Epic Games and Apple, having a slapfight.

[garote]

Epic Games wants to be able to distribute their software onto iPhones, and entice people into giving them money for usage of that software on iPhones, without paying anything to Apple in the process, except a microscopic (to them) yearly developer fee. You could call it "cutting out the middle-man", except that in this case the "middle-man" is the entity selling and maintaining the entire platform.

Well, if they wanted an alternative distribution channel, they could have one right now! Here's what they can do:

Hand out the source code for Fortnite, and let end-users compile it themselves in Xcode, sign it, and then side-load it onto their own devices. It would take several days of work and an Xcode developer license for every single Fortnite iOS player, but it could be done. There's your "app store alternative". I'm pretty sure it doesn't technically violate any Apple license terms.

And it makes sense, really. If you make money off the payment channel built into the software, like Epic does, the best way to make it secure is to open-source it and have John Q. White-Hat hammer at it for a few years, exposing all the flaws. Meanwhile Apple doesn't need to host your data files, vet your API usage, scan your code for malware, do any advertising for your app, or give you any free cloud data hosting for your app state. That's all up to you. A perfect solution! Train every customer of your software in the art of software development and proper security!

Of course, there's a problem here that reveals an additional wrinkle in the case:

If you give out your app's code and/or allow users to side-load whatever they like and connect to your servers and use your payment platform, you are deliberately creating a giant security hole that you then need to fill: Users can hack your app to do an end-run around the payment platform. Blizzard's struggle with Battle.net is a great example of this. For a very long time they fought with hackers who distributed alternate versions of Battle.net, in order to play unrestricted or custom games of Starcraft, Warcraft III, etc. They have now implemented a very sophisticated scrambling, encryption, and digital signing mechanism inside Battle.net and every game distributed through it, to combat that problem and ensure their payment platform is the only choice. It took a lot of expensive developer time, and didn't completely eliminate the problem - since they are distributing Battle.net to eminently hackable PCs - but it did raise a barrier against casual piracy.

That barrier is one of the things Apple is transparently providing, by maintaining only one app store, and maintaining a high barrier to side-loading random software. It is another thing Epic gets when they distribute their app on iOS: A userbase that is consistently forced to use the one payment channel, rather than what they would prefer, and what hackers are happy to give them: Not multiple alternate payment channels; but NO PAYMENT CHANNEL AT ALL. I.e. good old software piracy.

Epic's public bleating about "open for everyone" is an obvious smokescreen to give them the appearance of a more altruistic legal footing. They don't give a crap about opening up other companies' ability to bypass Apple's payment structure -- it in no way affects their business, except negatively. It's another piece of their try-hard PR positioning, in one of the most blatant examples of a stage-managed lawsuit I've seen in many years.

They could have filed their lawsuit without changing their app, without getting it banned, without crapping a childish 1984-ad parody onto the internet, without timing it just before one of their own "seasons", and without making the boss of that season an apple wearing a suit. Every one of those deliberate choices is an effort by Epic to cast themselves as a victim and underdog. They are neither. They make 5 billion a year and are now attempting to strong-arm their own storefront into other people's hardware.

"But, no!" you cry. "It's not Apple's hardware, it's mine as soon as they sell it to me! Then I own it! And from that point on, Apple has no right to say who can sell apps to me!"

Say what now?

"I suppose you think it is legal for Ford to tell me whose tires I have to buy, whose gas I have to use, et cetera, because it is a Ford product and I can always buy a Chevy? No!!"

Sorry, that is a false equivalency. It blurs the line between selling software that is loaded onto a device, and selling hardware that physically modifies a device. The two really do not compare. For a start, the things you do with "your" information transmission/storage/execution device regarding other people's information, are legally regulated.

For example, it is legal for you to buy a record pressing machine and sell records, but it is not legal for you to dub someone else's record onto your own, and sell those copies.

