied-Mediocrity
The broken link icon seems suspiciously appropriate here...
(weirdly the link actually works, it's just the embed that doesn't... iframely issue?)
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@Polygeekery said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
On an entirely unrelated note, I bet you could scan your signature, convert it to PNG, use an image manipulation program to crop it and clip out all the whitespace and leave a transparent background and then you could pass that off as a physical signature and bypass all those shenanigans. If only such a thing were legal to do..... If only......
I actually
did that oncehad the same random thought but it turned out to be more painful than the Wooden Table, although that's probably because I rarely need it (printing+scanning isn't that much work when you only do it once). The main issue is how to easily paste a picture in a PDF and save the result as a PDF.Acrobat Reader (or most PDF viewers) can't do it, and free PDF editing software is a pain. I don't really remember but I may have actually resorted to an e-Wooden Table, i.e. doing a screenshot of the PDF, add the picture in a picture editor and save the result as PDF.
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@Polygeekery said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
Which if that is the case then people are just paying third-party services to be able to legally email documents to each other because
and .
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@remi said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@Polygeekery said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
On an entirely unrelated note, I bet you could scan your signature, convert it to PNG, use an image manipulation program to crop it and clip out all the whitespace and leave a transparent background and then you could pass that off as a physical signature and bypass all those shenanigans. If only such a thing were legal to do..... If only......
I actually
did that oncehad the same random thought but it turned out to be more painful than the Wooden Table, although that's probably because I rarely need it (printing+scanning isn't that much work when you only do it once). The main issue is how to easily paste a picture in a PDF and save the result as a PDF.Acrobat Reader (or most PDF viewers) can't do it, and free PDF editing software is a pain. I don't really remember but I may have actually resorted to an e-Wooden Table, i.e. doing a screenshot of the PDF, add the picture in a picture editor and save the result as PDF.
How Do I Edit a PDF in GIMP? | Techwalla
Since PDFs are image files, you can open and edit them in image-editing software such as GIMP. The type of editing you can do in GIMP is limited to using the GIMP tools you would use for any image, such as painting the background, adding text, cropping, erasing or blurring edges.
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@Polygeekery said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@remi said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@Polygeekery said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
On an entirely unrelated note, I bet you could scan your signature, convert it to PNG, use an image manipulation program to crop it and clip out all the whitespace and leave a transparent background and then you could pass that off as a physical signature and bypass all those shenanigans. If only such a thing were legal to do..... If only......
I actually
did that oncehad the same random thought but it turned out to be more painful than the Wooden Table, although that's probably because I rarely need it (printing+scanning isn't that much work when you only do it once). The main issue is how to easily paste a picture in a PDF and save the result as a PDF.Acrobat Reader (or most PDF viewers) can't do it, and free PDF editing software is a pain. I don't really remember but I may have actually resorted to an e-Wooden Table, i.e. doing a screenshot of the PDF, add the picture in a picture editor and save the result as PDF.
Since PDFs are image files, you can open and edit them in image-editing software such as GIMP. The type of editing you can do in GIMP is limited to using the GIMP tools you would use for any image, such as painting the background, adding text, cropping, erasing or blurring edges.
"Since PDFs are image files... "
They aren't image files. It's a binary file format with a tag system...images are one of the tags...GIMP is processing the PDF and presenting you with an interface to edit it.
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@loopback0 said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@Polygeekery said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
Edit a PDF in GIMP
Woah. TIL.
So now it's not only a shitty version of Photoshop it's also a shitty version of Acrobat.
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@Polygeekery said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
Then it occurred to me.......what if both people use efaxingservice.com? Surely they have a routine to recognize this and bypass all the
? Surely they don't place a call from one modem to the next in the same datacenter? Right? If we assume that they do, then things are even more retarded. Now we have Person A sending an email to Person B and a fax machine or modem was never involved, and they should have been able to just send a fucking email directly between each other and bypass all this other . But they can't. Because and .Not so sure about that. If they did, they'd run the risk some people might wake up to that fact and realize the entire situations is retarded, just send email instead. Which would risk their business model. Okay, probably not, pretty low risk considering the circumstances.
@CodeJunkie said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
I'd honestly like to know the reasoning behind regulations allowing faxing, but not emailing.
My guess would be that fax is considered to be "analog" and therefor "safe" from forgery, whereas email is binary and everybody knows how you can just manipulate that. Yes, that's complete hogwash, but still.
