> This is not an OCR problem (as we switched off OCR on purpose), it is a lot worse – patches of the pixel data are randomly replaced in a very subtle and dangerous way: The scanned images look correct at first glance, even though numbers may actually be incorrect.
I have a habit of scanning invoices/statements/manuals etc to pdf and found the above quite alarming. Though I don't use Xerox (my scanner is Epson Perfection V39), I never considered the possibility that a scan of a document can result in altered numbers. How do I know if my scanner could also be affected in case it uses similar underlying software/setup?
TFA suggests that Xerox was offering the option of lossless JBIG2 compression but they implemented it incorrectly -- they didn't include the delta blocks that described how individual image blocks differed from canonical patterns.
Which brings up another point: How did Xerox's SW development process take place? Was it done in-house with frequent code reviews or was it outsourced to a low bidder and then thrown back over the wall with no real quality assurance process?
This isn't the kind of issue a code review would catch. Code review will find when the code isn't written to standards or doesn't look maintainable. It isn't going to catch a subtle misuse of a technique that should be valid.
That depends on what kind of code review you're doing. Code reviews intended to find bugs are very good at finding bugs that would be hard to find by testing.
> the review should also be reviewing the tests, and you should really have a test if you have a standard.
Codes reviews and unit tests aren't a substitute for QA or acceptance testing. It's great when code reviews do catch stuff like this, but that's not going to catch everything. To me this bug points to deficiencies in another part of the process.
I know nothing about this encoding but I would think each implementable feature of the standard should have some tests that you can implement. Maybe some sample data and then process it’s encoded counter part. I bet I am trivializing it but I would hope they are thinking twice about shoring up their process.
If you scan in color/grayscale, it can’t use JBIG2 compression. The machine will likely use JPEG for lossy compression, could result in less crisp scans, but it eliminates this risk.
What the author refers to are the three available compression modes on Xerox scanners, which are "normal", "higher", and "highest". It is not clear what that means exactly, but it is possible that all three of those are lossy compression modes.
In my opinion, the only reasonable mode for JBIG2 is lossless, as the lossy mode of JBIG2 is, in general, prone to these character mangling issues. File sizes for lossless JBIG2 compression are already very low, so I would claim that using lossless is almost always worth it, unless character mangling is explicitly not a problem.
I wonder if this may be also a problem with Samsung MFPs, as some Xerox consumer models were apparently OEM'd by Samsung (e.g. Samsung SCX-4200 vs. Xerox 3119, or was it the other way around?). Not sure if there's a list which links the Xerox-Samsung similar models.
I guess, if the scanner offers JBIG2 format option, it may need a test at least.
Or implement the specification instead of just skimming it. As far as I remember they skipped several safeguards that would have prevented this problem when they implemented the compression algorithm.
Yah, I've used some lame-assed JSON parsers whose authors thought they knew it well enough in their head that they didn't bother looking at the nice spec that laid it all out for them in black and while.
Maybe you mean http://web.archive.org/web/20030228034147/http://www.crockfo...? That has a context-free grammar (which omits the syntax for literals), railroad diagrams (which includes it), a prose description, an example JSON document, and a public-domain sample implementation in Java. It's true that there are some holes in the spec, notably the definition of whitespace and the semantics, but it's fairly complete and unambiguous.
I posted another one 2 days ago, vis a vis the Rittenhouse trial. I was in a rush but I wanted to post something demonstrating how the fidelity of digital tech can be misleading.
In my post I just picked the first main stream media outlet (CBC in my post). today’s post is much better.
I am not sure whether you are being sarcastic but there is, in a way. If HN detects that you are posting a duplicate, it just brings you to the previous story. It seems easily confused, though.
Otherwise, if you have a doubt after posting a story, you can click on the website name next to the title to see other stories from the same website, which is another way of seeing duplicates. Of course, this is easier with websites that don’t get 20 stories a day.
I was being sincere. Sarcasm doesn't play well here, beyond even the standard problems of written communication.
I thought maybe post deduplication "expires", and links are let through for discussion again x-weeks later. I also noticed dang posts these "previously discussed" links often, if not preempted by other users. I don't know whether to upvote or downvote those because it contributes to the convo but indirectly and with low-effort. Therefore I figure an automation might be worth the hassle.
