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Xerox's 'Intelligent Redaction' Scanners

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the this-can't-be-real-right dept.

coondoggie writes "Xerox today touted software it says can scan documents, understand their meaning and block access to those sensitive or secure areas so that prying eyes cannot read, copy or forward the information. Xerox and researchers from its Palo Alto Research Center debuted "Intelligent Redaction," new software that automates the process of removing confidential information from any document. The software includes a detection tool that uses content analysis and an intelligent user interface to protect sensitive information. It can encrypt only the sensitive sections or paragraphs of a document, a capability previously not available, Xerox said."

35 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. Automatically redacts the same content... by aicrules · · Score: 2, Interesting

    So, once you have marked a certain confidential information as confidential, it will do it automatically in other documents. Which means that for the low, low price of your time, you can submit a document with "fill-in the blanks" text until it redacts the same parts and BANG you know what the redacted section was...:D

    1. Re:Automatically redacts the same content... by deniable · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The fun game is then getting access to the material stored in the copier. This is the big list of things not to tell people. It's like having a what to hide from the cops list on your fridge.

    2. Re:Automatically redacts the same content... by zeromorph · · Score: 3, Funny

      Great, the next cracker related headlines will be about some Chinese kiddie who breaks into a copier in a remote corridor of the DoD. Yay, Xerox.

      But this list thing actually shows, that the summary:

      can scan documents, understand their meaning ...

      is totally bogus.

      On the other side, this could be a wonderful Clippy revenant:"It looks like you're scanning a secret..."

      --
      "Hannibal's plans never work right. They just work." Amy/A-Team
    3. Re:Automatically redacts the same content... by Brad+Eleven · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The best part is your use of revenant. Had to look it up: One who returns after death (as a ghost) or after a long absence. Other sources say animated corpse.

      Kind of like our guarantees of freedoms, any more: Ghosts, or zombies at best, but possibly resurrected in toto at some future date.

      --
      "Press to test."
      (click)
      "Release to detonate."
  2. They will know too much for their own good. by Y-Crate · · Score: 4, Funny

    I'm sure this will lead to a lot of copiers having "accidental" drownings in their bathtubs and Completely Innocuous single car crashes.

  3. That's not intelligent.... by Paul+Doom · · Score: 2, Funny

    ...it's just a new way to save money on support and service when printers stop printing or blow toner all over the place. "Look at this mess! The first page greys out and then there are only a few faint lines for the next 30 pages!" "Nothing wrong with the printer. That information is simply redacted."

    --
    "Life is life." --Laibach
  4. Accuracy by kevmatic · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is a poor idea. It better be 100% accurate at marking classified data as classified. All it will take is one screw-up and some extremely important data out there can be leaked to the wrong people.

    99.99% accurate isn't going to be good enough, is it?

  5. Hampers whistleblowing, perhaps? by Radon360 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Attention corrupt senior corporate management:

    Tired of dealing with underlings trying to take you out by blowing the whistle on your illicit financial dealings? We have just the type of business equipment that you're looking for. Stop those do-gooders right in their tracks by automatically keeping them from copying those fudged books and secretive memos. Act now, and we'll throw in the automatic notification upgrade so you can terminate their employment before they have the chance resort to other means of toppling your investment scam...

    (okay, I'll put my tinfoil hat back in the closet, now)

  6. Oh nifty... by CoolVibe · · Score: 2, Funny

    Now I just have to find out how it works so I can print T-shirts that cannot be copied :)

  7. Disaster in the making by Raul654 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    AI is a disaster through-and-through. It never works well. Ever.

    Consider hand-writing recognition, autonomous robotics, and game theory, just to name a few of the narrowest, most-well defined (read:easiest) AI applications. AI works well in none of these - at best, it's so-so (like the 95-98% success rates in OCR).

    Now what you have here, with the automatic redacting copier, is that the copier needs to understand the document its reading, and determine which parts to redact. Contextual understanding is *HARD* - it's the same class of problem as automated translation - only harder in this case.

    This copier idea is a huge flop. I don't know why they waste money on it. Anyone who relies on this copier to redact documents is a fool, because it is bound to make all kinds of mistakes (both type 1 - missing things it should have picked up, and type 2 - redacting things it shouldn't).