As an analogy consider "Word documents" vs "PDFs". Everybody can edit Word documents, but PDFs can't be edited so they are secure. Okay, nobody would believe that anymore now that everybody has a PDF app with which can annotate on their tablet, but that certainly was a common view 15 years ago.
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@remi said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
My own experience therefore started by printing out the PDF to sign it, then scanning it
I recently did that for some shit that administration sent me, which needed 3 signatures, one was already there and mine would have been the second. Being jaded enough to not even think much of such a garbage process, I duly printed, signed, scanned, emailed back.
To my surprise I got a reply that I should "sign" it digitally so that the quality doesn't get degraded too much by all the printing and scanning. On the one hand I was pleasantly surprised by this glimpse of sanity from admin. On the other hand, I was annoyed anyway because such a signature is even more useless. My signature isn't anywhere consistent when written on paper, scribbling some ugly lines with a mouse makes it indistinguishable from having a random 5 year old sign it for me.
Side note: I do have a PKI card with which I can actually digitally sign PDF forms, i.e. with a digital certificate. I'm not sure if that only works for digital forms or for any random old PDFs, but it certainly wasn't what they meant with "digitally sign it", anyway.
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@topspin said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@remi said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
My own experience therefore started by printing out the PDF to sign it, then scanning it
I recently did that for some shit that administration sent me, which needed 3 signatures, one was already there and mine would have been the second. Being jaded enough to not even think much of such a garbage process, I duly printed, signed, scanned, emailed back.
To my surprise I got a reply that I should "sign" it digitally so that the quality doesn't get degraded too much by all the printing and scanning. On the one hand I was pleasantly surprised by this glimpse of sanity from admin. On the other hand, I was annoyed anyway because such a signature is even more useless. My signature isn't anywhere consistent when written on paper, scribbling some ugly lines with a mouse makes it indistinguishable from having a random 5 year old sign it for me.
Side note: I do have a PKI card with which I can actually digitally sign PDF forms, i.e. with a digital certificate. I'm not sure if that only works for digital forms or for any random old PDFs, but it certainly wasn't what they meant with "digitally sign it", anyway.
No one actually validates signatures anyway. Just like with credit cards ... there is no one validating the signatures on receipts back at the home office against known signatures of yourself.
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@Polygeekery said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
On an entirely unrelated note, I bet you could scan your signature, convert it to PNG, use an image manipulation program to crop it and clip out all the whitespace and leave a transparent background and then you could pass that off as a physical signature and bypass all those shenanigans.
Current Reader version has a sign button that lets you scribble a signature on a pdf, no shenanigans required.
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@CodeJunkie said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@loopback0 said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@Polygeekery said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
Edit a PDF in GIMP
Woah. TIL.
So now it's not only a shitty version of Photoshop it's also a shitty version of Acrobat.
One day it will be able to read email.
See: Zawinski's Law
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@topspin said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
My guess would be that fax is considered to be "analog" and therefor "safe" from forgery, whereas email is binary and everybody knows how you can just manipulate that. Yes, that's complete hogwash, but still.
GIMP - Film Grain Tutorial
Text and images Copyright (C) 2002 Eric Kidd and may not be used without permission of the author. Intention¶ Real-world images have lots of noise: film grain, scanner lines, CCD noise, paper texture, and just about anything else you can imagine. Computer-generated images, on the other hand, tend...
Yep, total hogwash.
I think I remember someone on here, maybe @flabdablet that had once worked out a way to automatically sign documents with a PNG like I mentioned and then process it through imagemagick to make it appear like a faxed>signed>faxed document. Or maybe I read that somewhere else?
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@Polygeekery It can also be done in Word.
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@topspin said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
As an analogy consider "Word documents" vs "PDFs". Everybody can edit Word documents, but PDFs can't be edited so they are secure. Okay, nobody would believe that anymore now that everybody has a PDF app with which can annotate on their tablet, but that certainly was a common view 15 years ago.
Oh, what's even better are "protected" PDFs. Which depends on client side protections to "protect" the document.
I've mentioned how my wife is publishing a children's book. Well, we got proofs the other day. I was asked to look it over for any mistakes, misspellings, suggested changes, etc. I decided to print out a copy and trim the pages and all of that so she could see what it would look like. It wouldn't print because it was "protected". I spent about 5 seconds considering alternative methods to be able to print it. I could have went the barbaric route and used snipping tool and was about to do that when I figured that Chrome might not "protect" PDFs. Well, it did, but then I wondered if Google Drive would "protect" PDFs. I uploaded to Google Drive and opened a preview of the document, hit Ctrl+P and viola! No worries. Robert is a sibling of one of your parents.