Personally, I think of him more like Palmer Eldritch, with three stigmata of a robotic right hand, artificial eyes, and steel teeth, who has returned from an expedition to the Prox system, in possession of a new alien hallucinogen Chew-Z to compete with Can-D.
Everything about this comment is too good! I'd never heard either song before, but I'd definitely argue Dan is at least half robot. I think one would have to be to keep a cool head while doing such a (mostly, 'cept for all the' thanks dang!'posts- also written by AI, I'm sure) thankless job.
This is how our robot overlords begin the takeover- hiding in plain sight, pretending to be one of us, while secretly gaining more and more power over us.
Do they pay him with silicon upgrades? Does he dream of electric sheep?
Are we the electric sheep?
'They Live' was a warning...when we put on the google glasses will we see their real metal skin?
>Since 1982, the ZBS Foundation (ZBS= “Zero Bullshit”) has been producing a sci-fi/detective hybrid radio drama called Ruby, the ongoing adventures of Ruby the Galactic Gumshoe. The show is a fun listen, and since its history is documented elsewhere, we shan’t dwell on it here, as the series itself doesn’t concern us so much as does a pair of its supporting characters: The Android Sisters.
>Exactly like it says on the box, the Android Sisters are robotic “siblings”—conceit and name both lifted from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—whose role in the show is to deliver pointedly satiric songs, rendered in a unison speak-sing intonation by actresses Ruth Maleczech (sometimes credited as “Breuer”—married name?) and Valaria Wasilewski. Though it’s a pretty one-dimensional schtick, their acutely ‘80s synth songs were sufficiently listenable to merit an album in 1984. Released on the typically more rootsy Vanguard label (it was the home of Joan Baez and Buddy Guy, among others), Songs of Electronic Despair contained eleven goofy examples of what people in the ‘80s thought the future sounded like, and many of the songs directly address the themes of mechanization and alienation with which a lot of the synth musicians of the era seemed obsessed. Really, much of this stuff is in the same zone as the work Laurie Anderson was up to back then—and Anderson was once an artist in residence at the ZBS Foundation.
>A second album, Pull No Punches, was issued in 2003, but the most accessible music available from the Android Sisters is their 2004 best-of, which is still in print on CD.
It indeed does that, but only if the previous submission got significant attention. Otherwise we allow dupes through. This is on purpose, to give good submissions multiple chances at getting attention and mitigate the randomness of what gets liftoff from /newest.
There’s controversy currently regarding whether pinch-to-zoom alters images for a current ongoing court case.
It’s borderline gaslighting at this point. I imagine it’s causing some people to do some extra deep digging while they try to reassure themselves that they do actually know a thing or two.
Interestingly, we have seen in the last week in the Rittenhouse trial an example of a judge taking a hyper-skeptic position on technology - namely, distrusting the zoom feature because it might add in extra information not present in the original image.
It’s easy to ridicule this, and I do think that particular judge’s thought process was rooted in ignorance rather than plausible paranoia, but it’s not hard to see how cases like this Xerox bug sow the seeds of distrust in the non-tech populace. There really isn’t a lot of clear daylight between “the scanned copy might be different to the original” and “the zoomed version might be different to the original”.
>an example of a judge taking a hyper-skeptic position on technology - namely, distrusting the zoom feature because it might add in extra information not present in the original image.
Some mocked the judge but here's an example where an AI upscaling algorithm added a human face that was never there:
EDIT: based on some replies I see, my cite isn't to claim that Apple iOS is using AI enhancement during zoom to add fake pixels. The point is to consider why the judge (who is not a computer programmer) is skeptical. Therefore, his request for expert testimony to rule out that the zoom function doesn't add false information is not that unreasonable.
In other words, what's obvious to a HN tech audience doesn't always apply to judges who don't have the same technical knowledge of how zoom algorithms actually work. So considering the judge's state of mind, the "fact" that iOS zoom doesn't add false incriminating pixels isn't a fact to his level of satisfaction unless the prosecutors bring in an expert to confirm it.
The issue is the expert who was brought it in was not an expert. They failed to answer even the simplest of questions related to upscaling and did nothing to inform the court of the nature of the upscaling used.
Anyone would be supportive of judges being cautious over upscaling, which we know has the potential to introduce false information because it's doing inference and interpolation.
