'Fax virus' panicked a manager and sparked job-killing Reply-All incident By Friday it's only natural to look back upon the working week with a certain nostalgia, an emotion The Register celebrates each week in On Call – the reader-contributed column that shares your tales of tech support trauma. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Seamus" who has fond memories of working as a technology …
Better safe than sorry. I always appreciate it when colleagues come up to me when they doubt the authenticity of certain messages, no matter how obvious.
And this is a senior exec in the 90's, likely aging him 60-80 years old now. From experience this is not that wild of a response for people that age.
>And this is a senior exec in the 90's, likely aging him 60-80 years old now. From experience this is not that wild of a response for people that age.
Add at least a decade on. The mid-90s was 30 years ago now and senior execs then would most likely have been (at least) in their 40s or 50s...
Roj Blake,
You're quite correct! I met up with a university mate I've not seen for a while down the pub on Wednesday night. We first met in September 1995. It being 2025 now, that means we've known each other for almost exactly 10 years and we're both in our early 30s and in our prime!
PS neither of us is overweight and we're both supremely attractive to the opposite sex.
This story was going to end in something like "as more reply-all replies occurred, their threat become reality as it took down our network for the promised 24 hours until IT could sort out the mess and remove all traces of the initial message to insure there was no recurrence once the network was brought back up"
Kind of a disappointment how it did end, to be honest. Really got my hopes up halfway through only to have them dashed!
I recall working as a temp agency contractor ten or twelve years ago alongside a fair pile of others, all from different agencies. Weekly timesheets had to be submitted.
The more up to date agencies accepted the timesheets via email. One lady who had just started was from yet another agency. The only way they would accept timesheets was via postal service or fax!
Cue a Friday afternoon helping a dumbfounded IT intern dig out a multi-function printer/fax unit from where it had been slumbering in the cupboard and connecting it up on a spare workbench, and off the timesheet went.
We cleared off home and came back in on Monday morning to find five sheets of what was clearly spam in the output tray!
Quite the introduction to things for the IT intern as well who stuck around to watch us send the fax off, having never seen one used before.
I'd have thought that a strongly worded message to the agency was called for - either they get their act together or they will be banned from providing services and a more capable agency will be asked to take over her contract.
They tried that, but hadn't got any carrier pigeons or clay tablets to hand.
Ah the good old unwritten rules of workplace like publicly shame any superior and find out really soon. No matter how factually correct or on point you are.
The superiors making constantly exactly similar jokes on others below them is just them showing how they are untouchable. And the meaner the jokes by them, the less capable they probably are to handle things if tables turn.
I sure hope people at least got good laughs from the email. The memories seem at least to be warm.
The lowly consultant's crime was to be critical about it, he might has survived if he has just said "relax everyone, this is just an hoax"....even better if sent to just the exec who could then issue his own update
As the article says, the other consultants at least learned something from this about office politics.
In the days of yore I set up an email to fax link so that my elderly mother could read emails sent by her grandchildren. She had her own unique email address for this. This worked well to start with, then mum gave out the email address to some local shops so they could email her when an order was ready or sent some product details. In no time at all spam from third parties started to arrive, wasting fax roll. It was possible to put a filter in eventually.
In Germany, there was a time when you would get a fax “This is a holdup! Fax us all your money!” and then everyone would pull their banknotes out of their wallets and fax it. Usually the fax was from some company you were working with! “Dies ist ein Überfax! Faxen Sie uns all Ihr Geld” - words very similar to what an armed bankrobber would say.
I used to work at a university, back in the days when email was newfangled and shiny rather than the semi-torturous curse that we've since discovered it to be. I got a call from someone who had joined the faculty a couple of weeks earlier, and for whom I'd set up a new PC and given her a basic run-through just to get her going before she could book one of the introductory courses appropriate for her.
"Hi, Rich11, it's Sandra X. You remember you set me up with email a fortnight ago? Well, I've got one through today and it's telling me if I don't forward it on to everyone then I'll get seven years bad luck. Is that true?"
"Hi Sandra. Nice to hear from you. Remind me, please, but don't you teach philosophy?"
[Small voice] "Oh."
Sometimes people's normal critical faculties get short-circuited when faced with unusual situations, with things completely outside their prior experience.
> Sometimes people's normal critical faculties get short-circuited when faced with unusual situations, with things completely outside their prior experience.
When a computer is involved, doubly so. And back then we were all IT babies at some point (unless you were born speaking in 1's and zero's)
I once asked my solicitor why the legal profession still insisted on sending documents by fax.
