David Kriesel: Lies, damned lies and scans
Free and Open Source Software Conference (FrOSCon) e.V.2 HN recommenders · 2020–2026
58K views · talk · evergreen · Uploaded 2015-08-22
David Kriesel's FrOSCon talk on how Xerox scancopiers, due to JBIG2 compression, silently replaced digits in scanned documents. He walks through how he discovered the bug and why it is so dangerous.
The standard reference whenever HN discusses the Xerox scanner bug or AI and compression that fabricates content.
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5 comments from Hacker News
> You may remember that this played a strange role in Obama's birth certificate some years back Just to clarify, the issue with the compression algorithm used by the scanner, not with the PDF format itself. There a few videos of David Kriesel explaining the bug for the curious: [VIDEO]
Sounds like the next iteration of "Lies, damned lies and scans": [VIDEO] >On the scale of things too horrible to contemplate, "document-altering scanner" is right up there with "flesh-eating bacteria". Since 2006, Xerox scancopiers literally are making stuff up. They, for example, replace digits with others in scans.
There is a version with an English voice over of the original talk here: [LINK] And the talk he gave in English himself here: [VIDEO]
Even 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: [VIDEO]
> OCR for construction documents does not work I'm reminded of the Xerox JBIG2 bug back in ~2013, where certain scan settings could silently replace numbers inside documents, and bad construction-plans were one of the cases that led to it being discovered. [0] It wasn't overt OCR per se , users weren't trying to convert pixels to characters. [0] [VIDEO]