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David Kriesel: Lies, damned lies and scans

Free and Open Source Software Conference (FrOSCon) e.V. · 57.9K views · 2015-08-22 · 52:59

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Overview

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.

On Hacker News

The standard reference whenever HN discusses the Xerox scanner bug or AI and compression that fabricates content.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2020–2026

Topics

Information theory & signal processingSoftware (other)Security & hacking
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xeroxjbig2image compressiondata corruptiondavid kriesel

What people said

lynx23 · 2023-06 · Recommendation

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]

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bXVsbGVy · 2020-08 · Recommendation

> 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]

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Terr_ · 2026-03 · Reference

> 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]

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Sources

Video by Free and Open Source Software Conference (FrOSCon) e.V., played through YouTube.

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