"Because they can't be forged", I was told.
I proceeded to show them how easy it was for me to send them a fax that appeared to have come from their own machine.
"Oh, that was very easy".
"I cannot imagine digital faxes being any more secure than signed encrypted email."
It's not about what *is* secure, it's about what's been *documented* to be secure enough.
Something new and really secure won't pass muster until someone forces it through as a material improvement.
Yep that's an underrated reason why old technologies persist and better ones take time to supplant them.
In the earlier days of the internet, there was no way to "sign" a document. No Docusign, and no one was yet cheeky enough to put a box "type your name to sign" like you still see sometimes. The only acceptable alternative was to print the document, sign it in ink, then fax it. Well I had email, they had email, so I thought I should be able to print, sign and scan the document, then send them a PDF of the scan. That was roundly rejected by my bank, they insisted I had to either fax the document, mail the document, or deliver it in person. I could not email it. They couldn't give me a good reason why I couldn't email them a scan, which was higher quality than a fax, other than "that's not how its done".
I was consulting at a client site in Toronto at the time, and I had access to a printer/scanner but it couldn't fax. Or maybe it could but it was some sort of networked fax that would require having employee credentials or something. I suppose I could have found some sort of a Kinko's type place to send a fax for me but it was a sensitive document that I wouldn't have wanted to do that with, plus I was kind of annoyed at the whole thing.
So I told them if they won't accept that email, then they'll have to wait until Friday (this was Monday afternoon) for the "time critical" document they needed me to sign. It was time critical for them, not so much for me, so I was happy to make them wait. When I dropped it off in person on Friday (I had to visit the bank anyway) the manager who was awaiting it told me he'd asked their legal department for an opinion on emailing scanned documents and was told "we'll have to research that". At some point later I remember emailing them documents so I guess eventually they got a favorable opinion.
There was also a period I had to go through where an emailed scanned document would do until the signed original could be sent so that they could get on and do whatever it was* but wouldn't finalise it until then.
For a while, too, I faxed from my PC. They wanted me to print, sign and fax various documents. Instead I pasted an image of my signature into the documents and sent then via fax modem.
*Too long ago to remember what any of these were. There were more than one.
What matters is if something is considered legally valid, which merely indicates how terribly behind the times the law can get and how important it is to address that at speeds above glacial.
This is also the exact reason for the long persistence of telex in shipping: a telexed order had legal statue because it was relatively hard to forge and every transmission resulted in a delivery confirmation.
That, however, was two decades ago, I have no idea if it's still used - even shipping eventually modernises, evidenced by, for instance, the discontinuation of rowing by means of slave labour :).
> The receipt only shows the recipient's RAM/Disk got the bits
The one's I remember from the 1970/1980's only acknowledged it if it had printed out and printed it as it received it.
No paper = error code
Of course fax machines got more modern and convoluted so what you say could well be true now, one would hope that a disk copy at least preserved it
Whatever that solicitor might have mistakenly believed, the actual reason they hung on so long in that realm was that there was case-law proving that faxes were acceptable as a matter of law for various purposes, but none proving email was. The situation has changed, obviously - quite a long time ago, as far as I remember.
https://www.lawsociety.org.uk/contact-or-visit-us/helplines/practice-advice-service/q-and-as/what-is-an-electronic-signature
So, it must have been some time after 2000 that it was actually tested in court.
In England and Wales the rules on service set out in Part 6 of the Civil Procedure Rules still make it easier to serve by fax than email where a firm has a fax number printed on their standard letterhead. If the fax number is there, you can serve documents on that firm (or in most cases their clients) by using that fax number and there is no opt out. Service by email requires prior permission from the firm, and for the firm to confirm limitations on their agreement to accept service, usually about maximum file sizes and use of particular addresses.
The main reason most law firms don't publish fax numbers any more is to avoid having documents served in this way. Most firms do still have fax machines though because some mortgage lenders prefer to communicate by fax (no idea why).
Some firms still don't accept service by email though. There is a risk involved - if a document is served by email, the time for responding to it runs from that date (if sent before 4pm, otherwise the next business day). If the email service takes place on the first day that person is on holiday and the date for responding is before he returns, tough; the deadline has been missed.
>>Some firms still don't accept service by email though..... If the email service takes place on the first day that person is on holiday and the date for responding is before he returns, tough; the deadline has been missed.
And that's why the company letterhead should show an address along the lines of reception@abc.co.uk for service of documents, in the same way as a fax number.
