We Are in The Matrix

Don't believe that a "photo" copy of a document is a true copy.



http://www.economist.com/blogs/babba...ors_picks=true

Quote:

The perils of digital technology Lies, damned lies and scans Aug 8th 2013, 19:43 by G.F. | SEATTLE DAVID KRIESEL, a doctoral student in computational geometry at Bonn University, has no academic interest in compression algorithms. When a former client asked him about a bizarre incident involving a photocopier, his first reaction was, "You guys have to be kidding me." The client called him when they found that a Xerox machine had scanned an architectural drawing of a house in such a way that numbers from one part of the original drawing wound up replacing those in another portion. The mystery proved too hard to resist. In the floor plan, areas corresponding to three rooms were shown as measuring 14.13, 21.11 and 17.42 square meters (see picture). After a bit of investigating, Mr Kriesel found that two different Xerox Workcentre models would replace one or two of those numbers with another, in an apparently random fashion. (Modern photocopiers act as big digital scanners with a printer attached rather than using the traditional analogue photographic process and can produce image files as well as printed duplicates.) <SKIP> Mr Kriesel says he continues to get troubling reports from reader (sic) who checked their scanner settings and photocopies to find substitutions. He has assembled a list of potentially affected Xerox hardware, and has begun to assemble reports of this issue in equipment from other manufacturers, too. The extent of the problem, he frets, will probably remain unknown. But the errors will be felt. For his part, Mr Dastin says Xerox takes this seriously, although this is the first report they have had despite the technology's being around for years. He and Mr Kriesel have thought about how to make the trade-offs more obvious, and the company will make changes.

Incredible.

:jaw:

via JREF Forum http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=263660&goto=newpost