FCC Opens Flood Gates for Junk Faxes

EmagGeek writes "The FCC implemented a Report and Order on Reconsideration (R&O on Recon) that uses some of the same exemptions for junk faxes that currently exist for the Do Not Call list. The new rules specify that junk faxers can claim an Existing Business Relationship (EBR) to justify flooding you with junk faxes. Under the new rules, a junk faxer could visit your website and call that an existing business relationship. The new rules also prevent junk-fax trapping, in which someone posts their fax number on the internet, waits for junk faxes, then files suit against the faxers under the TCPA. With all of the government-sponsored selling out of The People that has been going on in the past, say, 6 or so years, one has to wonder when or even if it is going to stop."

Fax Is Old

[chrpai]

The traditional print to paper fax machine is old and should die. The last place I worked at was large enough that FAX was integrated with their VM system and all public fax machines were thrown away. If you wanted to send a FAX you went to the copier and scanned it to your inbox. If you wanted to receive one they fax'd it to your telephone number and it showed up in your inbox. Add in a FAX spam filter module and problem solved.

what a joke

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't tell me this is Bush's fault too? I hate the guy as much as anybody but get fucking real.

They get all the blame for this and no credit at all for the do not call list. That's pretty fucking funny. I'm sure SOMEBODY here (everybody?) will explain it away with some bull shit story that I'm not interested in hearing.

Re:One solution...

[forand]

I think you are being a little short sighted here. When you are a business you need to make your contact information available to your customers and those that are interested in becoming customers. While businesses certainly do want you to contact them if you are interested in becoming a customer they most certainly don't want to have a similar ammount of faxes on the floor in the morning as they find spam in the email boxes. Keeping a number unpublished is not an option for what most fax numbers are used for: business corrospondance.

One hand does not know about the other

[shoptroll]

Anyone else find it a little ridiculous that this is on the same main page with the FTC shutting down Spammers?

Only in this country could we have one department closing down spam and another opening it up...

Govenrment Fax numbers

[WinPimp2K]

Sure you can, get all of the government fax numbers you can find and send em to junk faxers along with links to apporpriate .gov websites so the faxers can create that all important relationship.

You would then expect that the FCC will reconsider the regulations.
BZZT!

1> The government, hit by increased communications would determine the need for a lot more fax machines, and clerks to feed them paper and file the vital communications being received.

2> Certain specific government entities (congresscritters) would however dislike the increased demands on their time and on pain of budget cuts, force the FCC to rewrite those regs so that government agencies and officials can individually declare faxes to THEIR fax lines are illegal.

3>Certain specific entities that think they are government organizations (lobbyists, PACs and re-election committees) would contact the junk faxers directly and explain why the faxers need to immediately donate to the cause - or face the possibility of restrictive legislation.

Selling Out Six Or So Years

[G)-(ostly]

You missed about eight years there, buddy. Ever heard of this little thing called the DMCA?

Yea, Clinton signed that one.

Bush is an ass, but if you can't be honest about why you hate him, just keep your trap shut.

The right hand knoweth not what the left doeth

[wealthychef]

Elsewhere on slashdot: the government fined some major spammers. [slashdot.org] Crazy world.

Re:Selling Out Six Or So Years

[goldspider]

Calling someone out for being intellectually dishonest isn't "hate".

Re:Fun day

[Opportunist]

There've been 2 key reasons for "revolutions". Mostly one: Despair. The other one is idealism, but that one is rarely used and pretty much died out by today.

Despair has been a good fuel for every revolution ever. French revolution, Russian revolution, when people ain't got nothing to lose but their life, and especially if said life is close to being gone anyway, that's when they take up anyone as a leader.

Of course, governments learned since. What we got now in the US (and most of the "civilised" countries) dates back to the Roman Empire and panem et circenses: Bread and games. And of either there is no shortage in any "western" country. You have access to cheap food and cheap entertainment. Everything else is expensive, regulated and culled. Freedom isn't amongst the first things people want. What they want is food and entertainment.

And they got that. Plenty of that.

So you won't see a revolution anytime soon. People simply don't care. They don't care about freedom. They don't care about junk mail. They don't care about anything as long as their bellies are filled and their nerves are tickled.

If there was a God, he'd have replaced humanity with a sentient lifeform by now.

re: fax might be "old", but it won't die yet....

[King_TJ]

The last 4 companies I worked for still relied on at least 2 or 3 stand-alone paper fax machines, along with computerized fax solutions. Why?

