Today’s award goes to Xerox. The BBC reports:
Photocopiers made by Xerox are changing numbers on documents, a German computer scientist has discovered.
David Kriesel found that copies he made of construction plans had altered room dimensions.
. . .
Niri Shan, a partner at London-based law firm Taylor Wessing, told the BBC it could raise interesting legal implications.
“The person who provided the figures would be liable [for any issues]. Then the question would be, could they turn round to the photocopying company and say, ‘Hold on a minute, this is your fault’?
“Often in commercial contracts, the manufacturer may have limitations of liability on consequential loss.”
In his tests, Mr Kriesel found that often the number “6” would be turned into an “8”, and vice versa, with other numbers being affected too.
One room on his copied plans had its dimensions shrunk from 21.11m to 14.13m.
He said the anomaly is caused by Jbig2, an image compression standard.
Image compression is typically used in scanners and copiers to make file sizes of scans smaller.
Jbig2 would substitute figures it thought were the same, meaning similar numbers were being wrongly swapped.
There’s more at the link.
That could be a whole lot of fun. Imagine having a builder construct a house to your specifications, only to discover when he’d finished that the specifications weren’t what you’d specified!
Peter
Even better, imagine all the "A" size (8-1/2×11) drawings being enlarged to "B" (11×17) for readability, and having all the house dimensions enlarged accordingly.
Of course joist spacing would go from the standard 16" to 22", but you'd have a much roomier house.
This is a result of the redesign of copiers in recent decades. Photocopiers used to be exactly that: using light bounced off the paper image being copied and reflected through sets of mirrors the image – really, a page-sized combination of light and dark points – was projected onto a rotating drum of photoconduct material that was electrically charged. Dark places in the image had stronger charges to retain more oppositely-charged black toner, lighter places less, white places none. Plain paper was then passed between the photoconduct material on the drum and a highly charged corona device that electrically attracted the, again, oppositely charged toner, the paper passed under a heat source to fuse the toner to the paper (toner melts at about 106 F) and you have a photocopied image.
The new design copiers use image and in some cases, OCR software to "capture" the image to be copied, just like an electronic scanner. Multiple pages are stored on on a hard drive, just like your computer has, and single or multiple lasers controlled by that software do the job reflected light used to do, discharging spots on the electrically charged photoconduct on the drum.
There are two ares of concern; you've mentioned one, Peter, in your example of "software glitches" erroneously modifying scanned data. The other is that hard drive I mentioned: everything that has gone through a hard drive equipped copier has been stored on that hard drive. depending on the size of the drive and the volume of copies made, that may be a couple months or a couple years of image data. In short, all your company information, or your HR information, or your proprietary business secrets, may be on that drive. Rarely does a business stipulate the hard drive be removed and retained by the business when copiers are swapped out, and companies that religiously secure computer data on their employees' PCs never think about securing the very same data that has been "photocopied" onto the copier's hard drive. And, rarely is the copier in a secure location. Anyone with reasonable technical savvy could easily download the data from that drive, especially since most mid- to large copiers (think "office group") are now network connected, and some are internet accessible.
Which means they are also NSA-accessible and hacker-accessible….