David Kriesel: Lies, damned lies and scans

> 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]

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]

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]

> 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]