Fax Machines Permeate Germany's Business Culture. But Parliament is Ditching Them (npr.org) 49
An anonymous reader shares a report: The sound of the 1990s still resonates in the German capital. Like techno music, the fax machine remains on trend. According to the latest figures from Germany's digital industry association, four out of five companies in Europe's largest economy continue to use fax machines and a third do so frequently or very frequently. Much as Germany's reputation for efficiency is regularly undermined by slow internet connections and a reliance on paper and rubber stamps, fax machines are at odds with a world embracing artificial intelligence.
But progress is on the horizon in the Bundestag -- the lower house of parliament -- where lawmakers have been instructed by the parliamentary budget committee to ditch their trusty fax machines by the end of June, and rely on email instead for official communication. Torsten Herbst, parliamentary whip of the pro-business Free Democrats, points out one fax machine after the other as he walks through the Bundestag. He says the public sector is particularly fond of faxing and that joining parliament was like going back in time.
But progress is on the horizon in the Bundestag -- the lower house of parliament -- where lawmakers have been instructed by the parliamentary budget committee to ditch their trusty fax machines by the end of June, and rely on email instead for official communication. Torsten Herbst, parliamentary whip of the pro-business Free Democrats, points out one fax machine after the other as he walks through the Bundestag. He says the public sector is particularly fond of faxing and that joining parliament was like going back in time.
AI will save the German fax machine (Score:3)
They can use AI to decipher the mess that most fax machines produce on the receiving end.
With sufficiently powerful AI they can keep their fax machines for generations to come.
Re: AI will save the German fax machine (Score:2)
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Lawyers and real estate agents are still addicted to fax machines. Most politicians are lawyers, so there you are.
Most consumers are addicted to convenience. If your document sharing system isn’t digitized and touchscreen-signature enabled by now, you’re probably losing business you would otherwise appreciate.
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Because a transmission by fax is considered a legal transmission, aka: proof of receiving on the other end. That is the current law. Other forms are: personal deliverer with a signed recipe.
An eMail is no such thing.
And if it is a matter of court, a fax received 23:59, by the courts fax: is a lawful delivered letter - in time.
At midnight: there is no one at a court that would receive a paper letter. You can not deliver a letter in person and have some one sign the recipe that you have delivered it before th
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Not sure. But I can google it for you :)
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Interesting question, what if you fed an AI sinply the audio signal from a modem could it demodulate it accurately?
Re: AI will save the German fax machine (Score:2)
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There was ample opportunity to improve fax machines. Ie, re-align the document so that it is straight, removing most of the jaggies. But that would need extra work, extra cost, and possibly by the time that was doable the FAX had fallen out of popularity.
The advantage is that it was supposed to be a true facsmile, and not just a digital photo. So today's legal documents don't really have this. Sometimes actual couriers are still needed, but for remote documents I have seen normal PDF files with a digita
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Oh damn it, you had to go n make it all serious n shit. :-)
Because digital signatures and emails and such are so insecure, when I do something like a large wire for a car or buy/sell a house or other large purchases, I always call the other person to voice confirm things like the account and routing numbers and such. It's not fool proof but does eliminate one genre of scams.
It's unfortunate we live in a world where it's so easy to get digitally robbed and the punishment is so small if they're even found an
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I don't trust caller ID, so I don't trust anything about a fax any more than anything else. And if a document isn't legible, I can't use it, so I prefer almost anything to a fax. Your average cellular phone is capable of taking end to end legible photographs of typical black-on-white printed documents in a variety of lighting conditions, and that's an order of magnitude more valuable to me than a crappy fax.
Ze Germans (Score:2)
Too you they were faxists.
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*Told
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(Told) you they were faxists.
I'm a liberal - more of a "fax and drugs and rock 'n' roll" kinda guy.
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There's nothing like faxing a woman in the morning.
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There's nothing like faxing a woman in the morning.
I faxed my first wife my marriage proposal - sounds odd, but you had to be there. Anyway, we were married for 16 years, which was 10 or 12 years too long. So faxing a woman in the morning did not end well for me... ;-(
Kill the outdated precedents (Score:2, Interesting)
Fax has an undeserved legal status because of decades of court precedent from a time when you could be more sure of the sender and receiver of a fax. These days, it's way too easy to spoof caller ID or Photoshop a legal document and pretend that it was faxed that way.
Legislative bodies around the world need to sunset that special status because the precedents assume a world that no longer exists.
