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Situations where analog is better than digital (lemmy.sdf.org)
submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by evenwicht@lemmy.sdf.org to c/right_to_unplug@sopuli.xyz
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Digital is always better in some ways, but of course not in every aspect. There are some cases where the analog mechanism still has merit because it does /something/ that digital cannot -- yet it is being phased out anyway because of this naive attitude that digital is wholly superior.

VOIP vs POTS

  • POTS phone lines are powered. When you have a power outtage, that is when it is most important to have POTS. Yet as a society, we are not smart enough to figure this out. We will all be helpless sitting ducks in power outages, unable to communicate.

  • POTS phone lines serve modem and fax transmissions reliably. VOIP is fragile shit. Sure, modems and faxes /sometimes/ /somewhat/ work over VOIP, if conditions are just right.. certain codecs must be in play as well as netneutrality (low latency) and QoS. VOIP is ultimately an enshitification.

  • Perhaps we could argue that voice quality is better over POTS than VOIP.

FM radio vs. DAB

  • Advertising is a reality and channel surfing a shit-show on DAB. Every receiver takes a different amount of time to decode the AAC or whatever is in the digital signal. This means when you hear an ad or some garbage, you must wait 5 or so seconds for every single channel change. In principle, a receiver could incorporate 2 tuners to make this quicker. But I don’t think any do this.

  • A bad signal results in silence, which means a lot of people who use clock radios will wake up later than planned. Could also be fixed in receivers, but still all those without such a (currently nonexistent) feature will show up to work late.

fax vs. email

  • Although it’s theoretically possible to have an email service that does not expose your email address to the recipient, such a thing does not currently exist. Email forces us to share our email address w/recipients who we do not trust.

  • Faxes are universally accepted. But e-mail is a shit-show of Google and Microsoft and others being fussy about how a msg is sent, and rejecting on a whim whatever the fuck they want to reject. Faxes do not have this problem. Faxes just work.

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[-] esc@piefed.social 1 points 3 weeks ago

Faxes are shit, they are hard and rarely works and no one expects them anymore (nobody expected them even 10 years ago)

[-] mesamunefire@piefed.social 2 points 3 days ago

Healthcare still uses it quite a bit. For some reason....

At the office I worked at for a bit, we had a machine that would turn the FAX messages into PDFs and then let the department know they received something rather than printing everything. It even had spam filters and while/black list services. It was like a much worse internet, but it did work. Ive heard people got raspberry pis to do relatively the same thing.

Im not saying your wrong, but there is a bit more nuance in the real world.

[-] esc@piefed.social 1 points 3 days ago

Yeah, probably depends on the part of the world and culture a lot.

[-] evenwicht@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Faxes are shit,

Not if you know what you’re doing. Of course it’s shit if you feed a copy of a copy of a color doc into a scanner and send to a machine that thermo-prints hard copies from a roll of thin paper.

If you compose in LaTeX using the Lucida Fax font, generate a group 3 fax TIFF and directly send that to a recipient competent enough to keep it electronic, the quality is so crisp the only clue that it’s a fax would be by someone with a meticulous recognition of that font, if not from a fax header.

they are hard and rarely works

You have to plug the machine in and power it on. Then it works. Of course email has the same prerequisite, and much more.

For me, email rarely works. Google and Microsoft mail servers reject RFC-compliant mail from my mail server, so probably over 90% of email recipients are on a broken infra.

and no one expects them anymore (nobody expected them even 10 years ago)

True, as most people are not competent enough to realise fax avoids fussy and broken anti-spam algos, and that it minimises their exposure to tracking and surveillance when corresponding with an encryption-naive recipient.

[-] esc@piefed.social 1 points 3 weeks ago

LaTeX

There are close to 3 people in the world that compose them the way you describe.

plug the machine in and power it on

Also you have to have a fixed phone line and recipient as well, and your telephone exchange needs to be something that is from the last century. In any other case it won't work the way you describe.

everything else

Fax doesn't work for the vast majority of people for multitude of reasons.

[-] evenwicht@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

There are close to 3 people in the world that compose them the way you describe.

Luckily anyone can join the club if they want their faxes to have over-achieving quality. There is no law against it.

Also you have to have a fixed phone line

Not at all:

  1. There are 3rd party fax services who can send it for you.
  2. Fax over VOIP works if you select the right algo and have reasonable latency.

Side note: “fixed lines” are just an illusion. You can subscribe to a POTS line but unless you are in a quite primitive region it will just be a VOIP service that is hidden from you at the end of your street.

Fax doesn’t work for the vast majority of people for multitude of reasons.

