Here's some information on using the Internet to fax messages. This gives me a lot of ideas. First, there was some talk here about encrypting FAXes. Since somebody is already getting the data on the internet, this would be trivial for someone to do here with PGP. Secondly, I don't know if they are using mail or FTP to transmit, but if they converted it to mail we could have `anonymous faxes' by coupling with the cypherpunk remailers (then to a receiver site that supports the FAX service via email reception). Finally, it seems to me that this is the first glimmer of a very massive new market opening up. Maybe the first entrepreneurs in cyberspace will be developing this service. Digital cash will be extremely useful here. So far, no one has told them `no' (`is this legal?' he asks) but I'm sure there's a lot of people that will be mighty upset by all this stellar progress! The problem with services like these is that once they become wildly successful and popular the weasels whine and clamp down. Note the developers are also behind the Internet Radio. Boy, when a universal network is built where commercial activity is not considered some kind of shady taboo, our economy is going to just GO CRAZY and EXPLODE. I'd like to set up a hypertext library with modest transaction charges, and will do so once the opportunity is there (BTW, also heard that Brewster Kahle, major mastermind between WAIS, has formed his own company and is now marketing workstation `electronic printing presses'.) All the elements are there. We're all dressed up and ready to go, with no way to get there! Somebody go and kick your legislator, and phone and cable company reps! - ------- Forwarded message Date: Thu, 22 Jul 1993 07:04:57 -0800 From: farber@central.cis.upenn.edu (David Farber) Subject: actually it is really an experiment and should be viewed as one but .. From: the terminal of Geoff Goodfellow <geoff@radiomail.net> Today's SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS Business Section had the following front page story (From the New York Times - by John Markoff): "USERS AVOID FAX COSTS WITH INTERNET MESSAGES" The dividing line between paper facsimile documents and electronic mail is vanishing. Thanks to the volunteer efforts of a group of computer network designers, the network of networks known as Internet now permits users to send an e-mail message to be printed out on fax machines at a growing number of sites around the world. Because transmission charges on the Internet are minimal compared with those of the long-distance phone calls normally used for faxes, the system is a cheap way to send faxes across the country or around the world. To use the system, begun this month as an experiment in remote printing, computer mail users include a fax telephone number in the address portion of their message. The message, which may include both text and graphics, will then be automatically routed to a site that has agreed to serve a local geographic ``cell'' for delivery of the fax message. So far, participating regions include all of Japan, Australia, the Netherlands and Ireland, and in the United States, metropolitan Washington, Silicon Valley and parts of the San Francisco Bay area, as well as other pockets of the country. Leading the project is Marshall T. Rose, a computer communications consultant at Dover Beach Consulting in Mountain View, Calif. He has worked with another Internet researcher, Carl Malamud, who has created Internet Talk Radio, a weekly commercial audio program that is distributed internationally and can be played on computer work stations. The fax cell sites are computers on the Internet that are also connected to inexpensive computer-controlled fax modems that can route the files to virtually any fax machine. Each site can designate the size of the area that it will serve - whether an entire city or just the fax machines within a particular company. So far, in keeping with the utopianism that still permeates Internet culture, none of the fax middlemen and -women are charging for their services. Rose noted that the blurring of fax and electronic mail would raise thorny questions. ``Is this global and local bypass of the telephone companies using the Internet?'' he asked rhetorically. ``Is this legal? We need to think about this.'' (Information on Internet Fax Bypass can be obtained by sending a message to tpc-faq@town.hall.org). ------- End of Forwarded Message