Sure, Ford can't dictate whose tires you buy. But the government can tell you what firmware you can install on the emissions control computer under the hood of your Ford. It is also legal for Ford to constrain the usage of the software they install there -- for example, you are not allowed to extract it and place it in a Chevy. You'd have to rip the entire computer (the PCM, or "power-train control module") out of your Ford and find some way to physically install it into the Chevy. That's the only way to avoid violating the software license you agreed to when you bought the car.

The main point I want to get to, is that there's actually a pretty big difference between an "app store" and the process of merely putting different software on a device. But first, a diversion. Here's some fun background applying to cars:

Third party dealers sell customized firmware for embedding into Ford PCMs. (Installing it voids your warranty, by the way.) To be specific, they do not exactly sell firmware, they sell customized firmware they originally downloaded from Ford by paying a hefty access fee, which they then tweak in various ways. Even those tweaks are subject to government regulations (for example in California) if they affect the emissions of the vehicle. (Meeting those regulations costs money -- a cost that those third party dealers pass on to you.) If you sneak around the internet, you can find software that actually lets you write custom assembly code for loading directly onto a Ford PCM. You could conceivably write an entirely new firmware for your Ford -- a tough prospect considering how complicated Ford's own code is, which you would not be able to use as a template without violating both copyright law and license terms. (Not to mention meeting the state emissions regulations...)

Now, turning to iPhones:

You can install customized software on your iPhone that is not sanctioned by Apple, by jailbreaking it. Jailbreaking is not illegal. Hacking Apple's iOS into some bastardized form and then loading that on via jailbreak -- that is illegal. Same thing: Violates both copyright law and license terms, and probably a dizzying number of patent licenses as well. Woe be to you if you try and sell that on any kind of market. You'd basically be committing garden variety software piracy. KRACKED BY MR. KRACK-MAN, etc.

You could legally write your own OS for iPhones and sell it, assuming you could get it to run on Apple's hardware. But Apple has absolutely no interest in letting you do this, which is why they now build their devices with a custom bootloader that checks the software against a digital certificate. If you got ahold of that and managed to sign your OS using it, you could still get around Apple, but only for a brief moment while Apple reissues the certificate and finds a better way to bury it in new versions of their hardware.

Does Apple have a "right" to do this? It would be rather odd if they didn't. If I made an appliance that used hardware working in tandem with software on a CPU inside it, I don't think it would be right for other companies to legally require that I build in some way of swapping out the software, so they could sell their own. That's extra work for me. I might do it as a courtesy, or if I thought it would increase my market share, but it should still be my choice.

Now, when you talk about an "app store", you are not just talking about swapping out firmware, or an operating system. You are talking about something with quite a few moving parts, many of them made of software. A basic "app store" relies on an operating system, a delivery method, a platform for money transactions, and an interface for search and discovery. On top of that, add digital signing and encryption, anti-malware scanning, a host of developer tools, advertising, content ratings and warnings, user reviews, a support mechanism...

There was no "app store" when Apple first released the iPhone. You could use Apple's software to put music and movies onto it, and (slowly) run a web browser, and that was it. They added an "app store" a few years later in what was effectively a firmware upgrade. I'm putting "app store" in quotes because, before Apple released that upgrade, there was no such term. (The closest equivalent was Handango InHand, which described itself in much more labored terms than "app store" because no one knew what the hell they did until they used it.)

My point is, Apple essentially created a new kind of marketplace on their device, and then developed and managed it - and the device - so well that the iPhone became the single most successful consumer product in all of history. Was it the wrong move to aggressively retain control of how all users of their device browsed and paid for new functionality? It depends on who you ask, since that store makes money for Apple (after effectively operating at a loss for years) and consistently makes more money for developers than any other.

(Before you jump to point out that there is some revenue split at work due to Android supporting multiple stores, note that this fact also remains true for in-app purchases and subscriptions, which do not split across stores. That is, a typical user of an app on iOS tends to send more money to the developer via in-app purchases and subscriptions than a typical user on any other store, making more money for developers despite the 30% transaction fee.)