Technology is retarded and if you have to display it then you have already given up the illusion of security. It's like websites that think they've disabled right clicks or otherwise prevented you from downloading pictures. My kid's school uses an app to communicate with parents and it does stuff like that to prevent people from downloading pictures. In under a minute I was able to teach my technophobic wife how to use developer tools to find the originating URL of the photo and on that URL there was zero protection.
Or, just install one of the many Chrome extensions that disables their disabling of right click, if you need to do that sort of thing very often.
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@Polygeekery said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
In under a minute I was able to teach my technophobic wife how to use developer tools to find the originating URL of the photo and on that URL there was zero protection.
I do the same thing, tbh. I found a website that downloads photos from Instagram, since Instagram disables downloading it. Although, I've got to give Instagram some credit. I can't find a link to the image when I use developer tools.
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@Polygeekery said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
GIMP - Film Grain Tutorial
Text and images Copyright (C) 2002 Eric Kidd and may not be used without permission of the author. Intention¶ Real-world images have lots of noise: film grain, scanner lines, CCD noise, paper texture, and just about anything else you can imagine. Computer-generated images, on the other hand, tend...
Yep, total hogwash.
Don't forget about the other distinguishing property:
I think I remember someone on here, maybe @flabdablet that had once worked out a way to automatically sign documents with a PNG like I mentioned and then process it through imagemagick to make it appear like a faxed>signed>faxed document. Or maybe I read that somewhere else?
I'm not sure if it was automated but a discussion about a such solution definitely took place here.
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This post is deleted!
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@Polygeekery said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
Robert is a sibling of one of your parents.
TIL.
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@SlackerD said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
I can't find a link to the image when I use developer tools.
In Firefox you don’t even need to comb through the html with developer tools. Just go to “page information” -> “media” and it lists all media on the page with URL and a save as button.
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@topspin thanks! Didn't know about that!
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@SirTwist said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@Polygeekery said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
On an entirely unrelated note, I bet you could scan your signature, convert it to PNG, use an image manipulation program to crop it and clip out all the whitespace and leave a transparent background and then you could pass that off as a physical signature and bypass all those shenanigans.
Current Reader version has a sign button that lets you scribble a signature on a pdf, no shenanigans required.
I'm left handed, so I sign IRL with that hand. I mouse with my right hand so when I sign digitally I sign right handed.
I'm sure I couldn't make them match no matter how hard I tried.
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@Karla It also lets you type. You can of course use a touch or pen screen as well. Or your phone; the Android version has a sign button as well.
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@SirTwist said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@Karla It also lets you type. You can of course use a touch or pen screen as well. Or your phone; the Android version has a sign button as well.
I was speaking in general. When I had to sign consents for tele-medicine appointments. They needed a scribble.
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@topspin said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
@SlackerD said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
I can't find a link to the image when I use developer tools.
In Firefox you don’t even need to comb through the html with developer tools. Just go to “page information” -> “media” and it lists all media on the page with URL and a save as button.
And even easier: Shift+right click forces the context menu. Only times it doesn’t go to the image or video element is when some other element is overlaid on top.
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@Polygeekery said in The absolute state of faxing in 2020:
On an entirely unrelated note, I bet you could scan your signature, convert it to PNG, use an image manipulation program to crop it and clip out all the whitespace and leave a transparent background and then you could pass that off as a physical signature and bypass all those shenanigans. If only such a thing were legal to do..... If only......
I do that on some non-work stuff. I digitally sign with the "appearance" being the image of my signature. It actually makes a ton of sense-- if it's viewed on a computer it's valid without a doubt, and if it's printed, it's still valid (the default Adobe signature appearance of "Digitally signed by <CN> on <timestamp>" is stupid on a printed document). Adobe makes it trivial to save my signature as an image when I do that, but when wasn't it trivial.
Some U.S. localities have gotten with the times when it comes to digital signatures as well-- as an e-notary I find myself popular these days. I can inspect someone's ID over a video call and then apply a digital signature (state-issued certificate) with the appearance of my seal.
So we're getting rid of some of the anachronism, slowly but surely. One left that got my goat was witness signatures. Met up with two friends recently so one could sign, then back away, witness signs and backs away, as the second witness I sign and back away... stupid.
Notary - Wikipedia