As Twisol said, zooming doesn't inherently require interpolation. But when it does require interpolation, it's usually an extremely simple and well-understood form like nearest neighbour interpolation that's not going to result in things like faces being inserted.
It also only uses the available data in the image itself on which to work.
It's fundamentally different from neural network-driven inference and interpolation that attempts to fill in pixels using evidence from other images that the network has been trained on.
This is just pivoting. In this case zooming uses interpolation which "has the potential to introduce false information" exactly as you mentioned. It using only the available data doesn't mean that interpolation can't go wrong. So what if it's not AI?
And yes, it's so well understood that the prosecution had no idea of what's going on, claiming that it's "common sense" that it works just like a magnifying glass, which is simply wrong. Using bilinear (or bicubic) interpolation makes the edges of an image blurrier, especially when you're zooming in as much as they did on low-quality footage.
Come now, you're reaching. The defence attorney specifically claimed that "iPads, which are made by Apple, have artificial intelligence in them that allow things to be viewed through three dimensions and logarithms." and "[The iPad] uses artificial intelligence or their logarithms to create what they believe is happening. So this isn't actually enhanced video; this is Apple's iPad programming creating what it thinks is there, not what necessarily is there."
Aside from the confusion about logarithms, where I presume he meant algorithms, and the false claim about 3D, the defence was making a claim about artificial intelligence being used to upscale the footage. Which is inaccurate, and a specific claim being made that's unsupported by any evidence.
Funny enough, the same sort of question arose with regard to a crime scene image that was enlarged by the state's forensic lab, but a simple explanation of the mechanism used was deemed sufficient.
> Aside from the confusion about logarithms, where I presume he meant algorithms, and the false claim about 3D, the defence was making a claim about artificial intelligence being used to upscale the footage. Which is inaccurate, and a specific claim being made that's unsupported by any evidence.
With AI being used in ever more parts of technology, it is not surprising that a layperson wants to clarify if such technology is being applied here.
Apple has been advertising the usage of AI in dealing with photos ("Deep Fusion" of 2019 IIRC), so the suspicion is warranted.
Also, things like Deep Fusion are capture-time technologies, they don't alter the photo or video each time it's viewed. There's also already precedent in US courts for handling automatic enhancements applied to digital camera evidence.
I'm reaching? Like, why would the defense's wrong argument be relevant? You're not arguing with the defense here.
Your claim was that the judge's call is wrong because zooming doesn't actually do interpolation and has thus no potential to introduce wrong information. I've told you that zooming in this case does interpolate and that interpolation has the potential to go wrong.
When interpolation goes wrong it’s predictably wrong, which is not true of more complex algorithms using AI. If we can predict how it goes wrong we can extract the meaningful information from it.
It was a claim made by the defence, which the judge insisted that the prosecution prove the absence of, rather than requiring the defence to substantiate.
That's not how technical claims of that nature are normally handled.
The prosecution presented modified evidence, claiming that the modification doesn't change it, which the defense objected to. Why would the burden of proof not fall on the prosecution?
What does "built-in" have to do with anything? The entire point of the issue was that it wasn't just zoom in, it was enlargement (think upscaling). The software has to actively interpolate and add pixels where it thinks they're necessary in order to do so, and that changes the image. In most cases, it's probably not a big deal. But when it's from a nighttime camera of a person several hundred feet away that's only a few pixels in the original frame, there's a lot to go wrong there.
So if in 5 years the iPad really uses AI when zooming, it's perfectly fine because it's a built-in feature? What an absurd argument.
And both the prosecutions and defense's claims were fantastical, unsubstantiated (beyond some incorrect 'common sense' handwaving) and wrong - so since it's the prosecution that wants to enter new evidence, it's perfectly fine to ask them to back to it up. This isn't 'proving a negative', it's just asking them to prove that what they said (that zooming doesn't change the evidence).
This wasn't 'new evidence', it was an iPad being used to play a video for Rittenhouse during cross-examination, in which he was being asked to describe the events being shown.
Both prosecutors and defence attorneys have used the same mechanism countless times in previous cases, without issue, because it is actually common sense that pinch to zoom is not going to substantively change what's shown in a video like that.
There was not a question regarding visual facts previously. Much of the video usage was used to either establish timing or things someone said.
