Pentagon Offers $50K to Reconstruct Shredded Documents

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
Joined
May 9, 2000
Messages
75,399
DARPA is looking for a few good men to find a method of reconstructing shredded documents in the field that is fast and effective. Presently, it is a slow laborious process by hand or computer assisted which makes educated guesses. DARPA needs the Tin Foil Hat brigade to jump into action and win the $50K prize. No one knows sneaky better than geeks and nerds. :D

"Currently, this process is much too slow and too labor-intensive, particularly if the documents are handwritten. We are looking to the Shredder Challenge to generate some leap-ahead thinking in this area."


Click to expand...
 
I would hate to be part of the team that tried to recovery shredded documents from a cross-cut shredder. Talk about a puzzle from hell...
 
Is this so we can gain the upper hand in intelligence info when China starts sending its garbage to be dumped here. *drum roll*
 
Time for the paranoid to start filtering, bleaching, and repulping their own shredded paper.
 
Heh..now we all know to not just shred our sensitive docs but to burn them too. Thanks for the tip gov.org.
 
I was looking on their "projects" one time..... you can make SERIOUS DOUGH if you can think of apeshit crazy stuff they are trying to invent. Look on there, there is some off-the-f#@king wall things they have ideas for. usajobs website or something like that I saw it on...
 
An invention they are talking about would be worth MUCH more than 50k.
 
Seems easy enough. A mechanical system to comb and extract individual paper shreds, and then feed them to a scanner. Then software to arrange the puzzle pieces.

Are there people still printing sensitive documents?
 
robble said:
An invention they are talking about would be worth MUCH more than 50k.
Click to expand...

I have to agree. This 50k prize is bullshit. Compared to the money they most likely spent just to present the news of a 50k prize probably cost millions in government employee time...
 
Aren't flatbed scanners already capable of this? If you drop a picture in a scanner, it automatically orients them right side up and in individual pieces (Put in four pictures, it spits out four files, properly oriented). Wouldn't take more than that to simply add a utility to match up the edges.

The people making the scanner softwares would be the first i'd go to.
 
Document destroyers will have to result to burning to beat whatever method is developed.
 
Proabably a bigger prize for someone to reconstruct a harddrive that was erased with a simple 1 pass of zero's. Even though many people say its easy to do.
 
most people are probably trying to look at the words on the shreds and piece them back together so the document makes sense. I doubt that paper is uniform. How about taking hi-res images of the edges of the paper and finding the shred who has an identical edge (like patterns or arrangements of the material that makes up the paper)?
 
If it's anything like my cross shred machine the paper is so distorted and frayed you'd be lucky to match it by the edges. If you had a bunch of paper with the same coloring and size.....you're only hope to make it manageable is if the paper is still in the catch bin and largely undisturbed.

The ultimate way to screw with something like this would be to cut the paper in half long ways and shred it in two different machines....so you have to sort through every bag this place generates of shredding to even hope to find the complete document.
 
This is where watching all those episodes of Jeopardy come in handy.

THE SECRET TO LIFE IS PIE.
 
Someone isn't managing their paperwork properly. When I was in Australia, we shreaded everything, burned it then mixed it up with a stick.
 
I remember reading about the program that could reassemble docs shredded with a straight cut shredder quite awhile ago, but it wasn't good enough to reassemble cross cut at that time.


Currently, a variety of techniques exist for reconstructing shredded documents including manual assembly, fully automated (computerized) algorithms and hybrid operator-assisted approaches.
"Currently, this process is much too slow and too labor-intensive, particularly if the documents are handwritten. We are looking to the Shredder Challenge to generate some leap-ahead thinking in this area."



Wait, what? Now they're whining about all the work involved when it's automated?! Isn't gov't known for dragging things out to line their pockets? They should be overjoyed to be working at all in a time when jobs are getting harder to find.

We all know that this will be be used indiscriminately in the name of "security" just like everything else they get their grubby little mitts on.

Looks like people who can't burn will need to get DOD approved shredders that turn docs onto a fine powder. I'd like to see them reassemble that. :p
 
I am pretty sure this technology exists on CSI already. and it probably only takes a couple of seconds
 
Any documents being destroyed coming out of a SCF need to be burned or pulverized anyways. So this would only be useful for stuff that likely isn't that important anyways.
 
eh, i'd love working on a project like that. but the 50k is peanut, a joke even. This should be one of the million dollar prize thingies.
 
I've always wondered why people don't just incinerate their sensitive documents. It seems much faster and secure.
 
Zangmonkey said:
I've always wondered why people don't just incinerate their sensitive documents. It seems much faster and secure.
Click to expand...

It isn't the paper that is sensitive, it's the ink on the page. (not saying you didn't already realize this).

It would appear more environmentally friendly to reduce said sensitive documents to a watery pulp, then compress and dry it out into a "brick". You could then throw the paper bricks in the paper recycling bin or sell to paper recycling plant.
 
riot8ap said:
It isn't the paper that is sensitive, it's the ink on the page. (not saying you didn't already realize this).

It would appear more environmentally friendly to reduce said sensitive documents to a watery pulp, then compress and dry it out into a "brick". You could then throw the paper bricks in the paper recycling bin or sell to paper recycling plant.
Click to expand...

The chemicals involved in that are anything but environmentally friendly.
 
rhone89 said:
The chemicals involved in that are anything but environmentally friendly.
Click to expand...

True, which is why the first thought of incineration doesn't seem like the best. If the toxic chemicals are in the water it could be treated and disposed of properly.
 
If anyone's serious about this, I'll throw you a bone. Use a conical centrifuge for sifting and scan both sides of everything when it's passed through the feed rollers, having the software number each piece as it's scanned in. That will help your mechanical speed factor. Software is up to you.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top