Need I also add that if someone is on leave, their email should be forwarded to someone (eg reception, manager, colleague)?
I believe that the medical profession in the US uses them as well. I remember a relatively recent incident at my pharmacist's where they told me that they couldn't fill a prescription until they got a FAX from my doctor.
Whether this was a literal FAX or just hangover retro-jargon, I don't know, since the healthcare network I'm in uses the more or less ubiquitous EPIC electronic records system, which you would think wold be more efficient.
Speaking of FAX freakouts, we had one in our lab back in the trailing edge of the FAX era which only seemed to be used as a recipient for spam, which I'd usually scoop up and feed to the paper shredder when I arrived in the morning.
They were usually in the form of some "notice" from "HR" about special travel deals "employees" could get by calling some phone number ("scare quotes" intentional).
One morning a new secretary got to the machine before I did and proceeded to duplicate the page and shove it under all the office doors.
I had to explain to her that it was a fake.
Yet another reminder that there's a first time for everyone.
Yep, FAXes are in heavy use in the medical system in California, probably because of the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).* The main thing about a fax is that the data is not usually** stored electronically anywhere after the fax is received, unlike email, where both the sender and the receiver can retrieve a message and forward it after the message is received. This makes the message fairly secure as there usually only two printed copies with which to contend.
However, many fax machines will store faxes being sent or received, which adds to the problem. Nevermind that many people use on-line fax services where one uploads an image that is then sent. My guess is that many medical offices use a computer to send faxes as well, though they may be able to receive faxes on a physical machine.
*HIPAA: "It aimed to alter the transfer of healthcare information and stipulated guidelines by which personally identifiable information maintained by the healthcare and healthcare insurance industries should be protected from fraud and theft" (wikipedia)
**"usually" unless your phone is being tapped etc.
"The main thing about a fax is that the data is not usually** stored electronically anywhere after the fax is received, unlike email, where both the sender and the receiver can retrieve a message and forward it after the message is received. This makes the message fairly secure as there usually only two printed copies with which to contend."
vs
"However, many fax machines will store faxes being sent or received, which adds to the problem."
You're contradicting yourself.
For at least a decade the floorstanding combined photocopier/printer/scanner/fax machines (from Canon, Minolta, etc) that medium/large companies use often contain a built-in storage device (HDD/SSD). One reason is for speed purposes - i.e. when sending a fax the machine scans in the whole document quickly, stores it locally and then faxes it at its' leisure (as obviously the scanning part is faster than the transmitting part). Conversely I assume any received faxes are also temporarily stored locally before being printed or forwarded.
It has not been uncommon for security researchers/hackers to examine storage devices from 2nd hand machines and to discover large numbers of sensitive documents as the storage device was never properly erased before the machine's disposal.
Indeed. A place I've volunteered with had a copier which has a fax function, although I don't know if they ever bother to use that part. It failed twice. Fortunately, they did not call me to fix it because I hate on principle any machine that prints on paper because I know it's going to break sometime for a non-hardware reason and be much harder to fix than it should be. They had a repair contract, so a technician came and fixed it. Whenever the technician left, they left them a hard drive that used to be in the copier because evidently it was storing copies of things which it didn't need to which might still be present on the disk.
My main question was what the copier could possibly be doing to kill disks if replacing them was the way to fix the copier*, but my secondary question was why they had configured it to store all that data when they could have managed this with a RAM buffer alone.
* I still don't know. The first disk to be removed was a small spinning rust affair and I just erased and junked it, but the second was a 500 GB SSD so I put it to work. It's still running now with not a SMART error after three years of post-copier use.
I think your story is a bit muddled, including using pronouns "they" and "them" apparently for different entities separated by one other word.
I'd guess that replacing the disk drive was indeed motivated by security, but that either the technician removed the drive so that data could be recovered -- and maybe drives failed often enough (some certainly did) to make replacing it a default action - or else the user removed the drive before the technician arrived, to stop the data from being stolen.
Back in the early '70's I'd often ring my wife (at that time my girlfriend), for a lunchtime chat. She was in a smallish office (readers into model making might remember MAP) and the person entrusted with picking up the phone wasn't too bright.
All this was at the time if a lot of the Irish troubles.
So I rang.
"Model and Allied Publications. Can I help you?"
In an Irish accent: "Discus da IRA.Youve heard of letter bombs? Well dis is da explodin' phone call"
I had to redial
> person entrusted with picking up the phone wasn't too bright
I honestly thought this was going to end with "who she was also a bit slow picking up the phone which was shared with the fax and I had to start speaking in fax tones"
Even to this day I can hear the opening tones of a Hayes modem when making an outgoing call in the dial up internet days (The Register may need an article on that just like the fax one at some point)
"Fax? It'll never replace Telex!"