In this case the prosecution wanted to significantly zoom into very grainy footage to ask about an object a few pixels wide, on footage so grainy the prosecution couldn't identify the face of their own lead witness.
The defense raised the question regarding zooning altering or adding pixels and the judge said flatly he didn't know. All the prosecution had to do was bring in an expert on video to explain how zoom works - or have the expert do a non-fractional proportional zoom.
I wonder how reliable even the source video is at pixel-scale? If it's encoded with something like MPEG then not every macroblock is updated every frame, and even if it was then there are still compression artifacts created by the discrete cosine tranform.
Its common sence that you can't take over control of a car over the internet and kill everyone in it, that acess to a website that shows realtime location of half of US polulation would at least be properly protected, that a car's accelerator pedal doesn't cause random and unpredictable effect thanks to spagghetti code, that when Fujistsu charges a postman for theft, they are not just covering up bug in their tracking and accounting software.
Most states use a form of common law, which is completely based on what is common practice and what is common sense. Or at least was in England hundreds of years ago...
That does not mean we ask Joe Blogs what his common sense tells him about highly technical subjects, whether that's effects of sniffing glue, bank interest accrual or image upscaling algorythms
True. And the case of what upscaling does is technically truly interesting and nuanced... but that doesn't mean that people don't have a sense of what zooming in does to an image, CSI "zoom and enhance" be willfully ignored.
They may have a sense of it, and it's not at all clear whether the sense they have of what will happen matches reality.
Which is why both sides can ask the other side to substantiate their claims or provide expert testimony to justify their claims. If there is no issue, then the other side will be able to relatively easily find someone to testify to that or provide other evidence.
It's how the system is meant to work. If this is being used abusively, the judge will catch on soon enough.
>That's not how technical claims of that nature are normally handled.
That's because criminal law is purposefully biased in favor of the defense. If the prosecution wants to argue that they defendant appears to be pointing his gun at somebody when they zoom in on a photo with an ipad then they need to prove that the ipad's software can be trusted to do so reliably. If there are programs that can upscale images by creating new data then they need to prove that the photo app on their ipad is not one of those programs.
This should have been done with a program that is open to scrutiny (and ideally one that's open-source) so that the algorithm used to upscale the image is known. It's not enough to just assume that the ipad uses bilinear interpolation when there's a reasonable doubt that it could be using another algorithm.
How is a non-expert, and somebody whose job specifically requires them to be sceptical and to question unstated assumptions, supposed to be sure of that?
It's a simple enough thing to verify, or require the defence (in this case) to substantiate the claim without throwing out the method of showing evidence entirely.
Courts have to deal with questions like this all the time and handle them well enough. Technology isn't magic, nor do we have to go down a rabbit hole on each point about what might be there rather than what is there.
This inverts the burden. The prosecution proposed the exhibit, and so the burden is on them to show that everything about it - that the chain of custody was valid, that the processing done on it was meaningful - is correct. It's not the defense's place to prove them wrong.
All of the other evidence was processed through forensics software, and displayed on Windows laptops. Then, at the last minute, the prosecutor asks to show this late-discovered evidence on an iPad. Watching the trial, that felt suspicious - why should this one piece of evidence be shown in a novel way?
It’s not a new exhibit being introduced, and the zoomed in form is not evidence. Therefore there’s no chain of custody question.
It was being used to show the footage to the witness on the stand, in order for them to explain what’s shown on it. As has been done in American courts hundreds of times before.
Now sure, the witness and prosecution or defence could argue that a witness doesn’t need to make guesses about what they’re seeing on zoomed in low-quality footage when under cross-examination. That happens all the time, too.
What doesn’t happen every time is for iPads to be rejected for this purpose because of magical AI ‘logarithms’ inventing imagery.
That means the jury will be able to see this as its own exhibit. (It may have been assigned two exhibit numbers.)
And I'd say it makes sense. Each additional processing step can change the image. For example, if one used the waifu2x algorithm to scale the image up, that would certainly be wrong.
It is not magic, but, as other posters alluded, sometimes it can be merely an educated guess. It is hard to accept a life changing verdict based on a guess.. even if it is an educated one.
So no, each time a given technique is used, the way it works has to be explained so that a decision based on facts of the case is made.
Nothing wrong with that, but a common sense explanation by an expert witness ought to be enough. Does Apple need to be dragged into each and every case to testify as to how pinch to zoom works, as was demanded here?
