[cinntaile]

Deciphering fax messages? What is this, the 90s?

[kergonath]

We have decades of internal reports on film that we’d like to make accessible and searchable. We don’t do it with new documents, but we have a huge backlog.

[xyproto]

Fax is still hard to hack, so some organizations have kept it alive for security.

[meatmanek]

I think the most useful thing about faxes, security-wise, is that in their basic form they require zero digital storage of the image being sent. The only record on either side of the transmission is a piece of paper.*

Contrast that with email, which is store-and-forward by design, and now you have to put in effort to ensure both the sending and receiving email providers delete the message in a timely manner.

* obviously you can add store-and-forward behavior to either fax machine, but it's not the default.