    --


    To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
    --E.C. Stanton
    1. Re:Disaster in the making by Raul654 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You have missed my point. I don't deny that OCR makes life easier for people who have to digitize documents. The point I am making is that OCR is, as far as AI applications go, the easiest problem there is. And, even with such an easy problem, the best applications out there deliver substantially less than reliable performance. (If you think 99% is OK, then imagine that for a 100,000 word novel, at 4 characters per word, that's 2,000 words that need fixing).

      Now, with this copier, you are talking about a *substantially* harder problem, which has far less tolerance for errors. (Meaning that you want absolutely no false negatives) The chances that this copier works as advertised, or anywhere close to it, is basically nil. It was a waste of money for Xerox to develop it (because anyone even moderately knowledgeable about AI should have been able to tell them this) and it's a waste of money for anyone who buys it.

      --


      To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
      --E.C. Stanton
    2. Re:Disaster in the making by martyb · · Score: 2, Insightful

      AI is a disaster through-and-through. It never works well. Ever.

      Consider hand-writing recognition, autonomous robotics, and game theory, just to name a few of the narrowest, most-well defined (read:easiest) AI applications. AI works well in none of these - at best, it's so-so (like the 95-98% success rates in OCR).

      Agreed. But, there's a huge continuum between the current error-prone, manual process and a fully-automated redaction machine.

      Now what you have here, with the automatic redacting copier, is that the copier needs to understand the document its reading, and determine which parts to redact. Contextual understanding is *HARD* - it's the same class of problem as automated translation - only harder in this case.

      Agreed. But I do see an opportunity here for an automated assistant to the current manual process. In a sense, it's like a context-sensitive lint for English.

      Imagine it watching over your shoulder, so to speak, as you start redacting a document. "Oh, he just redacted: 'Reading, Mass' so I'll let 'em know the next time I see that. Consider an incremental search in an editor where it highlights all instances of the string you are searching for. You still need to actually READ the text, but it helps to at least point out all "words/phrases of interest."

      Let's put it another way. Imagine YOU are sitting in front of a PC and manually redacting hundreds of pages of documents. How long before you'd wish there was a way for the system to highlight things you have already told it, TWENTY !!%$%%! TIMES, that should be redacted? You still need to accept the offering, and continue to locate and point out additional words/phrases of interest so it can build its "vocabulary".

      Then, for completeness, add a verification pass where you get to see, in context, all accepted and declined redaction suggestions. For additional security or confidence, have another person do the same thing from the same starting point, and then diff the resulting redactions.

      Summary: no silver bullet here, but I see it being a very useful and helpful adjunct to an all-manual process.

    3. Re:Disaster in the making by AJWM · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Even if OCR only has a 50% success rate, that means that it is 50% less work that someone is going to be doing.

      While in general I agree with your point -- a thing doesn't have to be perfect to be useful -- OCR with only a 50% success rate is likely to mean more work for somebody who has to go through and correct it. At some point it's easier just to retype the whole thing manually than go through correcting all the OCR errors, and I think that point is a lot fewer errors than 50%. (Been there, done that.)

      --
      -- Alastair
    4. Re:Disaster in the making by veganboyjosh · · Score: 2, Funny

      I can get rid of all type 1 errs at the penalty of increasing type 2. I can do this on most modern copiers, It consists of unplugging the power cord.

    5. Re:Disaster in the making by Raul654 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      On the contrary, I'm do computer engineering research for a living. And don't get me wrong - I think this is a perfectly valid area to research. But a redacting copier is 3 (or more) decades from being a viable product - the technology just isn't there yet. Wildly exaggerated claims leading to disappointment have plagued the AI field for decades, and putting out products like this only contributes to that.

      --


      To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
      --E.C. Stanton
  8. Wow.. automated blame-shifting! by pintpusher · · Score: 3, Funny

    This way when some critical info gets missed in the redaction process, there's no one to blame! So not only will our (I'm usian) gov't be more efficient about hiding stuff from us, no one will have to take the fall if it goes wrong.

    That said, I'm amazed at what modern Ai can do. It's not clear, from this rather thin article, how much this system depends on human input to prevent mistakes. There must be some kind of training process. What is the state of these kinds of systems? I remember from some AI courses I took years ago, that they worked well but inevitably someone would end up calling someone else something stupid. Then the machine would start skipping important bits and the coders would look like idiots.