Courts have established mechanisms for handling technical questions around evidence. It's not like any of this is new.
The judge did not give the prosecution time to find an expert witness, did not ask his clerks to search for similar usage of iPad zooming in previous cases, and did not require the defence to provide expert testimony of their own to substantiate their claim.
In the end the iPad was not used. Instead a 4K TV was used, which ironically probably upscaled the image too.
This wasn’t a new evidence exhibit being introduced. Did you actually read the transcript, or are you reacting to this story based on what you’ve read elsewhere?
I would argue they DO NOT handle them well enough at all, and I have a feeling that if the person on trial had a different political affiliation you would also be claiming they do not.
Courts routinely get technology wrong, and use this the send innocent people to prison all the time. I would say the courts get technology related evidence wrong more than they do correct.
> I have a feeling that if the person on trial had a different political affiliation you would also be claiming they do not.
That's an ad hominem argument. In truth I don't care who's on trial, as the outcome of this specific trial is at this point an American culture war & politics issue that I'm uninterested in.
I am interested in how well courts handle technology and whether either prosecutors or defence attorneys can throw a wrench in proceedings with fanciful woo like "iPads, which are made by Apple, have artificial intelligence in them that allow things to be viewed through three dimensions and logarithms", and have that tolerated by judges who themselves are often technologically illiterate.
If the pre-zoomed image was already downscaled (e.g. to fit a small display), then up to a point, zooming should simply downscale less, i.e. remove fewer pixels. Beyond that point, yes, a zoom would have to perform some kind of interpolation.
In the CSI "zoom and enhance", anything beyond the simplest forms of interpolation would be part of "enhance", which is to say, not part of "zoom".
Even downscaling uses interpolation, but sure. The zoomed in part definitely wasn't shown at its native resolution though.
And bilinear interpolation is as simple as you can get besides nearest neighbor, yet it still has the potential to introduce wrong information/cause artifacting. So even in the "CSI" sense, zooming can cause issues (unless you want to argue that only nearest neighbor is CSI 'zooming'? But then not even browsers do only CSI 'zooming').
While as far as I know no pinch-to-zoom software does this today, I can totally imagine that in just a few years it might be common for pinch-zoom in browsers and photo gallery apps to do AI upscaling.
Remember, for most users, a photo only has to be as accurate as their own memories. If extra detail is added to make the photo look better, it doesn't matter as long as it isn't detail the user remembers differently.
Apple already uses AI to enhance photos with their Deep Fusion and Google makes even more use of AI in their Pixel 6. Added detail where it doesn't exist seems like a very reasonable concern.
And in a trial you only need to slightly modify a facial expression to affect the outcome. Imagine if some defendant appears to smile while a victim describes its ordeal.
You can't zoom without upscaling in some form. If you zoom in on an image in your browser, the image gets upscaled. It's going to be using a simple form of upscaling (default is bilinear), but it's still upscaling.
Of course you can, by having the image originally be displayed downscaled for instance. The back camera of your average phone has a much higher resolution than its display, or most computer displays for that matter.
AI-driven upscaling which fills in pixels using data from other images is quite different to algorithmic interpolation that only uses the available information in the image being worked on.
Then this is a problem inherent with digital photography. Any image you see is interpolated from Bayer data. There are multiple algorithms with different results, the colour needs to be adjusted, and the camera distortion needs to be reversed. All of this happens before you see anything on your screen.
A zooming or scaling algorithm that only uses available image data is deterministic, it should get the same result every time.
One that relies on a neural network trained on other images is not, it might produce a subtly different image each time it's run and introduce artefacts from other images.
What? Not only is this a bizarre argument (why would deterministically creating wrong information be okay?), it's not even correct. There's nothing that fundamentally prevents an image scaling NN from being deterministic and I doubt you think that deterministically adding someone's face would be fine, right?
‘Wrong’ information, if it’s expected, understood, and predictable, is still usable. Especially if we know it’s not going to introduce completely alien artefacts into an image like Ryan Reynold’s face.
All of the standard zoom algorithms fall into that category. Whether bilinear, nearest neighbour, or similar, they’re all going to produce similar outcomes with which, importantly, a teenaged witness on the stand will be familiar. Same with the way TVs upscale content.
