Rob Beschizza
Gear

Battle Of The Gadgets: Shredder vs. Scanner

In the closing years of the GDR, the Stasi, seeing the writing on the wall (and on the paper) shredded evidence of its misdeeds. Enron, eat your heart out. Now, almost twenty years later, the German government is finally able to piece together the packing material thus produced using the latest scanning and digital repiecing […]

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In the closing years of the GDR, the Stasi, seeing the writing on the wall (and on the paper) shredded evidence of its misdeeds. Enron, eat your heart out. Now, almost twenty years later, the German government is finally able to piece together the packing material thus produced using the latest scanning and digital repiecing technology.

"a puzzle that would take 30 diligent Germans 600 to 800 years to finish by hand, according to one estimate, might be solved by computer in seven."

The head engineer at Fraunhofer, Jan Schneider, said that the chance to make history was very exciting. The idea of individually scotch taping millions of scraps from 16,250 garbage bags was, evidently, not.

Story [Spiegel]