Japan still loves its FAX machines

Japan still loves its FAX machines

The Japanese are still clinging to its pre-internet technology (this would be the 1980s) – the fax machine. Sales of these machines exceeded 1.7 million and it’s become hard to replace it with anything newer.

What makes the fax so compelling besides the Japanese language being symbol based but also it being a hand written communication method. The joy of hand written correspondence is more warm and friendly than getting a text or email.

Fax is also hacker and virus resistant and an ideal method of having a paper trail for orders, shipments and approvals requiring an actual signature.

I send a fax once a month and I run my 50 foot 4 pin telephone cord from the back of the fax to the telephone line but other than that I cannot seem to inspire to have the fax connected 24/7 as I do not ever get incoming faxes. It’s way easier for me to get faxes on my Unified Communications mailbox bujt then if you ever deal with an insurance or bank these days it seems the usual “Can you Fax that over to me at 647-555-1212?” Sure! But then how many people have a document scanner or know how to use it the one on their multi-function printer?

How many recall the Black FAX prank where you sent black pages of information to the unlucky recipient generating a long dump of black pages hoping their toner ran out???

Thanks to the Fixer for this one circa 1993.........

"I've got a neat text file called "Fax Phun" which describes a technique called the "Moebius Fax." It's basically several sheets of black paper taped together in a big loop and fed into the fax machine (taped together once in the machine) to form an endless loop. I've done this before and the first thing I want to say is that it DOES piss people off. However, it's not perfect because the loop will almost certainly go out of alignment or will jam or some mickeymouse stuff like that. The call would then be aborted before you got the REAL effect you wanted - the ruination of an entire roll of fax paper! However, the advent of cheap Fax Cards has brought about a new kind of Moebius Fax. It's not really "endless" but you CAN make it VERY LONG. Just concatenate a bunch of copies of "Bunny Lust" or whatever together to make a HUGE text file. We're talking megabytes here. Gigantic. Enough to empty a fax roll. Set up your Bitfax software to send this textfile by fax to your victim. Make sure you have lots of disk space as the intermediary file Bitfax will create will be many times larger than your already-huge textfile. Reprogram the software to send a bogus header - maybe with another victim's name and phone number. And then fax away. Do this a couple of nights in a row and then stop because by then the Telco will have placed a print monitor on the line. By the way, using the same kinds of text files as in the above fax pranks will amplify the annoyance factor of this trick..."