This annoys the shit out of me; email is cheap, convenient, & ubiquitous; who has faxes in their homes anymore? Of course, it’s exactly the critical institutions that ur forced to deal with that have exclusive lock on ur records or forms (government & doctor’s offices typically). The standard bullshit excuse is that it’s for our protection, email can be hacked, bla bla bla. Personally, I think it’s a stall; person needs critical record (or to submit form). Person tries to email to speed up the process. Person gets told by soulless bureaucrat (or robotic medical office drone) ‘we don’t do that; it’s fax or postal mail’. Person decides it ain’t worth a trip to the Kinko’s, gives up and surrenders to sending/receiving whatever by snailmail.
Well fax is still on to date. but only few uses it now.
Only if you assume that fax machines are involved at all. People have been using fax modems since the early 90s. No real fax machine, just a regular old infectable PC. A well run large company will use fax modems.
It is exactly this outmoded, technologically unsophisticated thinking that is at the root of this problem.
As to how easy it is to fake caller id: 1. When I got my VoIP line, there was an entry for what number we wanted to show up on caller ID. Our number wasn’t even pre-filled in. We could have put down anything. 2. Not everyone has to be capable of faking caller ID. If only 2% of the caller IDs to a fax line might be fake, the company has no way of knowing which are the 98% trustable ones. So none of them can be considered reliable.
I don’t care if grandma doesn’t understand PGP, I do. I want to be able to use it for protecting email of important materials. Grandma’s issues are hers, not mine.
Thanks for the input, everybody.
I just got back to the computer, so, my thanks is a bit dilatory.
Signature required things still like faxes because they are basically a scan of a real signature. Of course they can be faked, but you’re much more likely to get a legit signature from a lay person via fax, than you are a fake one via email.
Digital, scanned, auto-penned, what have you… Signatures will always be a point of contention, and it deserves it’s own thread.