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I think I'd probably agree with you. I work for a subsidiary one of the larger health insurance companies (though our division is only about 500 employees), and we still get hundreds of faxes every day. I'm told the reason is that a signature on a fax is as legitimate as a signature on paper.
So yeah, like you said, a little Photoshop, and it's all over.
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Something old just gets accepted and never questioned, but anything new is treated with a paranoid level of suspicion.
A signature should not be used for anything.
Fax or letters through the postal service are usually much less secure than email, and certainly far less secure than what email *can* be when properly configured.
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> Fax or letters through the postal service are usually much less secure than email
Incorrect.
Tell me how email has any security at all. DONT assume that the SMTP server is using encrypted connections as that feature is totally optional and unless your server has been configured to send to unencrypted servers then you won’t know otherwise.
I know this first hand. I sent ID documents totally in the clear when starting this job and had no clue. Google didn’t bounce the email back asking for confi
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Something sent in the post is extremely insecure. Any street thug knows how to hit the mailman over the head and steal his mail cart. You may not even need to do that if it's sitting in a mailbox somewhere, break open the mailbox and steal the contents.
Postal services are well known for missing items too.
Intercepting an email transmission, assuming it's all in going over clear text SMTP requires you to be in the path or to have control of something like DNS or BGP in order to change the path. It requires si
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> So yeah, like you said, a little Photoshop, and it's all over.
Explain to me how you photoshop a fax? Step by step.
Then explain to me how in court the senders original is photoshopped retrospectivly by the recipients. Also how you photoshop the mini version PRINTED on the recipt at both ends (depending on the fax machine).
Then explain to me how email solved the issue.... I think you'll find that email makes it so much easier. Assume that like most of the world, your company has no GPG set up nor S/MIME
Re:Kill the outdated precedents (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not necessarily worse than plenty of bad email delivery setups; but the difference is that nobody thinks of email as safe, authentic, or private unless considerable extra care is taken; while it remains sadly common to assume that the stuff that is pretending to be old at the edges is more trustworthy.
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> but the difference is that nobody thinks of email as safe, authentic, or private unless considerable extra care is taken
Oh if only you knew how wrong that statement is!
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Way back in the '90s I imagined a new device, the legal document mogrifier. You send the email you just got to the mogrifier where a laser printer prints it and feeds it directly into a fax machine. The fax sends it over a POTS line simulator to a second fax machine. The printed document on the sending side feeds from the fax machine into a shredder.
Like magic, it's now a legally sanctioned FAX!
It's a damned silly idea, but not as silly as the legal precedents surrounding fax.
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> These days, it's way too easy to spoof caller ID or Photoshop a legal document and pretend that it was faxed that way.
Nothing solves that problem in 2024. GPG? S/MIME? AS2? They could, but you know what? The stark truth is no sod uses that stuff, or does so optionally. When was the last time you emailed a solicitor using GPG? If you are lucky they instead would have a secure upload server for you to use.
> Legislative bodies around the world need to sunset that special status because the precedent
Obligatory (tweaked) Futurama quote (Score:2)
"The sound of the 1990s still resonates in the German capital. Like techno music, the fax machine remains on trend. According to the latest figures from Germany's digital industry association, four out of five companies in Europe's largest economy continue to use fax machines and a third do so frequently or very frequently."
It's all about appearances. That's why it's time to update our country's stodgy image and give it the sleek, dazzling veneer of the 1980's!
Was an issue here too no long ago (Score:2)
I kept a Hayes 56K external modem connected to my network up until around 2010 because so many government agencies and doctor offices still relied on them. I still have the modem but I tried firing it up a while back and all the status LEDs just stayed lit. It gave up the ghost I guess. End of an era.
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If it worked the last time you fired it up in 2010, then it's probably easy to fix if you're interested. It seems likely that bad electrolytic capacitors are the culprit, possibly in the AC power adapter, but more likely in the modem itself. Electrolytic caps can age badly, especially when they've not been charged in a long time, and 2010 is just past the tail end of the capacitor plague (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague).
Probably not worth fixing except as a novelty, but some geeks would tota
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Yep, that's what I figured too. I replace tantalum caps on motherboards and rifa caps in power supplies. I believe the modem was built before the capacitor plaque so if I do take a look at the modem I'll start with the wall wart and work from there. If I remember correctly the wall wart provides something like 9VAC so the rectifier may be on the modem's circuit board.
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Yep, that's what I figured too. I replace tantalum caps on motherboards and rifa caps in power supplies. I believe the modem was built before the capacitor plaque so if I do take a look at the modem I'll start with the wall wart and work from there. If I remember correctly the wall wart provides something like 9VAC so the rectifier may be on the modem's circuit board.
