Three LibTIFF bugs found, only two patched

Still used by international banks to confirm some types of business. Lawyers like faxes.

You can try to take an email to court, but a lot of jurisdictions don't have any guarantee it's binding. Whereas the 60's/70's/80's were full of court cases around the world that settled, definitively, that a fax or photocopy of a contract was still a contract - you don't get to ignore it because it's a copy.

(Yes, people really tried that scam.)

Also, email can be traced, but fax usually means that there's a phone call and that gives you another level of evidence should you need it in court. Although personally I never really bought that argument, and fax systems seem to be going to the cloud and fax over IP (FoIP) these days.

The last few fax systems will probably be all electronic, never putting out paper unless the recipient wants it. The input (probably an account summary or trade confirmation) is generated by an application and picked up from a file share or some kind of message queue, converted into a set of images, and then sent via either fax over IP or a real phone line, to a system which does pretty much the same in reverse and delivers the images (and maybe OCR'd text) to an application.

But the legal aspects will keep people on that system for a decade or so, until someone realises that the expense of the infrastructure outweighs the potential cost savings in court...

(And it can be expensive. I know of a couple of banks whose license estate for faxing infrastructure is in the seven figure range on software alone, let alone the licenses for the platform below that software. At standard software maintenance rates, that's a pretty nice amount of coin for software which is mostly in maintenance mode these days...)

Yep... TIFF is just a container format that supports dozens of compression methods, including the ones used for FAX. Still (probably) the highest compression for monochrome images in a widely supported format. I've used it heavily for B&W maps and engineering drawings when size/bandwidth was more important than image quality.

Or to look at it another way, dozens of obscure serialization algorithms full of potential vulns. LibTIFF is a lot like ImageMagick in that regard.