Many years after I thought telex was dead I was called to a client to repair an absolutely ANCIENT IBM PC (yes, PC, not the more modern XT or AT!) which the client, an international shipping insurance agent, still needed because of the 8-but Telex modem card in it for communicating with some of their more out of the way customers.
Last week, I was out fixing an HP MFP, one of the big floor-standing ones, still in warranty and while disconnecting it noted the phone line plugged into it as well as the usual power and network connections. Yep, they are still using fax, although the on-site contact said it was very rare to send or receive one, they still had a requirement for it and HP still provide the option card.
> HP MFP, ....the phone line plugged into it.... Yep, they are still using fax,
I bought this recently, about +/-$80:
Jul 14, 2021 — Print, copy, scan, and fax with the compact Brother MFC-J1010DW wireless color inkjet printer.
Yep, the phone jacks are on the side. Have not tried them, last time we bought a house it was all "secure email" (what a pain), but it's in there if I need it. Is by far the best eighty-buck printer I ever met.
Yup, still have the functionality on my HP printer as well and the Macs still dutyfully install the drivers for it too, but (a) it's not connected to anything, (b) I have not sent a fax in literally decades, (c) I have no idea who I would send one to or who would try to send one to me and (d) I have given up on smoke signals as well..
I have, however, just come up with a use for it - guess which number I am going to use for those places where I suspect they'll try to sell me something later? I'd love the idea of those scam call centers getting an earful of fax moden noises..
There's a relic of fax machines to be found if the TIFF file format in the form of CCITT modified Huffman run-length encoding. I recall implementing that in my own TIFF-IO module for our image processing systems, way back when (1993, as I recall).
I also recall stories of fax machines being set up to send reports to the head office after midnight. Sometimes the phone number hadn't been entered correctly so some poor sod got woken up in the middle of the night, pick up the phone, and being treated to the scream of a fax machine trying to update sales figures.
"Sometimes the phone number hadn't been entered correctly"
I remember being on the sending end of that. We used fax S/W and the number was correct. The receiving office had two fax machines and for some reason redirected their calls on one to the other overnight. It was they who fumbled their own number.
I recall many, many years ago being a perpetrator of such things.
The days of FidoNet (yes, I did say it was a long time ago), and the overnight mail poll occurred in the early hours. FidoNet addressing was done through a "nodelist", which was just a CSV of Fidonet addresses (in the format 2:250/103) and the associated phone number, as well as some other technical details.
Well, the problem with this was that if the nodelist file went missing (in my case as I was closing down the FidoNet node), instead of doing something sensible like throwing an error, the software driving the modem went "oh, must just be a strangely formatted number", and dialled the numbers (obviously without the punctuation).
So, the first six digits of my upstream node's address just happened to match the phone number of some poor beggar on the other side of town. With this all being over the phone, busy tones and dropped calls were common, so you had a retry count that was not one or two.
I was still living with my parents at the time, and the phone call from the Police on their voice line at the same address (my number was strictly for the modem) caused a momentary squeaky bum incident.
Fortunately, the innocent victim did not want any further action taking, and my grovelling apology to the nice PC who called us satisfied all parties.
A hasty removal of any automated processes followed.
(Anon as, while ages ago, it's still a teensey bit embarrassing...)
Years ago, there was a phone in the corner of the tea room that folks would use to yak to their loved ones. If it rang, it would normally be answered as 'Up And Down Lift Company', 'Tartan Paint Company' or some such nonsense.
This day the conversation went: 'Underground Airways', 'Can I book a flight to Málaga?'
It turned out they had rung a travel agency just round the corner, got busy tone, so redialled but substituted the ATOL number for the last few digits
i had a similar situation where the phone rang at 2am every weekday and there was just a bleeping (nothing as bad as the noise of fax thank goodness). The number didn’t accept incoming calls when i tried to call it and BT were useless when I spoke to them. So a colleague who had a contact somewhere - they wouldn’t say where - traced who owned the number and provided a another number to call them on. After calling them and speaking to a bloke there in their tech team, it was them calling me in the early hours. My number was a digit off one of theirs and the dialer had been programmed wrong. He apologised and said he’s fixed it but there was no explanation as to what it was calling for or what the company did.
Our office phone used to receive "ghost" fax messages, often 3 - 4 within a period of an hour, then none for a week or so, then another bunch of 3 - 4.
