Since 2006, Xerox scancopiers literally are making stuff up. They, for example, replace digits with others in scans. The replacement digits are layouted perfectly into the page, so the errors are hard to see. Sounds unbelievably insidious, but it's true.

submitted by [deleted] from self.technology

https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_are_switching_written_numbers_when_scanning

https://media.ccc.de/v/froscon2015-1524-lies_damned_lies_and_scans

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[–]Canbot 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

This is hard to believe. That kind of thing can't happen by accident and implies these scanners have a lot of computing power to allow almost instantaneous processing and image manipulation.

Based on what I know of computing that's just not possible. It's completely antithetical to how copiers work.

[–]ID10T 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Totally possible and almost surely accidental. Caused by software developers trying to be clever. The gist of the issue is described by the article. The software attempts to identify "identical" parts of a document by pattern matching, then will save time scanning and memory by reusing the "identical" parts.

Unfortunately the pattern matching algorithm is broken, so it ends up duplicating parts of an image that are not truly identical.

Also makes sense why a high quality setting would be less error prone than a normal setting as the normal setting would apply this type of image compression more aggressively.

Basically a software bug that never got caught in QA because it was hard to spot.

[–]weavilsatemyface 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Based on what I know of computing that's just not possible. It's completely antithetical to how copiers work.

Tell me you know nothing of computing without telling me you know nothing of computing :-)

Yes, these scanners do have a lot of computing power. Its not an accident in the sense that the bug is the consequence of deliberate decisions made by the programmers, but it is an accident in the sense that it's a bug, and an old one now fixed.

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/08/10/1241249/xerox-confirms-to-david-kriesel-number-mangling-occuring-on-factory-settings

https://www.vice.com/en/article/gvy4gb/one-mans-david-and-goliath-battle-to-get-xerox-to-fix-a-major-bug

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2483669/the-xerox-character-substitution-bug-is-worse-than-first-thought.html

[–]TarBaby 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

"People at Xerox are copier heads!" -Steve Jobs