    That was hard and a real stretch there at the end. blah.

    --
    man, I feel like mold.
  9. Details please. by starseeker · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Obviously this is not possible in general, since how sensitive information is can and will change over time. Without full AI awareness of the situation that places the document in context, this is not possible. (E.g. the statement "Bob will be leaving the company" could either be highly sensitive or old news, depending entirely on the time and/or reader. Even more fun, what about "accidentally" sensitive statements where the mere fact that the machine hides it flags it as an item of interest to someone who didn't know it was interesting?)

    Also, a machine may "blank out" the sensitive part but leave enough around it for an astute hostile actor to still gain something - such things are so highly context sensitive I can't see any general algorithm that could guarantee success in all such cases.

    Still, two possibly useful approaches that are closer to hand would be:

    1) Supply the machine with a form, and specify certain areas (which will contain an SSN, for example) as containing information that must be treated as sensitive. So long as a standard form is used, the results could be handy.

    2) Supply the machine with a complete list of information you want to keep under wraps (and all the various ways that information might appear - drawings, descriptions, what have you) and have it check each document for anything that matches anything on its sensitive list. This also has problems and would be easy to get around but it WOULD be helpful to prevent non-hostile carelessness - i.e. "WHOOPS Bob just scanned something sensitive to add to that email, better blot out the parts that aren't cleared to go outside the organization."

    While a general solution isn't possible, I can actually see this being useful in controlled situations. The article mentions medical, financial and government which all have lots of well defined forms that can be used. It won't allow the replacement of human judgement but it might make it easier to stop certain forms of accidental distribution in well defined cases, and that's worth pursuing so long as it doesn't encourage carelessness.

    --
    "I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
    1. Re:Details please. by antifoidulus · · Score: 2, Funny

      Hi, I'm from the ---ox corporation and I am here to explain how this works:

      First, the machine ----------- in your documen-- and using --------------eats--------ba----------------bies and of course you can be ---% satisfied that we will ----- your documents and your -------- is very important to us! Hope that helps ----------- up!

      --
      Monstar L
  10. Re:The Truth About 9/11 by homey+of+my+owney · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yeah, and the practice continued unabated. It amazes me that they claim the very same government that is inept, unethical and incapable, can pull off keeping such a huge secret. For a 140 year old reference: "It appears we have appointed our worst generals to command forces, and our most gifted and brilliant to edit newspapers. In fact, I discovered by reading newspapers that these editor/geniuses plainly saw all my strategic defects from the start, yet failed to inform me until it was too late. Accordingly, I am readily willing to yield my command to these obviously superior intellects, and I will, in turn, do my best for the Cause by writing editorials - after the fact." ~ Robert E. Lee, 1863

  11. We the [REDACTED] by Speare · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I wonder if it prints yellow dots to encode the redacted text for forensic analysis.

    You know, it used to be that a "national security" threat was something that could kill millions, or wipe out the White House. Now a kid with some lighter fluid can be arrested for terroristic threats, and it's the White House that authorizes the killing. Can nobody read the Constitution?

    We the [REDACTED]
    --
    [ .sig file not found ]
  12. Re:User Manual = Redacted by julesh · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Maybe it's as good as Adobe PDF's redaction feature, and anyone can unredact the document?

    To be fair to Adobe, that *isn't* a redaction feature. It's a rectangle drawing feature that happens to get regularly misused.

  13. Re:User Manual = Redacted by gt_mattex · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Or maybe camera phones have already rendered this technology moot.

    --
    "No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes scripture." - Learned Hand
  14. Obligatory bash.org quote... by alexhs · · Score: 5, Funny

    IRC did that years ago...