There are only 2 credible obscure corner cases that yield a fax failure. Countless things break email. Email is broken as shit:

The things that make fax unreliable

The things that make e-mail unreliable

  • the recipient's client tools decide incorrectly that the message is spam and stores the message where it will never be seen
  • the receiving mail server uses a DNSBL to...
    • ..block connections from the sender
    • ..accept and blackhole messages from the sender (ref outlook)
    • ..accept and deliver messages to a place that is never visited
  • the recipient's mail service decides for any flawed reason that the message is spam and delivers it to a folder that will never be seen
  • the recipient uses a spamgourmet.com address and forgot to update the counter thus causing the message to be blackholed or the service provider of the protected address blocks the spamgourmet.com server specifically
  • recipient's mail server may reject the message if the domain name appearing in the From: field does not correspond with the IP address of the transmitting server (e.g. MUA allows freetyping the From: field and sender uses a spamgourmet.com address)
  • the recipient uses a forwarding service like Namesilo, who refuses to forward messages from unrecognized senders because the forwarding service considers their own IP reputation more important than the actual delivery of a single message
  • the recipient's mail server uses graylisting with unreasonable delay. Time-sensitive messages can miss the deadline or sending servers can give up before the time lapse.
  • recipient's e-mail server blocks the attachment (and possibly the whole email) incorrectly flagging it as malware.
  • recipient's e-mail address is unknown because a webmaster's anti-spam effort...
    • ..is to not publish any email addresses. Senders are forced to use a contact form that's blocked by a sometimes broken CAPTCHA. And when the webform does work, PDF attachments are not possible.
    • ..is to block e-mail address disclosure until a CAPTCHA is solved, and the CAPTCHA is broken or the sender rejects the effort required
    • ..entails hiding e-mail addresses until some javascript renders them, but javascript is either unsupported or disabled by the visitor's secure browser. There is also no indication to the visitor that an e-mail address is even available if j/s were to execute.
  • recipient's e-mail address is unknown because the webpage publishing it blocks Tor and the visitor will be damned if they must give up their security to view the page
  • the sender simply cannot send the message because the corporation who handles the recipient's email (e.g. is a PRISM corp like Google or Microsoft) is not sufficiently trustworthy for the content of the message
  • large corporations use DNSBLs to force email senders to relay their mail through a static IP, and the sender with dynamic IP may not consider any third party sufficiently trustworthy to see all their emails
  • sender boycotts the recipients e-mail provider
  • recipient does not have an S/MIME cert. or PGP public key, thus failing to achieve the level of confidentiality required by the sender (some sys admins even refuse to accommodate encrypted e-mail in fear that a malicious payload will get past the organizations malware scanner)
  • recipient uses an EU-based e-mail service provider, where law obligates collection of metadata (a collection that may jeopardize the level of confidentiality required by the sender), and the recipient or sender are not using a Memory Hole-capable MUA to protect their metadata
  • recipient abandons their mailbox because they have other accounts and can't be bothered to manage all of them, and unread mail piles up
  • sender is a technologically-challenged bank or brokerage who sends multipart MIME messages and puts in the plaintext part:
    • a message saying "Upgrade your mail client" instead of the actual message
    • a large dump of unreadable machine-generated HTML indistinguishable from garbage
  • sender attaches a file in a non-standard proprietary format like MS Word and the recipient cannot view it (or does not trust it to open it for viewing).
  • the email service requires users to solve a CAPTCHA, which may be broken, might refuse to send the puzzle to certain IP addresses, or the puzzle might not be understandable. Protonmail is an example of an email service that pushes CAPTCHAs.
[-] esc@piefed.social 1 points 2 weeks ago
  1. Noone will join the club
  2. What you just described is nothing like just power it on and it works.
  3. Everything else is irrelevant, there was no statement that email is better.
[-] elucubra@sopuli.xyz 1 points 3 weeks ago

I had a client who refused to use eMail, and used fax until it was really fringe. The guy got hit by massive spam calls, and wasted paper and toner (thankfully not ink or thermal) like crazy. I believe faxes do have some use cases even today, but they are rather fringe.

[-] evenwicht@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

The guy got hit by massive spam calls,

Obviously he did not know what he was doing. Foolish to expose a voice number to gratis 3rd-party fax services. If you do it right you get neither voice spam nor written spam. Sending email and sharing an email address is a good recipe for receiving spam.

and wasted paper

Fax does not require paper on either side of the transmission, so no need for waste.

and toner (thankfully not ink or thermal) like crazy.

Toner implies laser which wastes substantially more energy than inkjet. But of course the wisest fax recipients don’t bother with hard copies at all in the first place.

I believe faxes do have some use cases even today, but they are rather fringe.

That’s because privacy and data minimisation is fringe. Boycotting Microsoft and Google is also fringe.

this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2026
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The developed world is increasingly forcing people to use incompetently designed technology. The #digitalTransformation movement is being forced onto people.

Just like we cannot rely on the public sector to solve the climate crisis, we also cannot rely on the public sector to deploy well-designed privacy-respecting inclusive technology. We always need an analog option.

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