Despite the fact that our fax machine was on a dedicated line (with a completely different number) in the receptionists' office.
This went on for several months until we managed to trace the sender to an automated reporting system operated by some company for their boiler house which would periodically send a fax detailing the amount of fuel used, water treatment chemical levels etc. Turned out that if the first fax failed it would repeat the message 2 - 3 times before giving in.
We eventually found out a phone and fax number for the company's head office and IIRC a fax was sent their managing director in a harsh font.
This was followed up with a polite but strongly worded phone call.
The faxes ceased very quickly.
Tasmanians would sympathize with the problems of late night fax calls
Prior to Australia's change to 8-digit phone numbers, Sydney Area Code was 02, Melbourne was 03, Tasmania was 002, 003 and 004, depending on which part of the state.
As a result, it was rather common for Tasmanian voice lines (especially 002 and 003 numbers) to go off in the middle of the night, thanks to incoming international faxes where the sender failed to drop the first 0 from the area code.
The problem was solved by the 8-digit changeover, where Tasmania became part of 03, and their existing 6 digit numbers were changed to 62xxxxxx, 63xxxxxx, 64xxxxxx
We used that in reverse.
We had a hotdesk area which was used for contractors, but at some point a sales guy wandered in and proceeded to receive phone calls, loudly (we had a 'follow' system in place so you could reroute your calls to the phone you were nearest to). Even tually we got fer up and stuck a sheet of paper in a fax machine on the other end of the office and gave it the chap's number. We onlky had to restart it once (it times out after 10 tries) before he gave up :).
Our progress-chaser received a phone-call from her husband; he had forgotten the shopping list. Could she remind him what was required?
She faxed him the list, including a £10 note "To pay for it".
A while later, he responded with a fax/picture of coins; "Your change." Enough to buy a beer ---->
She faxed him the list, including a £10 note "To pay for it".
Hardly any sillier than bitcoin, is it?
Unless she faxed both sides of the tenner which could be difficult† on one page, it would only be five quid.
Curious whether an otherwise valid promissary note (cheque?) faxed would have been acceptable in those times.
Faxes were very much a thing when I started in IT but the blighters never liked me and I rarely had much joy trying to send a fax. You learnt quickly to be very nice to the sexytaries (usually not onerous :) as the fax machines were obedient servants in their charming hands. Both the faxes and the ladies are long gone but only the latter is regretted.
† clever el Reg readers would of course photocopy each side and fax the two photocopies together.
Have you ever tried to photocopy/scan a tenner? Most machines won't let you scan money...
I discovered this at a school around 20 years ago when I was asked to assist a teacher who was struggling to make some "play money" as a teaching aid - we both thought there was something wrong with the new colour laser photocopier/printer!
I've always wondered how they are able to recognise currency notes?
I found by empirical research, i.e. trial and error using my own MFP, that you can scan small sections and stitch the images together, but then it won't print the result!
> MFC-J1010DW happily copied one side of a US$20 bill.
Magnifier tole me there was no "Orion" pattern on the face side. But there was faint yellow "20"s on the backside, next to the trees next to the famous building. I copied that side, it scanned an inch, and that was it. I got a picture of the first inch of the bill.
Seems to me if you copied the face on *both* sides, very few suckers would notice. Just think it had been stacked by professional or machine.
Getting the "feel" right is of course a whole nother game. While fancy letter-paper has similar stiffness, inksquirt or xerography is not intaglio, water-base inkjet and cheap toner don't have mint-grade feel.
Fans of the highly steamed Goon Show will, of course, be quite used to photographs of currency being used to pay bills.
"
Seagoon: Well, gentlemen, I've read the meter. And you were quite right. You'd only put on one more therm - one and six please.
Grytpype: Right. Here's a photograph of two shillings.
Seagoon: Thank you. And here's a photograph of sixpence - change.
Grytpype: Thank you.
"
and later
"
Seagoon: But if you're President Fred, there's a gas bill here which now stands at four pounds.
Bloodnok: Oh! Right, I'll pay you. Here's a photograph of a four pound note.
"
(Foiled by President Fred, text lifted from https://www.thegoonshow.co.uk/scripts/president_fred.html)
I suspect it is an urban myth but about thirty years ago there was a story going round that one of the latest colour photocopiers was so good it was being used to counterfeit Canadian? bank notes one group of the perpetrators were only caught when the photocopier was repossessed for non payment and a sheet of banknotes was found inside which had only had one side copied!