Apple's userbase skews more towards people with disposable income. Companies like Epic know this, and know that they could extract even more money from that userbase if they somehow didn't have to pay Apple's 30% fee. Does that fact make them - or anyone - _entitled_ to that extra money? Why would it? If people can conceive of a way to divide part of a product out from the other parts, and theorize some profit stream inherent in just that part that they could grab for themselves if they swapped it out, does that mean they have a legal right to compel it into existence? Apple has that high-end userbase because they do a damn good job designing and programming their device AND their on-device marketplace. You want to draw a line between the two - device and "app store" - because -- why exactly? Because Google did? (Note that even Google insists you cannot distribute an alternate app store via their own Google Play store. They "allow" other stores to keep their appeal to the widest possible range of hardware manufacturers, but they personally loathe the idea.)

Since I'm on a roll, here's another thought experiment: Apple could have declined to add an app store, and declared that the iPhone would only contain Apple apps. It could have also made an app store and declared that all the apps on it HAD to be downloadable for free, and that furthermore they were not allowed to support third-party payment systems either, which would not have been a "store" per-se; more like a free library. Would there then be some kind of populist movement to allow developers to charge money for them? In other words, should we be allowed to legally or morally compel a hardware developer to create an apparatus for us to sell our shit though their hardware, where none exists? Is an injustice that Apple isn't allowing additional middle-men between their userbase and developers, to siphon off more money ... or is it an injustice that Apple is allowing anyone to siphon money at all, because compelling people to pay for changes in software on a piece of hardware they own is morally wrong?

By the way, if you insist on having a physical analogy for what's going on with Epic and Apple's App Store, here's a much better one you can throw around.

Apple is running a high-end hotel chain. There are other hotels out there, but when people can afford it, they stay in an Apple hotel. One of the things they like about the Apple room is the big, well-stocked fridge. Apple makes it clear that every time you take an item out of that fridge, they will add the cost to your bill. Apple also adds a 30% markup to the price of every item in that fridge.

Suppliers of drinks and snacks make a lot of money jockeying for position in that fridge, because people who stay in Apple hotels have disposable income and the fridge is very convenient.

Enter Epic Root Beer. They see Apple adding a 30% markup to the bottle in their fridge, and they want a bigger slice of that pie. So they modify their root beer bottle: Now it comes with a credit card slot. To open the bottle, you have to send Epic $5 via the credit card slot. Then they tell Apple the "price" of their root beer is zero. 30% of zero is zero, so Apple stocks the root beer in their fridge, but gets zero money for it.

You can see why Apple Hotels would boot Epic Root Beer out of their fridge.

Comments

[zeugma92]

totally with you on all of this. the Epic lawsuit just seems like a naked money grab with no conceivable upside for anybody except Epic.

[garote]

A rather interesting description of the current state of things, regarding app stores: https://capiche.com/e/ecommerce-and-app-store-fees-compared

[garote]

So, can Apple (and Google, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, etc.) through the legal morass that is an End User License Agreement, compel developers to only use a specific method of in-app purchases, while collecting a fee on them?

Apple has been walking an increasingly narrow path here, and right now it's laid along the distinction between "changes confined to the behavior of the device" and "everything else". That is, if your fee is for helping users purchase lunch, Apple doesn't take a cut. If your fee is for adding a digital skin to an in-game character, Apple takes a cut. They had to draw that line for pretty obvious reasons:

If there was no line and they didn't charge a fee, they would make no money at all from the app store. Every single app would quickly become "free to install" with "unlockable functionality" via in-app transaction.

If there was no line, but they still charged a fee, sellers of real-world goods everywhere would loathe it and shun the app store, using web-hosted "apps" running in Safari instead. It wouldn't matter if iOS had one app store on it, or five, or fifty. Also, the argument against it is not just based on the strength of the players, i.e. "eBay and Amazon and Target and Walmart are so big that they would fight us and win," it's based on the border between one marketplace and another. Is Apple selling software, or are they selling toilet plungers? As long as they stick to a fee from transactions for software and software services, they are on stable legal ground.

