Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Would you notice?

From Bloomberg Businessweek

Xerox is now saying that some of its scanners can alter numbers in documents, even at the highest resolution setting. It blames a software bug for which it does not yet have a fix. “We continue to work tirelessly and diligently to develop a software patch to address the problem,” the company said in an Aug. 11 statement.

The problem came to light when German computer scientist David Kriesel scanned a construction plan on a Xerox machine and noticed that it changed numbers on some of the room measurements.


Would you notice such a thing? I'm not sure I would.

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2 comments:

Sackerson said...

Seems appropriate that it took a German to notice it.

And are people aware that modern photocopiers keep a copy of everything on their hard drive, so that there are date security issues?

A K Haart said...

Sackers - I wondered if the copiers were also doing some character recognition too. That would allow the hard drive to be searched by content.