I'm surprised you've had to replace tants - I've always found them to be quite reliable unless over-volted or physically damaged. The Rifa caps are usually X-class or Y-class - I've seen one or two fail but I wasn't aware that it's a 'thing' until you mentioned it and I looked it up. Interesting comments about this in a Hackaday story: https://hackaday.com/2023/04/0... [hackaday.com]
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I typically find bad tantalums on older PC and XT class motherboards both shorted and opened (mostly shorted). I've had a few explode like a fourth of July firework too! Strangely though it's usually the two legged that are bad and not the three legged although I have had a few. I replace Rifa caps no matter what condition they are in if the power supply is over 20 years old. They will fail, it's just a matter of when.
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Old tatalums short and may explode.
They do this (short) due to age.
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> capacitor plaque
All caps dry out and must be replaced. The plague represents a bad batch that had shorter life than what was designed.
I recently fixed my DECT handset by replacing a cap. Certainly not a plague victim, just went bad.
Also any surface mounted crapacitors should be seeen as suspect simply for being surface mounted ones as they fail almost by design.
Power adapters can fail, too (Score:1)
I have a friend who continues to use a very old operator-provided Thomson (now Arris) TG-series Wi-Fi router -- there's a neat phone, Internet, and tv package.
According to the friend, it seemed, as if it was the router that was going to give up the ghost, because the connected landline wouldn't work.
Fortunately, he had exactly the same model router he got from another friend. The friend, who wouldn't bother too much, r
Didn't we have this story 15 years ago? (Score:2)
Guess it's a thing that some parts of business/ society/ legislation change at different rates in different cultures. Who'da thunk it?
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It wasnt 15 years ago, more like 2.
Japan is very big on faxes and physical media archives of financial information.
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Of course, we both could be right. The topic is "this story coming rou
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I looked again.
I last read about fax etc on Japan in 2021 as the Japanese government were reported to be looking into updating approved methods for submission of business financial info etc.
They also had rules about submitting specific documents to the government on physical media only, which I would prefer due to its read only nature. They were looking into "cloudy" options in 2024.
So yes, we will have seen this over and over as it keeps popping up when they chance a bit of it.
... undermined by slow internet connections (Score:2)
> Much as Germany's reputation for efficiency is regularly undermined by slow internet connections ...
Most non North American commenters here tout having high internet speeds. Is that just bluster?
I've been dealing with these $%@^@#$ machines (Score:1)
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T.37 [wikipedia.org] is the other. Most office printers have all three faxing capabilities built-in so it's pretty transparent. Just the set-up is slightly different.
Australia (Score:2)
I find this story hard to believe. In Australia, most business had fax machines up to around year 2000, then we outsourced it to an external service till about 2010 then dropped it. I don’t know any business in Australia that uses fax machines, even legal.
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I find this story hard to believe. In Australia, most business had fax machines up to around year 2000, then we outsourced it to an external service till about 2010 then dropped it. I don’t know any business in Australia that uses fax machines, even legal.
I believe medical was the last big user in Australia, but like most countries have simply gotten rid of them. The UK is the same, you rarely see a fax machine these days.
That's what makes this story, well, a story... The fact that a country as modern and advanced as Germany still uses faxes.
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> I find this story hard to believe.
> I don’t know any business in Australia that uses fax machines
Funny, I didnt know that Germany was Australia. I thought they were thousands of miles apart and populated by people of a totally different culture and historical background. I even heard they speak a whole different language...
Never heard of Japan then who are also really big on fax? They are much closer to you.
I love FAX. (Score:2)
It's brilliant. A DIRECT transmission (with encryption as an option) requiring no networking or intermediaries like servers etc other than a phone network, or radio link, analogue or digital.
Many say email replaced FAX, but the thing is email can’t do much of what fax can. What happened was loads of people got fax machines so they could send messages to each other without having to muck about with having a phone conversation. The home PC came about and in many cases took over the fax function, and w
BS (Score:2)
> fax machines are at odds with a world embracing artificial intelligence.
Total BS.
In the '00s I was a software tester testing software that happily received and sent faxes while using OCR and AI to pass the document through an all digital workflow to human operators for any human assistance needed.
It cared not for HOW the image arrived. Email, physical scans or a fax using a fax card in a pc. It cared not for HOW results went out, Email, post or FAX. It was just software that handled anything that wa