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Ed Webb

Machine pieces together the ripped secrets of the East German state - Times Online - 0 views

www.timesonline.co.uk/...article7070484.ece

secrecy Germany stasi pattern_recognition computers data information authoritarianism Totalitarianism

shared by Ed Webb on 22 Mar 10 - Cached
  • An astonishing 45 million documents were ripped up, and stuffed into rubbish bags
  • The reunified German state insisted that the files be reconstructed, and a team of 30 in Nuremberg set about manually sticking the documents together using old-fashioned puzzle methods, tweezers and lots of sticky tape. But in the course of 15 years, just 350 sackfuls of paper have been reassembled this way: completing the task, it was estimated, would take at least another 400 years.
  • the E-puzzler, the most sophisticated digital pattern-recognition system in the world
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • within a second, the document is assembled on the adjoining monitor
  • The East German police state — memorably evoked in the 2006 film The Lives of Others — remains an object of grim fascination for both Germany and the world. The BStU receives 8,000 requests a year from Germans anxious to uncover the past.
  • the technology promises to do more than the historical equivalent of reconstructive surgery. Museum curators and archaeologists have used it to help to reconstruct broken terracotta figures from China and papyrus documents from Iraq. Next month the files from the Jewish archive in Buenos Aires, badly damaged in a terrorist attack in 1984, will be brought to Berlin, where Fraunhofer technicians will begin the task of salvage and reconstruction. The equipment has played a role in a German tax fraud case.
  • Even documents that have shredded twice and resemble confetti can be digitally reassembled.
  • Ed Webb on 22 Mar 10
     
    via Wm Gibson @GreatDismal
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