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Hard Drives in Copy Machines

I can't watch the video, but wow, that could catch and keep a lot of stuff that should have higher security!
 
Choppier security has been a potential issue for a while - decades, in certain lines of work. But I'm a bit surprised encryption isn't free of charge. Although, if the purchasers openly don't care...
 
Do they still use HDs in copy machines/printers?
I know in the past they did, but now with current RAM prices seems pointless.
By the way, RAM can retain information for a few seconds a minute at room temperature I think.
And much longer if cooled with Liquid nitrogen.
So CIA can literally take the info from your notebook with them.
 
WOW! I am ashamed to admit that I had no idea about the hard-drives. Lesson learned here. Especially as I am going to be moving doctor's surgeries very shortly.
 
Yup, the big machines have hard drives to facilitate the complex copy jobs. RAM won't cut it because who knows how big a job they may be asked to hold.

Now, if you want really nasty there were some copiers with a nasty software bug that could actually end up changing figures on the paper being copied in some fairly narrow circumstances.

The problem was image compression. One of the basic ways of compressing data is to look for repeated patterns, store only one copy and replace the others with a token saying what pattern to use. When it's text you accept no errors, this works fine. When you're dealing with images it's always a tradeoff between how faithfully you reproduce the original and how much you can compress the file. Unfortunately, the compressor was too aggressive. When faced with numbers in a small font that happened to line up with the cells being used by the compressor it could decide "I've seen this before" when the other cell actually contained say a 6 instead of an 8.
 
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