This path has been narrowed even more by so-called "reader apps", where you sign in with an account purchased elsewhere, and since there's no commerce taking place on the app, Apple doesn't collect. Developers are chipping away aggressively at the times and places they make transactions happen, and eventually it will get to the point where Apple will no longer be able to guess how much money they are even "passing on" to developers through the App Store because developers will be making it half a dozen different ways, most of which Apple won't be able to track. By then the whole debate over "one store versus several" will seem pointless.

What about hardware used exclusively for gaming? It is "right" for Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo to limit the ways game developers on their platforms get extra money out of their players?

If it's not, that would basically amount to a declaration that any company can be in the hardware business, or the content business, but NOT a combination. (E.g. you can sell a widget, but you can't collect any money when content is viewed with it. Or you can sell content, but you're not allowed to also sell a content player, or the software that connects them.) Because if Sony, or Microsoft, or Nintendo, refused to publish a game on their platform that made them no money but enriched the developer through an alternate transaction system, they could be sued.

Then there's storefronts like "Steam" and "Battle.net". No one - as far as I know - has argued that those are not allowed to dictate how the games they host make money from player. But a few years back, Valve (makers of the "Steam" storefront) started selling "Steam Boxes", which were basically commodity PCs with Linux installed on them, and "Steam" installed on top of that. Did being in the hardware business immediately challenge their right to decide what was hosted on "Steam"? (The product cratered so no one really had time to ask that question.)

It might be best to let the market handle this.

[peristaltor]

It might be best to let the market handle this.

No.

I know, I know, we've had these discussions and disagreements in the past (though it has been some time). There is a missing element to this discussion: at what point does a [Thing] become so ubiquitous, so needed, that it's time to turn it into a municipal service instead of a for-profit monopoly?

That's what happened to electricity (in most places), and before that to water and sewer service. What started initially as a nifty improvement to life through a private subscription service became universal and—this is the important part!—part of overview by the public, the actual customers.

Cell service (at least voice and text) has gotten there; it just needs to happen. (Oh, and further benefit! Municipalizing the service will remove the silly constant upgrade demands made by the for-profit providers, which will consequently quiet the silly from the backlash community of "G5 causes viruses". That would be nice.)

Data service might be next, but I share your concerns with the security holes.

We seem to have entered an era where the biggest actors in any given industry have declared themselves to be The Market, and have been able to cow regulators into believing them. Sadly for all, there is no "market" as it is invoked.

Markets are social creations. We, the participants in markets, decide. And what we decide, we can change.

[garote]

So what, specifically, are you proposing?

[peristaltor]

Interesting thought, solutions.

I would say that at some point (which the people of a society should be free to democratically choose) Apple and other platform providers need to address the desires of folks like Epic, and negotiate the fund transfer cut they take. Given the costs involved, people should not be forced to buy multiple platforms just to get the services they want from multiple providers who happen to be playing pissy snit throwing monopolist at any given time.

Barring that, perhaps it's time for a municipal control of the platforms. It's probably too soon for data, but talk and text? Yeah. It's what happened with water, then sewer, then power, then land-line telephony, gas, etc.

[garote]

... need to address the desires of folks like Epic. Hmm.

Epic's desire is that Apple, and all the other gaming platforms, receive ZERO money for hosting and delivering their content, as well as running the services that support network play (absolutely essential services for every game that Epic produces).

Epic makes 5 billion a year even without that "desire" met. F* them.

[peristaltor]

Behind every demand is a reasonable suggestion being ignored.

I'm no fan of either party, but it does seem irrational to suggest that, unless they provide costs of continuously securing the delivery method, 30% is reasonable.

I have a hate-on toward Visa and Mastercard and all payment systems, though, so it could be my bias. Those totally need to be municipalized.

[garote]

Well, as magic and effortless as it may seem for bytes to arrive un-tampered-with on your device in exchange for an electronic transaction that securely sends money from you to the company that produced the content or software ... It is not magic. It is in fact quite astonishingly complicated.