It’s not like this is new evidence being introduced in its zoomed-in form. It’s an iPad and footage or images being used in the same way prosecutors and defence attorneys have used them for years when cross-examining witnesses.
The reason it’s okay to be deterministic and wrong in engineering is because it’s a lot easier to explain the conditions under which the wrong result will be produced and how you can identify those situations in the specific photo. The reason I think a simple resize that deterministically adds misinformation is better than a neural network is because I can calculate the bounds under which the algorithm produces wrong information and label the image. And I can do that without running the algorithm.
And how do you resolve conflicting technological claims from the defense and prosecution? By expert witness. Which is what the judge did. So what’s the problem?
That's not what happened. The judge placed the burden of proving that zooming didn't do that on the prosecution, and only afforded them a few minutes to find an expert witness.
Some important context I didn't see in the tech press: the previous day, the prosecution violated Rittenhouse's Fifth Amendment rights and various other due process rights while questioning him on the stand. At one point, the prosecution attempted to defend themselves by arguing to the visibly angry judge that they had a "good faith explanation." The judge responded, "I don't believe you."
From what the judge has seen in this trial, the prosecution has shown it will stoop to any low to get prejudicial evidence in front of the jury. I don't blame him at all for not just taking the prosecution's word for the veracity, authenticity and provenance of the photo.
Thanks. This is critical context for this case for why requesting this level of verification of evidence, which might be considered a stretch in normal circumstances, is much more justifiable in this case.
There's a lot of work being done on deepfake-like video compression (e.g. Nvidia [1]). The judge might be unnecessarily distrustful today, but give it a year or two and his worry will be very warranted.
The discussion around zoom becomes a lot less ridiculous when you see the video still they wanted to zoom in on. The prosecution wanted to zoom in in this video for the jury and argue Kyle was raising his gun and not his arm at that point in time. With this resolution, and the importance of that question to the trial, it makes more sense that the judge was being very cautious about zooming in.
The complaint about that video was completely valid, and it's shocking to me that technically literate people are mocking the judge's [and defense team's] apprehension about it.
The prosecution was arguing about what essentially came down to the location of 1-2 individual pixels that were present after the image had been interpolated. Basically: the pixels that the prosecution were trying to argue showed the pointing of a gun were:
1) Only apparent when the image was "zoomed" (interpolated) in exactly the manner they wanted to use.
2) Not apparent in any of the videos or photos which were taken closer to the place they were talking about.
The prosecution is depending on the idea that a computer can see more than a human can, and "enhance" a photo in such a way that shows something that nothing else does. It is absolutely ridiculous. Here is the image (linked above) which was itself cropped from a much larger image, and taken from about 150 meters away, at night, from the tiny sensor on a drone camera.
Not sure I follow. Someone questions a technical process because it might add extra information seems like a fairly cogent thought and awareness of tech. Even if it's not described or discussed in technical terms.
I just meant that I think the judge simply has no idea of how computers draw images to screens, and that he wasn’t making a sophisticated argument about the risks of AI-based upscaling or unverified closed source software or some other kind of techno-trickery.
And furthermore that this isn’t a slight on him, given how hard it is for the public to divine exactly how technology works, as illustrated by Xerox.
In my view, it has become necessary to place some distrust in digital images due to the ML video processing that is being applied nowadays. Artificial neural networks are being used to "upscale" video footage, that is, to create footage that appears to have a higher resolution than the source material. It is clear that these methods can introduce artifacts ("details") into images that were "dreamt up" by the artificial neural network.
I do not know how this relates to this specific trial, but if I were a judge I would want to rule out that footage used as evidence was manipulated by "AI".
Look at how easy it is to make a deepfake [0]. How can we effectively fact check in a world where visualization of the facts is the most dominant form of confirmation and now we can fake that?
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5uoKvSryN4o
Whilst I'm not defending anyone. Some people need to realise that a judge or a person, might reasonably know the answer to a question they ask. But they ask it to allow people to provide their own case or opinion. Where by doing so might bring to light technicalities or areas the haven't considered.
IMO the Rittenhouse claim is not paranoia at all, Other analysis of that same video has definitely proved that what the prosecution is claiming is taking place is not taking place at all,
If you watched the trial, the reason the judge was skeptical is because the expert witness present to explain the process responded "I don't know" when asked to explain how the image enlargement works and admitted it adds additional unknown information.
