Reverse Paper Shredder Reveals Your Corporate Secrets

Paranoid types are going to have to start burning their documents if this thing catches on. Researchers in Germany have developed a software program to undo paper shredding. The project was undertaken to reassemble about 45 million shredded pages of police documents torn to some 600 million scraps 18 years ago.

As Bertram Nickolay of the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology put it to Nature mag:

The pieces of torn documents are scanned on both sides, and the digital images are then analysed by a cluster of 16 computers for 25 features, including colour, shape, texture, handwriting and typeface,

It’s only a matter of time before the IRS gets their hands on this and the whole CrunchGear house of cards comes tumbling down.

(via Nature)