If you add in the ongoing effort to produce and maintain all the software that operates the hardware, as well as the software that enables other companies to develop for the hardware, the cost is clearly not confined to the process of shopping for an app on a store, but spread out before and after that on an ongoing basis. It's a lot more than the "delivery method" they are securing.

If you want a different percentage applied "across the board" and mandated by law, then apparently you believe you know the proper percentage better than the operator of the store and the hardware. Are you prepared for the federal government to nationalize large chunks of virtually every large tech company in the nation, and have the government run and pay for that infrastructure? Because if not ... aren't you just robbing Peter to pay Paul? They'd still need to operate their pipelines but they wouldn't be able to set their cost. A bureaucrat would be coming in to tell it to them.

Epic Games is not gasping for funds. And I don't know if you've noticed this, but over the past 15 years, properly secured software purchasing platforms running on properly secured hardware have created a straight-up renaissance in software development, because piracy used to be ubiquitous, and brick-and-mortar software stores charge humiliating percentages, like 50% at rock bottom, usually 70%. There's a good reason every single gaming platform has moved to internet distribution. Their developers prefer it because they were being fleeced by software store middlemen stocking cartridges on shelves.

It's worth keeping in mind that this collection of marketplaces is, on average, about a decade old. It's rather early to declare that only government intervention can "restore" "fairness", I think.

[peristaltor]

It is good to see that you have not veered from what I view as an interesting perspective, one that fits into a neat stereotype. The first element of this stereotype: gummint bad!

Are you prepared for the federal government to nationalize large chunks of virtually every large tech company in the nation, and have the government run and pay for that infrastructure?

No, and I never said as much. Those are words you incorrectly ascribed to me, probably to Straw Man the hell out of government action of all sorts. There are so many different types of arrangements in the society/business dance that avoid your blunt force trauma imposition of "nationalizising", ones that work very well indeed in respecting the interests of more than a few parties.

Next stereotype: bizness gud!

…apparently you believe you know the proper percentage better than the operator of the store and the hardware.

All I know from this current kerfuffle is that some operators have pleaded for decreased toll charges on a platform, and the platform has pretty much told them to pound sand up their ass. When the first party responded with a ballsy move, they got shut out completely. That's it.

Again, as I stated above, I have no dog in this fight. Epic can indeed fuck themselves for all I care. Apple, too.

What we have here seems to be monopolistic behavior. Seriously, if Apple can just shut out a player from its platform——with or without good reason for doing so——monopoly.

You also note Epic's profits as reason they should be compliant with monopoly behavior, without noting Apple's own obscene profits, often obscured by legal shifting and other shenanigans.

On one detail, yes, we agree: this is a new-ish market, not one ready for municipalization. That doesn't mean Apple might well avoid such societal impositions by not acting just like the trusts that got busted after the Gilded Age.

[garote]

I'm not trying to build a straw man here. I think it's vital to recognize a point; one that is a bit of a game-changer in terms of how this conflict is perceived: Apple et al are not operating a mere pipeline. What they do is much more complicated than that, and really much more comparable to a hotel chain offering space to vendors in their in-room refrigerators. The word "monopoly" is just not applicable.

[peristaltor]

The word "monopoly" is just not applicable.

And here we are in squishy legal territory. Again, having no dog in this fight, I don't care which of the two are acting like the bigger ass hat.

That said, they shut Epic and all Unreal engine games licensed from Epic out of their system. If an Apple user wants to play any of those games, they must get another freaking machine to do so.

That fact that such machines exist, and therefore no monopoly, gives Apple some legal legs. In the past, I doubt there existed side-by-side tech so completely removed from each other, yet so intricately intertwined. Really, the diff between an Apple phone and a Softy phone and an Android? Price and a few features.

I am heartened that some of these pissing matches (and quite a few other issues) got a grilling in Congress last July. Haven't checked in on those hearings much, but I like to see people playing monopoly called to the carpet. The laws that govern their behavior are still on the books, after all.

