Other recent related submissions/discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34815391 - "Xerox copier flaw changes numbers in scanned docs (2013)" (theregister.com), 36 points, 3 months ago, 8 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32537073 - "JBIG2 Undetectable Data Corruption: Destroying Our Past, One Character at a Time" (circuitousroot.com), 67 points, 9 months ago, 34 comments
Xerox scanners randomly alter numbers in scanned documents (2013)
11–20 of 63 posts
Re: Xerox scanners randomly alter numbers in scanned documents (2013)
#12This is basically the same thing Samsung and friends doing to their camera app. Expect, in Samsung's case, some user love this.
Re: Xerox scanners randomly alter numbers in scanned documents (2013)
#13Even though this happened a long time ago, whenever I hear or think about it, I am a mazed that it didn't put Xerox out of business, or at least hurt a little more. After all, some big players were already doing digital archiving at the time. :-/ BTW, the CCC had a pretty neat presentation at that time as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0O6UXrOZJo
Re: Xerox scanners randomly alter numbers in scanned documents (2013)
#14This is basically the same thing Samsung and friends doing to their camera app. Expect, in Samsung's case, some user love this.
Re: Xerox scanners randomly alter numbers in scanned documents (2013)
#15Somehow there are not really consequences on this. So either archiving stuff, at least in the business context, is not really important. Or we simply trust these copies. The latter one is of course scary.
Re: Xerox scanners randomly alter numbers in scanned documents (2013)
#16This is basically the same thing Samsung and friends doing to their camera app. Expect, in Samsung's case, some user love this.
This finding did completely invalidate the financial book keeping and backup of tax records of many companies.
I sure hope nobody uses the Samsung camera app to file their taxes and keep their books...
Re: Xerox scanners randomly alter numbers in scanned documents (2013)
#17Even though this happened a long time ago, whenever I hear or think about it, I am a mazed that it didn't put Xerox out of business, or at least hurt a little more. After all, some big players were already doing digital archiving at the time. :-/ BTW, the CCC had a pretty neat presentation at that time as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0O6UXrOZJo
Maybe, these – the demise of Xerox not happening and the size of the players involved – are related? As in: none wants their archives and data bases put in question? (Meaning, in order to claim damages, you'd have to admit that there is damage, indeed.)
So theoretically, everyone who archived during that time using Xerox WorkCentres has to question their documents.
Re: Xerox scanners randomly alter numbers in scanned documents (2013)
#18Re: Xerox scanners randomly alter numbers in scanned documents (2013)
#19This is basically the same thing Samsung and friends doing to their camera app. Expect, in Samsung's case, some user love this.
The issue was, that a small font sizes and default print quality settings, the caching mechanism would consider some digits like 0 and 8 to be similar enough, to use the cache - which would end up switching numbers around. This finding did completely invalidate the financial book keeping and backup of tax records of many companies. I sure hope nobody uses the Samsung camera app to file their taxes and keep their book…
Re: Xerox scanners randomly alter numbers in scanned documents (2013)
#20* the OCRmyPDF docs point to the JBIG2 Wikipedia page, and the Disadvantages section - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JBIG2#Disadvantages - so it's easier to avoid this bug
* I'd hoped OCR would fall out of the process, but nope
* from the Wikipedia page, huh, the Pegasus malware exploited iOS's implementation of JBIG2