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posted by martyb on Thursday July 30 2015, @03:45AM   Printer-friendly
from the dragnet dept.

Washington cybersecurity bill [protesters] are hitting Congress where it hurts: right in the fax machine.

Protesters have programmed eight separate phone lines to convert emails sent from a handy box at FaxBigBrother.com (as well as tweets with the hashtag #faxbigbrother) to individual faxes and send them to all 100 members of the US Senate.

The rationale, said Evan Greer of activist group Fight for the Future, is that Congress doesn’t appear to understand technology invented in the current century.

“Groups like Fight for the Future have sent millions of emails, and they still don’t seem to get it,” said Greer. “Maybe they don’t get it because they’re stuck in 1984, and we figured we’d use some 80s technology to try to get our point across.” All 100 members of Congress will receive each of the faxes.
...
Do US senators really use their fax machines that often, though? “Yes, sadly,” one former Senate staffer told the Guardian. They love their pagers as well. Faxes “all get digitized by the time they get to the office, though”, which bodes ill for senatorial email inboxes.

And why is 1979’s hottest tech trend still so popular on Capitol Hill? “One thing that makes faxes – and pagers, for that matter – still good tech is that they are analog and difficult to search. Members love them, especially to transmit data for things like campaign financing records.”

… so, if you're looking for an explanation for why government does things the way it does, the explanation that assumes maximum weasel … factor is nearly always correct?


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  • (Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Thursday July 30 2015, @08:25AM

    by wonkey_monkey (279) on Thursday July 30 2015, @08:25AM (#215801) Homepage

    Just the Fax: Internet Activists go Analog

    Faxes have been digital since the 80s.

    At my old job one of the first things I did was move the office from a paper-printing stand-alone fax machine to a server with a modem attached. That way it stays digital from the sender to the receiver.

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2015, @10:38AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2015, @10:38AM (#215825)

    Faxes have been digital since the 80s.

    Fax machines have always been digital. They just didn't seem digital to the vast unwashed masses who were following Author C. Clarke's statement that: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". So to those who did not know, they seem like magic, and since 'those who do not know' also 'do not want to learn [because learning is hard in their view], faxes always seem magical.

    Fax machines used the the analog phone system to transmit the digital data, but that was the closest a Fax ever was to being 'analog'.

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by wonkey_monkey on Thursday July 30 2015, @11:24AM

      by wonkey_monkey (279) on Thursday July 30 2015, @11:24AM (#215833) Homepage

      Fax machines have always been digital.

      No, not always:

      Group 1 and 2 faxes are sent in the same manner as a frame of analog television, with each scanned line transmitted as a continuous analog signal. Horizontal resolution depended upon the quality of the scanner, transmission line, and the printer.

      --
      systemd is Roko's Basilisk