Curing junk fax blight

Press, 22 June 1989, Page 14

Curing junk fax blight

NO NEED for new laws after all. Without even realising it, the clever Japanese have invented a technological cure for the “junk fax’ blight discussed in this newspaper recently. Japan is the world's densest fax market, for good reason. Its language uses characters that are cumbersome to transmit in any other way; and its system of postal addresses is impossibly complex.

Fax solves both problems, and Japanese firms have begun to make fax machines for home use, costing as little as SNZBSO. Japan’s electronics companies have designed machines that share a line sociably with a normal telephone. The latest models — and this is the good bit — can be switched on and off remotely from a push-button phone. The unintended result is a fax

machine immune to junk — advertisements and whatnot sent out en masse by unattended computer. Simply hook up an answering machine to the line, and record a message telling callers what keys to press if they want to send a fax.

Only when they do will the fax machine exhale its welcoming whistle. That foils all mass faxings, but lets in the ones real people want to send you.