4 HN users recommended this talk5 months2019–2025score 6.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
Called a classic CCC talk, and the Xerox bug is cited as a cautionary tale about trusting scans and digitized archives.
David Kriesel's 31C3 talk, in German, on the discovery that Xerox scanner-copiers silently replace digits and letters in scanned documents. He explains how the bug stayed unnoticed in the wild for years.
“If you speak german and haven’t seen this yet, watch it, this is a classic.” (HN, 2021)
I would also highly recommend "Traue keinem Scan, den du nicht selbst gefälscht hast" [0] but I just noticed that there are no english subtitles available. [0] [this video] (2015)
German talk on scanners silently altering documents.
(2013). The whole ordeal lead to a quite legendary presentation by David at CCC (german, no captions, live translation available but pretty bad): [this video] If you speak german and haven’t seen this yet, watch it, this is a classic. His talks are all entertaining and interesting.
Legendary CCC presentation on the Xerox scanner number-changing bug.
Thanks for the complementary links! Regarding Xerox scanner compression issues, compare this great CCC-talk by David Kriesel, "Traue keinem Scan, den du nicht selbst gefälscht hast" [0] – Sorry, German only. [0] [this video] [1] [link] (Didn't MS's PDF-viewer have similar issues?)
CCC talk on Xerox scanner compression altering scanned content (German).
This reminded me of a great talk (in German) by David Kriesel about scanners not scanning correctly but replacing letters and numbers because of pattern matching (if I remember correctly). It was a really great talk. Not sure if there is an English version somewhere: [this video]
German talk on scanners replacing digits through pattern matching.
> Not sure if there is an English version somewhere: [this video] Seems to be: [link] Direct: [link] Which has german/english dual audio, but defaults to german (so presumably google ruined the english track on upload). If your video player doesn't support picking audio, you can probably fiddle with ffmpeg to strip out the german track.
Related: [this video] guy discovered that xerox workstations (like the ones to scan in government archives) corrupted numbers. Thus falsifying documents on a massive scale. Obamas "birth certificate" went through this document shredder. So distributing, non digital copies. Thats were the lasting value is.
Xerox scanners corrupted numbers in scanned archives.
Germany scanned its national archives in with xerox stations. We will never know what numbers might have been scrambled. [this video] So similar projects existed and were so disastrous that they were quietly buried. To this day if a document was xerox scanned before the Bugfix it might be nil and void in court.
Xerox scan bug as cautionary tale for digitizing archives.
Worse, Xerox scanners specifically meant for digitizing documents have changed text for a long time. The compression algorithm they used (I think even in the default settings) sometimes replaced e.g. 6 with 8, and similar things. See: [this video] (german, but there should be news articles from back then in english as well, somewhere)
Xerox scanner compression replaced digits like 6 with 8.
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