Xerox Confirms To David Kriesel Number Mangling Occuring On Factory Settings

An anonymous reader writes with a followup to last week's report that certain Xerox scanners and copiers could alter numbers as they scanned documents: "In the second Xerox press statement, Rick Dastin, Vice President at Xerox Corporation, stated: 'You will not see a character substitution issue when scanning with the factory default settings.' In contrast, David Kriesel, who brought up the issue in the first place, was able to replicate the issue with the very same factory settings. This might be a serious problem now. Not only does the problem occur using default settings and everyone may be affected, additionally, their press statements may have misled customers. Xerox replicated the issue by following Kriesel's instructions, later confirming it to Kriesel. Whole image segments seem to be copied around the scanned data. There is also a new Xerox statement out now." Swapping numbers while copying may seem like bizarre behavior for a copier, but In comments on the previous posting, several readers pointed out that Xerox was aware of the problem, and acknowledged it in the machine's documentation; the software updates promised should be welcome news to anyone who expects a copier to faithfully reproduce important numbers.

Comments

Important number

[fustakrakich]

69 dude!

Now if 6 turned out to be 9,
I don't mind, I don't mind, ...if all the hippies cut off all their hair,
I don't care, I don't care.
Dig, 'cos I got my own world to live through
And I ain't gonna copy you.

Re:Important number

[ehiris]

If xerox transforms it to 68, they owe you one!

Re:Notify Xerox First

[margeman2k3]

Corporations are people too!

In Development

[NewView]

Coming soon ... Xerox voting machines.

xerox was not in denial

[swampfriend]

They meant to admit this to the public last week, but their press release got its letters changed around for some reason...

Re:Sucky thing about digital

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, read the thread linked in the summary, copying doesn't even work right.

Says you. I advised one of my clients to get one of these machines when this issue was first made public. This "feature" gives them plausible deniability for the numbers in their documents to be wrong when they submit them to various entities.

I should send a big bouquet of flowers to Xerox. Falsifying documents is not falsifying documents when the copier does it.

Re:Everything you thought you knew...

[b4dc0d3r]

"Sure, but can it substitute feet for meters?"

No, It's a copier, not rocket science.

Re:Sucky thing about digital

[flyingfsck]

It is not brain dead. It is the only way the copier can efficiently forward the image to the NSA.