[garote]

If you think "price and few features" is all that differentiates those devices, you're just not paying attention. (Microsoft no longer makes a phone by the way. The closest they get now is a tablet with cellular built in.)

No, they did not shut out "all Unreal engine games licensed from Epic". They tried! But the court smacked them for it. It was a pretty dick move.

Nevertheless, "monopoly" just doesn't apply here. There is nothing "squishy" about it.

[peristaltor]

If you think "price and few features" is all that differentiates those devices, you're just not paying attention.

Technical details seldom decide what and what does not constitute a monopoly.

[garote]

I assume you're familiar with how lawyers operate? :D

[peristaltor]

Sure! You pay them, they do their best. I worked at a few myself (decades ago).

[android606]

I would say data needs to be made a public utility before talk and text. Talk and text are posed to die as their own separate thing, anyway. Especially with the whole lockdown situation- access to a videoconferencing-capable data stream has become quite normalized.

I say low speed "high-speed" data should become a more-or-less public service. I don't think it should be free for everyone, yet, but it should be available for purchase everywhere in the country that's physically reasonable. Standard 'talk and text' should slowly go the way of the telegraph, and some kind of standardized voice over IP thing should take its place.

Then again, there's one huge problem that seems simple to solve but isn't because "The Market" is extremely inefficient. Let me take the long way 'round: The internet has taken bloody ages to replace the FAX machine for the very very simple reason that there are too many options. FAX machines aren't inherently more secure or better in any way at all, except simplicity of use: You put in a sheet of paper, type in a phone number, and press "Start". Two minutes later, a shitty-looking copy of your document spits out the other end and falls on the floor, along with a second sheet containing a grainy copy of the dust and wrinkles on the back of the page. It's completely lame in every way, except for the fact that it's easy.

The internet could have completely replaced the FAX machine in 1997, if only someone early on had come up with a totally standard way to stick a piece of paper in a scanner, type in a name (or number or email address), and have it magically come out of a printer on the other end. Instead, the process consists of putting a page on a scanner, messing around with resolution settings, using Epson or Kodak or Dell or whoever's crappy-ass software to choose resolution and color profile settings (both things that the average person does not understand AT ALL), then save in one of a dozen image formats, just to get a file. Then, you have to figure out how to attach the file to an email and send it...just to have it bounce back because the recipient's email server doesn't accept "malicious" PDF attachments, or because your uncompressed 9600DPI TIFF file is 1.2GB and exceeds the capacity of the mail server's 32MB hard drive... Once you finally get the file sent successfully (and you call them to make sure they got it), you have no idea if their image program will open the file format you sent. After lots of back-and-forth, they finally open your file and print it, but it comes out the size of a billboard on their dot-matrix printer, and they have to tape 140 sheets of form-feed ledger paper together just to see that you accidentally sent them the wrong thing.

...and that's just for something as simple as a FAX. How in the hell would you ever standardize VOIP services enough to make a coherent system that will allow people to actually all call one another with different devices and providers and what-have-you, when there's already a system in place that does exactly that, except with poor quality? That's the kind of thing "Teh Market" just can't ever solve, because there's more money to be made on walled gardens than on cooperation.

[peristaltor]

I would say data needs to be made a public utility before talk and text.

I can buy that. Finland has already made data a human right available ASAP to all citizens (including the ones living with reindeer waaaay up north).

Talk and text are posed to die as their own separate thing, anyway.

Maybe, if the giants get their way. Cell service kinda already does this, having the phone transform talk into data, which is then patched into the talky network.

I am worried that constant upgrading degrades overall service, as measured by actual experience (especially of rural users!). 5G is just the latest addition to the many-bladed razor, the purpose of which is to force upgrades to people that may or may not be able to afford a new phone when the current one works so well.

The internet could have completely replaced the FAX machine in 1997, if only someone early on had come up with…

…a way to verify receipt, something which email, data transfer (except direct), and other whiz-bang golly-gosh still fails to provide. Sure, you might have entered the wrong phone number; but dang it, you get a receipt showing the thing you were supposed to deliver was delivered.

