One Man’s David and Goliath Battle to Get Xerox to Fix a Major Bug

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One Man’s David and Goliath Battle to Get Xerox to Fix a Major Bug

What’s the world coming to when we can’t trust a photocopy?
Rachel Pick
New York, US

You've probably never double-checked to make sure a Xerox machine accurately reproduced what you just scanned, but maybe you should. Especially if the machine is from Xerox's Workcentre line.

There are some technological processes that we trust implicitly, day in and day out across the globe, to get things right. One such process is photocopying. If we scan a document, we assume the facsimile will be just that—a facsimile.

David Kriesel was photocopying some construction plans when he first noticed the error. Numbers were being miscopied by the Xerox WorkCentre machine he was using, and the new numbers looked so convincing that they almost escaped notice.

It wasn't an optical character recognition error—Kriesel made sure of this by turning OCR off. Instead, whole patches of pixel data were being replaced. As Kriesel explains, image segments "that are considered as identical by the pattern matching engine of the Xerox scan copiers, are only saved once and getting reused across the page. If the pattern matching engine works [inaccurately], image segments get replaced by other segments that are not identical at all, e.g. a 6 gets replaced by an 8."

The saga started in 2013, with Kriesel eventually getting Xerox to release a patch that fixes the error after months of back-and-forth. But there is no way for the company to track down each Workcentre machine, and many businesses and individuals that own the affected models may still be entirely unaware.

Kriesel's FrOSCon talk above is the first time he has presented his story in English (rather than his native German). Watch for the story of his impressive efforts to hold Xerox responsible for its mistakes.