Absolutely, when call hits local switch it can be terminated differently based on its location. Particularly pertinent for modem based services in the 90s. A single national dialup number would terminate on 100s of local pops and routing decisions would be done to keep traffic as local as possible.
Internet Thruway from Nortel allowed multiple ISPs to use the same local termination hardware; If I remember the details correctly, different national numbers could be terminated on the same box, with the subsequent IP traffic routed to the correct ISP.
It is more secure in some senses. You can't get a PDF-borne virus from an old-school fax reception. My tax preparer only accepts mailed documents and faxed documents. It's sometimes a pain, but I have to admit that I'm a little bit happy that he's more paranoid than I am about my financial information.
"not fax" doesn't have to mean "use one of the least secure digital formats in existence". If you're goal is to replicate a fax you should probably limit yourself to a basic bitmap encoding similar to group 3/4 encoded faxes and create a validated decoder (something many fax machines lack).
Funny, if somebody had told me they only accepted mail documents I would ask for their email. Not to be annoying or whatever, but because today I assume mail means e-mail, not snail or physical mail.
> "See for yourself first-hand as we give a live demonstration of the first ever full fax exploitation, leading to complete control over the entire device as well as the network, using nothing but a standard telephone line. "
Maybe it's time for you to find another tax preparer. Mine accepts encrypted documents with her public key.
I meant it in the confidentiality sense. The fact that you can put anything on the cover sheet and header line as sender number and that it has exactly zero relevance as authenticator should be obvious to anyone who actually ever set up a fax machine.
An office fax machine sitting out in the open is going to be less confidential than email on an SMTP server where only a sysadmin or the recipient can see it, yes.