The default in Outlook for out of office messages is to send only 1 message to each sender.
When we first moved to our own in house Exchange server in about 2018, a couple of former colleagues in the sales department believed they should send a response to every email regardless of how many someone sent them so they set up autoreply rules instead of using the Out of Office Assitant. They also forwarded a copy of every email to the other person.
This worked fine until they both set up out of office rules up for the Christmas break, the first time both would be out of the oiffice at the same time.
Every email that came in to user 1 got replied to the original sender and copied to user 2. Every email that came in to user 2 got replied to the original sender and copied to user 1. Unfortunately one of them hadn't thought to exclude the other from the autoreply rule.
The server crashed about 20 minutes after the first email came in to one of their inboxes, luckily we hadn't even left the office before it died.
Just like a chap in our office who auto-forwarded emails to his home* email which was fine until when he was out of the office and not at home...his home email ran out of space and started auto-responding back...
Crashed the email system.
*totally against company policy of course, I think he survived with a good telling off.
...was so keen to send us faces, or possibly receive them, that they bought a fax machine and gave it to us.
Some of my staff liked it.
It worked,until the paper ran out. They didn't send any more.
Most messages went half a mile, some a couple of miles. If it was urgent I'd drop the original in on my way home, otherwise it wouldn't be there until th3 following afternoon.
As for received faces: never saw one I wanted before th3 hard copy arrived, or that could easily be read,
(We'd had a scanner, upstairs, and a laser printer, downstairs, for years, and a fax modem card, the two storey fax machine/copier)
In the days before email..... By fax, you could send a hand-written message, including a sketch, and get a reply with a marked-up correction/addition/explanation by return.
I slightly regret the loss of the telex machines. We had three formidable operators: There should have been a sign over the door: "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here."
Sometimes you didn't, nay couldn't, leave the telex room unscarred....
Slightly surprised that none of the knowledgeable techs here have offered an answer to this question, so I'll stick my neck out & guess that yes, they'd work fine.
The fax output was, (as anyone regularly woken up by a misconfigured one will remember) just a fast series of tones, all (AFAIK) well within the audible spectrum, so surely a digital line would treat them like any other noise made into a telephone handset's microphone, & deliver / reproduce them at the receiving end?
Someone at my office once sent a fax to the office general fax number purporting to be from a dance school and confirming a colleague's ballet classes booking, complete with spoofed origin number, and everyone pretended to believe it to be real. Good way to embarrass a macho bully :)
• In pre-Unicode days, FAX machines were used extensively throughout Asia because PCs supported non-Roman alphabets and ideograms poorly, if at all. ("Code pages" -- shudder.)
• At work we had a roll-of-thermal-paper-type FAX machine. One morning I walked in to find the supply roll empty, and the floor behind the machine covered with Spam-FAX adverts of various sorts.
• On my home PC, I had one of those wonderous option cards known as a FAX/modem. The accompanying software would store incoming FAXes on your hard disc, let you review them on your computer's CRT display, and let you print the ones you wanted.
Back in the 80s(?) the office gained an early hard wired Xerox fax machine for no apparent reason. We never used it to send or receive anything... It just sat there unused
Then one day it burst into life and started to churn out page after page (uncut) of an unknown document and had got though half a roll of thermal paper before we hit stop... that was the only time it did anything... never did find out who it was or who it was meant for
Then there were the Faxback [sp?] services, a pre-Internet mechanism for distributing documents etc. You'd phone an IVR system and key in the numbers of the documents you wanted, along with your fax number. The documents you'd requested would be faxed to you forthwith.
I used those to get tech documentation, but can well imagine tax departments offering such a service as well, for all their many forms, bulletins, etc.
It's not worthy of an On Call of its own: But around 2004 an exec forwarded a hoax email "from the London Ambulance Service" to the entire company:
"New gang members drive around, deliberately with no lights on their cars. The first person who 'flashes' them has to be followed by that new gang member in their car, who then has to fire a shot into that vehicle"
The "London Ambulance Service" as a source raised my suspicions, so I checked snopes.com: www.snopes.com/fact-check/lights-out/
I politely emailed the exec with the link. They had the grace to send a retraction to everyone.
Some evenings I teach English as a Second Language (ESL). earlier in the year I stepped into a class as a substitute, and starting going through a lesson with the students. One of them started laughing when the dialogue reached "What is your fax number?". Evidently the fax is as dead as a hammer in Sao Paolo, and it is only in backwaters such as the USA where the fax lingers on.