You can't legally deliver a document with email. It won't stick in court. With a fax receipt, you have a fighting chance at winning litigation (worked a few years in law firms in college, so things might be a bit different).

[android606]

Well, sure. I suppose you added to my point about The Market. A FAX receipt is still not any kind of proof that anything legible came out the other end. A FAX machine will gladly send back an ACK after printing a completely blank sheet of paper. It will also gladly record a completely false phone number in it's internal log, because the phone number it stores is whatever the sender programmed into their FAX machine's settings- which is pretty likely to be +011-999-999-9999.

There's absolutely no good reason to trust a FAX machine's ability to confirm receipt any better than a mail server's. The FAX machine receipt confirmation is like menthol in your aftershave. I'm 100% positive that FAX technology was approved over internet technology for the same reason: The ease of use made the user feel like it was "working" and therefore safe and stuff. If an internet protocol for sending paper documents directly was developed (FAX-over-IP) and built into a bunch of popular-branded all-in-one printer fax devices, normal FAX machines would have completely died 20 years sooner.

They could have literally encapsulated FAX machine data in IP packets, for an extremely low development cost. A feature that could be easily hacked onto their existing firmwares.

But, there was no market pressure to kill FAX machines. The people using FAX machines trusted them, and were mostly ignorant about why they shouldn't. They also simultaneously didn't trust computers very much and weren't interested in learning more. Manufacturers weren't about to take the lead- Who would want to do that when they can sell computers, modems, scanners, laser printers, AND keep selling FAX machines?

They got really firmly ingrained in the legal and business framework for utterly stupid reasons. It seems to be about once a year I still have to send a FAX to someone for some reason, and I groan about it every time.

[garote]

I hate fax machines. I hate them even more than I hate straight-up paper billing, because it's like taking paper billing and then wrapping it in a clown suit labeled "internet", which then promptly hurls a pie into your face and steps forward onto a rake.

[android606]

I couldn't agree more. They were ah-MAAAY-zing in 1966: but couldn't be any worse by today's standards.

[garote]

I looked at this again just now and all I can think is: "That stupid machine is about to amputate both her hands."

[android606]

At least clowns are theoretically amusing.

[peristaltor]

[Cue scene from Office Space, with fax machine as a stunt stand-in]

[peristaltor]

Don't get me wrong: I'm not defending faxes. The level of investment in actual paper in the legal and medical professions, though, should never be underestimated.

There's absolutely no good reason to trust a FAX machine's ability to confirm receipt any better than a mail server's.

And here the key difference between email and fax rises to the surface: the email only exists on paper after it is printed, and many aspects normal to emails (sound, animation) won't print.

One tech embraces print; the other does not. When a doc has to sit in a file box for decades without significant degradation, that must be considered.

[garote]

Faxes fade. :D

Receipts are the worst offenders, usually: Thermal paper is notorious for turning completely blank in less than a year.

[garote]

These days I take a picture of the document with my phone, using an app that auto-straightens pages and performs OCR on the text, then combines the last series of photos into a PDF. Then with a few button presses I use iMessage to send the document to the other person. I verify receipt with the "Message delivered" line that appears below it, and if the other person has read receipts turned on, I also know when they're read it.

The problem of what businesses do, however, is the larger problem, and it still stands.

[android606]

I'm really not sure what legal precedent was set to make The Law believe FAX documents should be more legally enforceable than internet transmissions or anything else. I would be willing to bet that the manufacturer(s) of FAX machines had their legal team(s) on that case.

Regarding FAX machine security, here's a kind of silly article about the idea of hacking a FAX machine to gain access to a network: stuff

[peristaltor]

I've worked in law firms. There is a simple rule of thumb: If it ain't written down, it's so much harder to prove that it's best to treat it as if it didn't exist.

Sure, you can hack a fax; but can you prove it was hacked in court? It's written down! It's on paper! It fits in this folder!

Welcome to the world in which we live.

[garote]

That description of what it's like using a fax machine or computer-based fax is hilariously, appallingly accurate. :D