Squeezing the truth
1 min read
Photocopiers have always been seen as faithful and honest servants of the administrative class. But recent developments appear to be changing that.
Once, they were simple optical devices; a document was scanned, processed and printed. The business model of the day saw photocopiers rented on a usage basis; each time a page was copied, the meter turned and the user's bill increased.
Modern photocopiers are a different animal; the one sat close to my desk needs advanced skills to access its functions. One of the features is the ability to scan and store documents. To save memory space, these files are compressed and it seems there may be a bug in this approach.
News reports claim that German computer scientists have found that data in documents can change in certain instances. In one instance, a dimension was changed from 21.11m to 14.13m. Tests showed that 6s could turn into 8s and vice versa.
The culprit is alleged to be the Jbig2 compression standard. Yet Jbig2 has been around since the turn of the Millennium and widely used. If there was a problem with Jbig2, you might expect it to have been detected and fixed by now. But, with software, you never know.
