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Comment by peterwwillis | Hacker News Reader

The only digital equivalent of a fax is:

1) Get a public IP address on the internet. 2) Put a server on the internet, with an open port, running software that can receive arbitrary files. 3) Connect to it from your computer and send it a file. 4) Receive confirmation that the remote server correctly received your whole file.

Everything else, like e-mail, depends on a chain of service providers and accounts to deliver and store content reliably over the network. Fax enables any person with a phone number to send documents to any person with a phone number. E-mail may seem similar (you need a phone service provider and a fax machine), but I think faxing is a less technically complicated solution, more reliable overall, and allows a lot more independence.

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Doesn't calling a phone number rely on a chain of service providers as well? Your fax probably needs to be bounced through several companies and some of that infrastructure ends up shared with internet infra anyway.

Though I agree that for many end users sending a fax is easier and simpler, but that seems mostly because of experience and familiarity.

The big differences to me are that faxes don't need an "account" to send/receive files, the machines are simpler and cheaper, they have far fewer intermediary technical and user issues, and their network is way more reliable. If you depend on sending and receiving documents, faxes are light-years more reliable and less complicated than, say, e-mail.

Can you count the number of times an internet connection has gone down for a business, compared to the number of times the PSTN has gone down? Unless a truck takes out a utility pole, there's no contest. And the lack of obstructions for user access removes a whole slew of other issues.

> The big differences to me are that faxes don't need an "account" to send/receive files, the machines are simpler and cheaper, they have far fewer intermediary technical and user issues, and their network is way more reliable. If you depend on sending and receiving documents, faxes are light-years more reliable and less complicated than, say, e-mail.

You most definitely need an "account" with your telephony provider in order to receive anything.

I meant regarding e-mail (or any other internet file transfer service). Your e-mail account, and that of your recipient, are accounts used to authorize access. If either you or your recipient lose account access, you can not send and receive files. This happens all the time, like when your corporate ID gets locked for no reason, or a user forgets their password, or some other problem occurs.

Faxes require no such accounts. Just plug the machine in to a phone line and send a document.

More accurately, faxes do not support accounts. Faxes assume that a single phone line has a single user, like machines on computer networks in the bad old days. The modern equivalent would be using a single email account for the entire company and posting the password around the office.

I recently had to send some things by fax (and actually do have a fax machine), and had trouble with the remote fax server disconnecting in the middle. I finally figured out part of the problem was it did not like the direction I was feeding the pages. But there was no worthwhile error message, and the connection only errored out several pages in.

Also the quality is kind of crap. One of the pages was unreadable, so after having sent the "official" version as a fax (they accepted faxed raised-seal documents as originals), I had to follow up with a higher quality color scan anyway.

Still your point about it being P2P, relying on just the physical network and its addressing is appreciated and duly noted.

>>Can you count the number of times an internet connection has gone down for a business, compared to the number of times the PSTN has gone down?

I will give you that point, but counter with this: fax machines rely on printers, which IME are one of the least reliable pieces of technology. A printer being jammed/broken is far more common than losing internet connectivity.

And business people nowadays can check their email on a cellphone. Even if they don't, the email will still be there when they get back online. A mangled fax or one received when the power's out can be permanently lost.

A fax confirmation sheet can be shown in court as proof that the other party received the document in some cases. Email is a lot trickier.

In fact, it is possible for telephony providers to recognize fax signals, decode them themselves and just send the decoded bits over the connection, then re-generate the fax sounds at the other end. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.38 .

Reliable? Depends on the implementation I guess. If it's competing with a phone line they might not get it. We used fax to communicate with with far flung doctors offices and it was nothing but trouble. The process of sending or receiving a fax often entaled calling back and fourth to ensure that it arrived and re-sending.

Email, on the other hand, always got through.

It doesn't need to be that equivalent though. Some changes can be / are beneficial.

The last time I had to send a fax was when my back account had fraudulent charges made against it. My now-former bank wanted me to fill out a form — fine — which they would only snail-mail or fax to me.

This form could simply be hosted on their website, as a PDF. In fact, the form I received had something like Z:\BigBankCo_Shared\Docs\Forms\Fraud.docx on the bottom of it, and in the end, I gave them a number of a service that automatically converts faxes into PDFs in emails.

Now, they wanted me to fax (or snail mail) it back. A email with an attachment to a support address, such as fraud-form-returns@bigbank.example.com, would have suffice. Directly, bit for bit equivalent? No. Gets the job done? Yes.

All together, the entire thing was a few simple questions (my info, information about the transactions, and a statement essentially swearing up and down it wasn't my fault) that could also have just been gathered by an HTML form.

(And, I'm not saying these should replace the snail mail/fax; keep them, if there is sufficient demand for them. Which I suspect that once you have an HTML form, there won't be.)

You can run inbound and outbound SMTP servers yourself, and send email with no forwarding. Nobody does this, but the protocols support it fine.

The official protocols do support this, true, but nearly all of the major email service providers (e.g., Gmail, etc) will assume your email is spam if you send it from your own random mail server.

They're intermediaries. If you want to bypass intermediaries, to emulate a fax, it works fine.

> Everything else, like e-mail, depends on a chain of service providers and accounts to deliver and store content reliably over the network

In your proposal, how do the packets get from point A to B?

Over the public network. Via fax that's the PSTN. Via internet that's... the internet. A phone number == A publicly routable IP address.

I think the point was that you still directly depend on a chain of service providers when you use the Internet. You don't free yourself of that.

I think there's an assumed split between infrastructure providers (ISP, PSTN, telco) and service providers (webmail, hosting, etc.) and fax only needs the former.

Ok, so, we're all agreeing on the same thing. The internet method I proposed is the same as faxing, but anything else requires more service providers, machines and steps.

Sounds like an FTP server to me.

An FTP server that also then does some processing on the received file. It’s the processing that opens the machine up to exploit, not the receiving of the data.

If one piece of FTP software were both a client and server and allowed anonymous write access, yes, FTP would be fine.

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