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Comment by famousactress | Hacker News Reader

I may have told this story before (perhaps back in 2008 if this was posted then) -- but my first gig in tech was QA for Hewlett Packard testing printer/scanner/copier units. At some point I scanned a photo of my then-girlfriend and crashed the unit. Was able to do it repeatedly, provided I scanned the image in straight/cleanly. I didn't come across any other images that reproduced the issue, only this one photo. The underlying bug was a buffer overrun of some sort, was fixed before shipping -- and the image became a part of the durable regression test suite for that department.

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Not surprised there was a bug, but I am surprised it was patched (before or after shipping). I have an “enterprise grade” HP scanner (3500 F1) with buggy Twain drivers I had to manually disassemble and patch that will crash any time you try to duplex scan a single-sided sheet of paper. The blank page detection algorithm caused a null pointer dereference if two-sided mode was selected but the second side was elided.

The bug reproduced 100% of the time with all available versions of their drivers in any application using the TWAIN rather than WIA or proprietary scanner interface. It was as simple as scanning any one-sided document in duplex mode. I escalated the issue to their engineers who kept insisting the issue was with my PC until the product was EOL’d just a year or two after production.

I had other hardware issues pop up and ended up getting a Fujitsu for ADF document scanning and keeping the HP for scanning photos with the flatbed. Not many stand-alone hi-res dual color ADF/flatbed scanners out there.

If you're in software, you probably know this, but your bug was likely ignored not because it couldn't be reproduced, but because the engineers on the project were prioritizing feature work for the next version of the scanner, and did not have any support from management for fixing bugs in an already-shipping product. Sadly, driver software quality tends to max out at the level where customers won't return the hardware for a refund, and then the company abandons it and works on the next shiny new device.

> If you're in software, you probably know this, but your bug was likely ignored not because it couldn't be reproduced, but because the engineers on the project were prioritizing feature work for the next version of the scanner, and did not have any support from management for fixing bugs in an already-shipping product.

Well, yes, but is it normal to insist no bug exists?

perhaps if HP support admitted there's a bug, depending on the support contract (if applicable), HP would have had to fix it

That is actually correct.

Well, that's why the parent commenter was surprised that the scanning bug in the grandparent comment was fixed at all.

I can't help but wonder if Alexander Hamilton or Benjamin Franklin would cause printer problems too (for a different reason)

Counterfeit protection does work on image recognition, but not necessarily the faces. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation

This makes me wonder what'd happen if you had the EURion tattooed on your face.

Sad that this rings a GDPR bell in my mind.

You don't need GDPR for this to have legal issues.

As an amateur photographer, I'm pretty sure that you'd formally need a model release form for a commercial use of it to be legitimate[1].

Of course, as with any legal issue, the company would weigh the probability of it being enforced vs. the hassle of doing it right... and it's pretty clear where the balance is in most cases.

[1] https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/using-name-or-likeness-anot...

That's a publishing consideration, not really an image in a box in the engineering lab consideration.

As far as photography is concerned, the act of making a photograph and giving it away to someone constitutes publishing. Here, the engineer published the photo by giving it to his employer (and making it a part of the test suite).

Not publishing would be keeping it to himself, which the engineer did not do. For all we know, his girlfriend did not consent for that photo to be distributed to other people. Model release forms exist for that reason.

But that's not merely a publishing consideration anyway; the law is more general than that.

In the end, it's someone's face being used for a commercial purpose without consent, and this is exactly what the law is about.

Everything is commercial if you squint hard enough.

Is it enough to buy her bottle of wine or something in exchange for being able to keep the photo indefinitely?

It's up to her. Some people are OK with that without being compensated. Some aren't. That's the reason model release forms exist.

What if her name was Lena?

Lena Forsén's photo was taken from a magazine - the appropriate model lease forms have surely been signed by her at some point.

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