The judge further clarified by using an analogy, breathalyzers are often used by cops who dont know how they work, but the breathalyzers machine has already been judicially accepted as reliable evidence. This is not the case for upscale images.
Please always use the official CCC source, which is media.ccc.de [1].
The Youtube channel is there only, because people didn't respected the unwritten rules and put the content on Youtube anyway. But we like to distribute the content always from its original source, also with privacy in mind.
4.8 million people viewed the talk on that YouTube video alone, as opposed to 50k on ccc.de.
The “unwritten” rules end up hugely restricting the dissemination of this, and other, awesome content on ideological grounds that not everyone feels as strongly about as you and the CCC.
So do upload it to YouTube and anywhere else, spread the knowledge and link to whatever you please.
YouTube keeps recommending this video to me again... and again... and again... :-) But it's a really great talk! Worth re-watching every once in a while.
The official source [0]'s video file has an en voicover that was captured from the live voicover translation provided by a skilled volunteer at the conference. Use VLC or mpv, if you can't find the audio track selection option in your player.
One thing that bugged me in this otherwise awesome talk, is that the setting with values normal, higher, and high
is called Quality, but the speaker keeps calling it Compression. This is very confusing, since quality degrades with increasing compression.
I don't think there's anything wrong with running a conference in a language other than English. It just won't be accessible to me (and most others in the HN community), and that's OK.
My comment was a regrettably rude way of asking if an English translation is available elsewhere, and fortunately it worked :)
Related https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0909_xerox_money He acts with integrity and just wants the problem solved. He takes no money but he does accept non-monetary assistance from a number people interested in or affected by the bug.
Given theres been controvery in the past regarding HP (and others, likely) printers refusing to print B/W when the colour ink is empty/missing[0], its highly likely that yes, they're still printing yellow dots on B/W stuff.
The iSmell developers were hoping to make money the same way, by selling big smell combination pack cartridges that you have to entirely replace after any one of the smells ran out.
>The iSmell Personal Scent Synthesizer developed by DigiScents Inc. is a small device that can be connected to a computer through a Universal serial bus (USB) port and powered using any ordinary electrical outlet. The appearance of the device is similar to that of a shark’s fin, with many holes lining the “fin” to release the various scents. Using a cartridge similar to a printer’s, it can synthesize and even create new smells from certain combinations of other scents. These newly created odors can be used to closely replicate common natural and manmade odors. The cartridges used also need to be swapped every so often once the scents inside are used up. Once partnered with websites and interactive media, the scents can be activated either automatically once a website is opened or manually. However, the product is no longer on the market and never generated substantial sales. Digiscent had plans for the iSmell to have several versions but did not progress past the prototype stage. The company did not last long and filed for bankruptcy a short time after.
This Wired Magazine article is a classic Marc Canter interview. I'm surprised they could smell the output of the iSmell USB device over the pungent bouquet from all the joints he was smoking:
>DigiScent is here. If this technology takes off, it's gonna launch the next Web revolution. Joel Lloyd Bellenson places a little ceramic bowl in front of me and lifts its lid. "Before we begin," he says, "you need to clear your nasal palate." I peer into the bowl. "Coffee beans," explains Bellenson's partner, Dexster Smith. […]
>"You know, I don't think the transition from wood smoke to bananas worked very well." -Marc Canter
The failed quest to bring smells to the internet (thehustle.co)
DigiScent had a booth at the 1999 Game Developers Conference, with scantily dressed young women in skunk costumes.
I told them about a game called "The Sims" I had been working on for a long time, and was hoping to finish and release some time soon.
They unsuccessfully tried to convince me to make The Sims support the iSmell, and even gave me a copy of the SDK documentation, because they thought it would enrich the player's experience of all those sweaty unwashed sims, blue puddles of piss on the floor, stopped up toilets in the bathroom, and plates of rotting food with flies buzzing around on the dining room table.
I've read about this so much, I wonder if B/W printers have anything similar? Is there a secret yellow cartridge somewhere in my printer that I don't know about?
And destroyed the legal viability of several scanned document archives in the progress. If you have any contracts/legal binding documents that were archived with this technology, you may appeal them at any time.
