Scanners are swapping numbers and messing up our data

Our society relies on scanned documents at every level, from private business to government agencies. Which is why it's so disturbing to learn that several brands of scanners (including Xerox, one of the most popular models) has been swapping numbers in these documents at random.

A German PhD in computational science discovered that scanners are changing 6s to 8s in many documents. And now that he has published his paper, even more people are speaking up to say they have suddenly noticed these errors, too.

This... could be a very big problem.

Image courtesy Flickr/Aotearoa People's Network Kaharoa