Also within the year, I have found and discarded spam faxes on a departmental multifunction printer, so I guess the student wasn't entirely wrong.
One upon a time I worked for a phone company whose logo resembled a Death Star. One fine day we had two emails arrive in short order. The first was a global offering, along the lines of the CEO we'd headhunted and no doubt offered great terms to etc was going away after 9(!) months with a generous package. The other was more local telling us to cut costs etc.
Someone decicded to do a reply all (I forget to which email) pointing out the glaring chasm and contridiction between the two bits of info. Within a day or so nother email arrived telling us that the offending indivdual was a contractor who was told their services would not be required, possibly angling no no permanent member of staff would never think such things...
Ah the happy days of fax shenanigans.
Drawing a sinusoidal cycle in pencil on a bit of paper, gumming the ends together to make an endless loop, and sending it to head office, who got a whole roll of paper with a sine wave on.
Then ringing up two hours later, in the certain knowledge that some lowly functionary would have binned it, and saying "did you get my banner for Sir Leo's presentation this afternoon?"
Or sounding a message on pirated Buckingham palace letterhead asking for someone to contact the Met about security arrangements for tomorrow's royal visit - giving the phone number of a Chinese restaurant.
Most fax machines printed a header with the phone number of the source - but that wasn't caller ID, it was supplied by the machine at the other end. I discovered that Panasonics would let you programme anything you liked, such as "Embassy of the GDR" or strings of oriental characters . So all sorts of unsettling suggestions were possible.
> Most fax machines printed a header with the phone number of the source - but that wasn't caller ID, it was supplied by the machine at the other end. I discovered that Panasonics would let you programme anything you liked, such as "Embassy of the GDR" or strings of oriental characters . So all sorts of unsettling suggestions were possible.
From the (hard to find) docs of my $80 4-in-1:
Set Your Station ID
Set the machine's Station ID if you want the date and time to appear on each fax you send.
(USA only)
The Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 makes it unlawful for any person to use a computer or electronic device to send any message via a telephone fax machine unless such messages clearly contain, in a margin at the top or bottom of each transmitted page, or on the first page of the transmission, the date and time it is sent and an identification of the business or other entity or other individual sending the message and the telephone number of the sending machines or such business, other entity or individual. To program this information into the fax machine, see Set the date and time and Set your Station ID.
Enter your fax number (up to 20 digits) using the dial pad, and then press OK.
Enter your name (up to 20 characters) using the dial pad, and then press OK.
It will dial-out even when these fields are not set. Even with no phone line! So not enforced. I recall older faxes declined to work until the ID was set.
I stopped in the Irvine Bridge hotel during the troubles. We regularly got woken by the fire alarm and had to shiver in the carpark in the snow while the building was checked for bombs. This was before "code words" were used to validate a genuine IRA caller from pissed jocks having a laugh.
Then came code words. The hotel got a handful of telexes (from the police, the NI office, probably the BBC) saying that if <codeword> was used, to take the threat seriously and react immediately.
The next day they got a telex, intended as a reminder, saying something like "the IRA codeword is..." And we were all in the car park in our Jim jams in falling snow for two hours.
I moved into a B&B room in a pub instead.
A client of mine (engineer's supplier - think big shelves of bits of metal and counter staff in brown coats) had a fax machine into the early 2000s to take orders. He also had a modem on the back of his Unix server. If he wanted me to look at something he'd ring my mobile, tell me what the problem was and then ring off, unplug his fax and plug the modem into the fax line. My phone was one of the clamshell Nokia Communicators so I'd flip it open, dial in sort out whatever it was.
All advanced tech for its time. All outdated now. All a good deal more secure than leaving everything connected to the internet. Have things really got better?
I think it was a Motorola flip phone (or a Nokia mini brick style?), that I bought a special cable for that would let it work as a 4800 baud modem for my laptop. I had a pay by the minute phone plan so I only used it if I was really out in the sticks*. But I was on call by email 24/365 so it was good to have so I didn't need a phone jack.
* OK, when I was in a campground with no cell service (in the north woods of Wisconsin), I had a coworker monitor the emails and call the campground office to tell me if there was a problem. I lucked out and didn't have to drive the 30 miles to the nearest town to get cell service.
