Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

5 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. 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.

  2. 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?

  3. 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
  4. 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.

  5. 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.