    <Cthon98> hey, if you type in your pw, it will show as stars
    <Cthon98> ********* see!
    <AzureDiamond> hunter2
    <AzureDiamond> doesnt look like stars to me
    <Cthon98> <AzureDiamond> *******
    <Cthon98> thats what I see
    <AzureDiamond> oh, really?
    <Cthon98> Absolutely
    <AzureDiamond> you can go hunter2 my hunter2-ing hunter2
    <AzureDiamond> haha, does that look funny to you?
    <Cthon98> lol, yes. See, when YOU type hunter2, it shows to us as *******
    <AzureDiamond> thats neat, I didnt know IRC did that
    <Cthon98> yep, no matter how many times you type hunter2, it will show to us as *******
    <AzureDiamond> awesome!
    <AzureDiamond> wait, how do you know my pw?
    <Cthon98> er, I just copy pasted YOUR ******'s and it appears to YOU as hunter2 cause its your pw
    <AzureDiamond> oh, ok.

    Source : http://bash.org/?244321

    --
    I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
  15. Waiting for the new security announcements by Opportunist · · Score: 2, Funny

    To avoid a meltdown, follow these easy steps.

    1. Read radiation gauge and ensure it shows no more than (deleted for reasons of national security).
    2. Press the (deleted for intellectual property reasons) button.
    3. Watch carefully for (deleted for reasons of national security).

    If meltdown cannot be avoided, (deleted for reasons of excessive gore and violence).

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  16. Maybe it's a good idea. by DanielJosphXhan · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If the intelligent redaction feature accidentally misses actual critical information and instead redacts non-critical information, that could be a good thing. I mean, for people who want to know things other people don't want them to know.

    --
    [ think ]
  17. Next step? by fropenn · · Score: 2, Interesting

    What is the next step in development of this feature? What about using it to prevent the duplication of copyrighted works (sort of a DRM for paper)?

  18. Re:Accuracy? Who Needs It! by JustJim0183 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Don't you mean censorship ?

  19. If it's that intelligent by kalirion · · Score: 3, Funny

    What's to stop it from holding our secrets hostage in an attempt to be given human rights?

  20. Defining the variables by Rob+T+Firefly · · Score: 2, Informative

    Putting aside the fact that OCR and related AI is still just this side of "not very good," for an AI to sucessfully and exclusively redact certain material, someone still has to at some point define the dataset of what is redactable, and feed that data into the machine. Unless, of course, this AI is simply allowed to crawl the networks and glean for itself what's good and bad for us...

    --
    Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
    1. Re:Defining the variables by tompaulco · · Score: 2, Funny

      Putting aside the fact that OCR and related AI is still just this side of "not very good,"
      As Director of Recognition Technologies for my firm, I would like to disagree with you.

      Sadly, I can't.

      --
      If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
  21. Secret != Classified by cyphergirl · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Everyone seems to be automatically assuming that it would be used for classified data. This looks more to me like something developed for the businesses that have to deal with HIPPA. Well-defined medical forms (with SSN, name, etc in the same place every time) could automatically be redacted in order to ensure patient privacy and HIPPA-compliance. Looks like a win for the medical industry. It could also work well in the financial world where "need to know" information can be blacked out on financial forms and applications.

    --
    --Insert catchy .sig line here--
    1. Re:Secret != Classified by Intron · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It will be great until the first time somebody puts the form in upside-down and copies it.

      --
      Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
    2. Re:Secret != Classified by cyphergirl · · Score: 2, Informative

      After actually going to the Xerox website and reading about this new technology, I see that it is built around document routing (for review, for example) and has nothing whatsoever to do with their copier and MFD products. This makes sense, considering that they purchased A***** (can't remember the name), which handles legal discovery production and organization services for several corporations (SCO included). Xerox ("The Document Company") is more than just copiers these days.

      --
      --Insert catchy .sig line here--
  22. Take the brain out of the user and into the system by Psykechan · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I worked at a company that had a "top secret" project that they were working on that if the internal name were revealed it could result in, well, not much really... but management was very paranoid that it would get out. This copier could have sensed the name and blanked it out when sales copied "sensitive" material accidentally. Nice.

    Except for the fact that once you make the machine start thinking the user begins to stop thinking. If sales knew about this feature then they wouldn't be bothered to care at all what they were copying and sending out to customers. Eventually the copier wouldn't be a fail safe for the user but would be just a new liability for error. I can't see how this is really much better except it just shifts the blame to IT.

  23. Re:User Manual = Redacted by Goaway · · Score: 2, Funny

    Maybe it's as good as Adobe PDF's redaction feature, and anyone can unredact the document? Yes, because pieces of paper are much like digital files. You can just switch them to select mode and drag the paragraphs around.