Random Thoughts

I don't get fax machines

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The past 4 days I swear I’ve done nothing but send faxes. Why is that? What makes a fax so much more secure than an e-mail with a digital secure PDF document?

It’s frustrating really. It’s hard to find a fax machine anymore and I’ve ended up spending over $10 faxing stuff to people. When I asked a university person the other day why you still need to fax stuff and can’t send a digital copy (Isn’t a fax a digital copy?) they told me they need an original signature. That I don’t get. I could forge a signature and send a fax just as easy as I can scan my signature and add it to any document to be e-mailed and printed.

How is a fax viewed more secure than a digital document?

I just don’t get it…fax machines need to go away. Just another old technology that is still sticking around because we don’t want to give it up. What are we so scared of?

My favorite though has to be that I can fill out my taxes completely online and submit them from Shanghai. But I can’t fill out and send a electronic W2 or I-9 form to an employer. Is it just me or is there something wrong with that?

[tags]faxmachine[/tags]

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I started blogging in 2005 and found it such a powerful way to reflect and share my thinking about technology, this generation, and how we prepare students for their future not our past.

2 Comments

  1. Fax machines have long been “my least favorite telecommunications technology”… why scan paper into an electronic format (a good thing) and then reverse the process to create more paper (a bad thing)!?

    Now a transporter that actually sent the original wouldn’t be as bad… but fax machines are just plain silly. I hate needing one for business.

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