Primarily, there's the "simplicity" factor. No matter how nice it might be to be able to fax anything from your PC that you could print to a printer, you've still got the complexity of the system itself to deal with. Larger companies use networked fax solutions like "LightningFax", where all the outgoing faxes get queued up on a server for delivery. If a dialing rule is incorrect on the server, it might spend all afternoon trying to dial a number without putting a required 1 on the front, or not using an area-code where one is needed for an "in state long-distance call", etc. Or as occasionally happens, the driver on the server might get hung, causing all the faxes to logjam, reporting that they're all "ready to send" - but the telephony card isn't making any calls out.

When your customer is waiting for a faxed quote, your salespeople want an immediate solution. Having that old stand-alone fax machine as a backup is the easiest way to solve their problem, while you troubleshoot the issue on the network fax package.

There's also the fact that sometimes, a fax needs to be sent (or received) by a visitor to your business. Are they going to be able to log in to one of your computers, know how to use the scanner to get their document into the computer (or know how to get a received one to their workstation to print)?

Re:what a joke

[eln]

The DNC list is a great idea, and it does help, but there are too many exceptions in the rules to make it a final solution. Political campaigns and non-profits can still get through, and the idea of what it takes to establish an "Existing Business Relationship" is a joke. If they just changed the EBR restriction to only apply to, say, people who had actually purchased something from the company in the past, it would help a lot.

Re:Fax Is Old

[optimus2861]

Add in a FAX spam filter module and problem solved.

The problem with junk faxes is less the data, more the time & method of transmitting the data. This isn't the internet where data transmission is measured in milliseconds, and you can have multiple connections to computers active at a time. Even a one-page fax takes several seconds to transmit, and while that fax is being sent, you can neither send one out nor receive another one on that phone line. Start letting junk faxers have free rein and you can kiss the usefulness of faxes goodbye as the phone lines jam up. No spam filter's going to help you when you can't get a call out because you've got junk faxes flooding your phone line.

Re:Fun day

[baalz]

You say that like it's a bad thing. Don't get me wrong, living among the sheeple makes me grind my teeth on a daily basis, but when you put it into perspective like that junk faxes don't rate very high in the order of things that people have evolved to worry about. Heck, this isn't even ancient history, lots of people in the world TODAY have a non-trivial chance of thier cause of death being starvation, and as mind numbing as a lot of the entertainment offered to the masses is there is also a lot of good enriching stuff that beats staring at the mud wall in your hut. The reason most people don't care at a level deep enough to risk their life (as in revolution) is because for all the message board flaming this is not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. Worrying about the *IAA bullying or the idiocy of patent law seems terribly important, till you point out that everybody in the first world lives in the most opulent luxury in history. Hell yeah bread and circuses keep me satisfied, there isn't a hell of a lot with a higher impact on my quality of life than food and entertainment. Everything else is nitpicking that seems terribly important because very few of us have ever had to worry about what really is important. Bread and circuses.

What is really important

[Opportunist]

I guess you're familiar with Maslow's hierarchy of needs [wikipedia.org]. And while it's a little imprecise, it sums up the problem quite well.

Yes, sure, when you have NOTHING you couldn't care less about "problems" like DRM or spam. You got better things to do. But does that mean I should stop worrying altogether as soon as I got a burger in my stomach and Galactica on my TV (or HDTV)?

It worries me that people actually do just that. They don't care anymore what's going on with their life and how they are reduced to being consumers instead of actually being people and treated as such. It seems everything everyone wants is more money to consume more. Self-realization has been replaced with the urge to own more toys.

Is that where we, as a species, are going? I mean, the saying "best thing since sliced bread" alone tells a lot about the mindset of some people. As if bread that's already cut into comfortable slices marks some achivement...

Re:What is really important

[Anonymous Coward]

Self-realization has been replaced with the urge to own more toys.

No, self-realization is now measured by the number of toys you own. Materialism is the real problem here. People aren't finding any other goals in life than to get more stuff. At a certain level, the very thought of that is repugnant to most people, and yet in many cases they've slipped into it themselves. Having stuff isn't detrimental to us, it's the constant striving for more and making it a higher goal than any real progress (in any field) that is a danger.

It's this exact reason that Paul wrote this in 1 Timothy 6:10 (in the Bible, in case you didn't know):

The love of money is a root of all sorts of injurious things, and by reaching out for this love some... have stabbed themselves all over with many pains.

(For the inquisitive, the "..." in the above quote takes the place of things not relevant to the current discussion.)