Not quite the same thing but the company I was working for in the l1990's go this newfangled sales assistant that gave each sales rep all the info about every customer, and they could dial in to a modem to connect to the office LAN to update both the main system and their laptop with any updates
There was a bank of modems with call hunting (or something similar) connected to a PC , can't remember what the software was now but I put together some scripts working with the modem codes so that only certain numbers were accepted, and then it called that number back so saving the calling person the costs of a possibly lengthy metered phone call. (as well as a rudimentary measure of security)
Was quite please with what I done, and as it could also connect via telnet to the HP mini in the room that ran the ERP package, I set it up with my own number so that I could do stuff from home at weekends (on overtime) instead of travelling in.
Ah the days of doing things hands on and getting your hands dirty
Fax protocols and capabilities are actually surprisingly complex. During the late 2000s, colour fax was a feature introduced by certain Japanese MFP manufacturers.
Whilst there was a push to eliminate fax use from the NHS, it's certainly not gone away completely. At one point, the Office of Government Contracts specification for a basic colour MFP included a fax card in every machine. As a result, hundreds (if not thousands) of large MFPs were installed in places which never had a phone line.
Being an immature student in the early 90s and doing a computer course, was finally getting to use a PC (didn't have one at home). Discovered the computers in the study room were wide open, no real security to stop us installing crap. So, off the front cover of PC Format I believe it was, or another computer magazine of the time, on the floppy, was a screen saver that were tiny spiders. It was either a screen saver or part of a joke program package.
Once setup and running, the tiny spiders would start eating the desktop. It reminded me of the old DOS virus' like Cascade but in Windows. I think it might of been Windows 95 or could have been Windows 3.11. Pretty sure it was just a screensaver, so obviously don't touch the mouse and it would activate. I was sat on one of the computers after I'd put it on 5 of them one day and another student came in. She sat at one near me and some time later, started reading what she'd just been typing. And then it happened, the spiders kicked in and started to eat the screen. She panicked as she hadn't saved her work. I thought "Oh, that's not fun. It was supposed to be funny......just move the mouse, just move the mouse", I said to myself. After that incident I decided to remove it.
Been looking for that program on and off ever since.
I don't think I've ever worked for a company that would fire employees just because they've made a mistake or they've embarrassed someone. But then I've always been 'technical', not some seemingly easily replaceable work-widget.
Its a poor attitude by management which likely is the root cause of anemic company performance.
I did a similar naughty prank when I worked in a school. On April fools day I waited until a particularly anxious colleague was teaching in one of the computer suites and sent a few pages to the printer which simply said, “illegal document blocked”.
My colleague assumed that a student had tried to print something unwholesome and went off to tell the head of ICT, whose instinct said this was something to do with me. They made a point of mentioning to someone else while I was in earshot that the deputy head had got wind of the prank and was looking for the person responsible.
I was pretty sure they were bluffing and didn’t rise to it, but after a couple of hours my resolve weakened and I had to ask if they were serious. After stewing on it that long the joke was definitely on me.
Because it costs you ink and paper. A CIO decided that we needed a fax machine in our office, and had one installed with great fanfare. This was in 2004, and the only person that used it was him. Well, fax spam was still kicking, because someone's wardialer found us and we would regularly get 20--30 pages of cr*p to fill up our trashcan with.
I wish that I had thought of it, but it was my boss who went to a hobby store and came back with a pack of black paper. He would fax the spammers a request to stop, followed by 20 pages of black. That worked surprisingly well, for once we were costing them money.
We had a client who was a national account and they had branches everywhere. There were long distance zone surcharges on phone calls at the time, but there were overlapping zones. A quirk of the time in New Zealand.
So they thought about it and had a relay that printed and forwarded the price list updates or something like that to all branches with one fax. Each branch was configured to print and forward if it came from a certain number to the next one in the chain and of course the actual config was different from branch to branch so it was a pain to configure. Somehow this became the responsibility of the fax installer because the sales person said so to get the deal.
This is a story I believe because I still work with someone who had to implement their area's part of the national solution.
Another time when I was fixing the good old Laser Fax made by Lanier. It may have been a rebranded Toshiba engine? A real beast of a machine that could do anything from FM (analogue with a fantastic greyscale gradient but SLOW) to CCIT G4 with JBIG. Anyways, it was at a Gerontology Professor's Office at UBC in Vancouver Canada and once a year they had to receive faxes from a field office that just had a Satellite phone hooked up to a fax at a field office in a remote African camp. I would arrive and dumb down the config of the machine so it would NOT drop the call! Dropping the call was super expensive and there was bad jitter which would mess up MH encoding, delay on ACK signals etc. Many things got turned off and the max speed was dramatically reduced but the call would not drop and the graphs were legible without line artifacts that would cause bad science. I did that once a year for about 5 years in a row.
Good times.
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