I believe I have actually been bitten by this bug, or something very similar. I had an IRA transfer go completely awry because the check was sent to the wrong PO Box. I typed out the transfer form with an address with the digit "5" (xournal is awesome). When I was tracking down the problem, the rep said that the digit on the transfer form was unquestionably a "6". Despite how farfetched it seems, it seems like their document management system perfectly changed that digit in this manner.
So true, should store the unaltered raw-data-picture as scanned.
Its actually nightmarish.
A silent corruption of court-documents, stored plans and land-records, patent-filings with the originals often permanently gone.
Contracts that can be nulled and voided by a hostile party on this basis by simply challenging the document on basis of the archiving process.
A error so deep and systematic, it even mangled the birth certificate of the us-president when it was scanned. The whole affair is a huge advertisement for keeping written records and avoid digitization, same as voting machines.
A raster image in a PDF uses the same exact JPEG compression, most likely.
I didn't like any of the existing Linux scanning solutions, so I built my own paperless management tool. I was evaluating different compression algorithms for keeping authoritative masters and was eyeing JPEG2000 (I hate JPEG artifacts). But in the end I decided to go with FLIF, which is lossless. Despite its lower amount of battle testing, being lossless allows me to run a sha256 on the decompressed image and know that it is exactly what I had scanned in.
I used to scan documents that I wanted to keep, but frankly now I just take a photo on my phone. It's easier usually (pace dropboxes terrible interface), there are robbaly loads of apps to help, but imo, that's a whole class of hardware that's has been disrupted.
I have a networked all-in-one HP printer that can scan to a network share on my NAS. On the NAS, I set up a watcher script that runs OCRMyPDF [1] on any incoming PDFs. That gives me a super easy workflow, just feed documents into the
scanner and a minute or two later, I have a fully OCRd PDF in my network share.
Scanners have the advantage not to distort the image what a photo inherently does. I do not know if today's phone cameras regard the spherical distortion, but I doubt as this would require to have several distance measures I guess those cameras don't have.
It just doesn't matter - the only thing that matters is if the text (information) that's being imaged is readable for person receiving it.
Apps like Office Lens will undistort the pic and it just looks good enough. (App knows you are taking a picture of A4 page, so it knows how to make it look straight + white.)
I used to use CamScanner. The scanning mode will take a distorted document, find the edges and output a "flattened" document. For me, this was usually more than enough to look like a scan.
These days on Android, Google Drive's scan functionality works just as well as CamScanner used to. I use it for a lot of cases where I'd previously use a proper scanner - it's good enough most of the time.
Or even Google Lens / Google Camera does a decent job of scanning in the special scan document mode, although you have to rely on the software actually recognizing that's what you're trying to do to get the button to show up to start the process.
I used to use scanners, until I bought a new Brother laser printer and discovered that the scanner feature requires a proprietary driver on the computer end. It's sad as Brother printers tend to work really well with linux, for printing at least.
Since then I've written an ImageMagick script that converts phone photographs of documents into reasonably convincing "scans."
Quite disturbing to learn about such "artifacts" from a big-name mfgr. More so, that this was a known to them issue at the release time to be mentioned in user manual!
By the way, reading the blog post I stumbled on quite a few minor typos (like "arrors" for "errors" etc.). Should be easy to fix, but in a way this adds more emphasis and mood to the content...
I find compression algorithms to be frustratingly bad.
For example, my scanner has an 8 color compression mode. Great! So I scan in a piece of paper printed in 3 colors - black, white, and, say, green. The green comes out as a dithering of multiple colors. Why can't the compression format figure out what are the dominant 8 colors in the scan, put out a table of the RGB values of those 8 colors, then compress to 8 colors? This would look and work great for an awful lot of scans.
Another problem is b/w photos mixed with text. Setting the scanner to staic level black/white pixesl works great for text, but terrible for photos. Setting it to greyscale works great for photos, but terrible for text. Oh how I wish it would recognize greyscale areas and use greyscale for them, and black on white text areas and use static black/white pixels for them.
I have a habit of scanning invoices/statements/manuals etc to pdf and found the above quite alarming. Though I don't use Xerox (my scanner is Epson Perfection V39), I never considered the possibility that a scan of a document can result in altered numbers. How do I know if my scanner could also be affected in case it uses similar underlying software/setup?