Reading last night's mails, I get the information that readers have been able to reproduce the error on the following devices (thanks, Christian and others):

• WorkCentre 7530, WorkCentre 7328, WorkCentre 7346, WorkCentre 7545

As usual, the following holds: I did not reproduce the error on these devices myself, so consider this as hearsay, even though plausible. My own Observations have been made on the following devices:

• WorkCentre 7535, WorkCentre 7556

Other mails reported the reproductability of the issue on

• Xerox ColorQube 9203, Xerox ColorQube 9201

There are also some readers able to reproduce errors, but understandably not willing to be named here for credits at the same time. I respect this attitude and then give credits to anonymous readers, so feel free to mail me even though you do not want to be named. After writing this article, I will add a “list of reportedly affected machines” to the original blog post.

Whats more, there is a new download. Lots of readers asked for a original scanned PDF of one of the affected devices, so there is one now in the lower part of the original blog post.

Some words with respect to the increasing media coverage: Usually, if one newspaper or newscast presses ahead, others follow. Since yesterday in the evening, there is such a pioneer in form of the renowned German Magazine “Spiegel” (see here). Thus, it is likely that other newspapers and -portals will follow these days. In a few hours, the USA also wake up again, which were responsible for almost two thirds of the hits yesterday. In case the concern grows further, I think there will be a Xerox statement in the near future, which I am looking forward to.

In any case, I do not any more think Xerox can just sit through the issue, as grandma Jane Doe currently needs to worry about her pension awards getting messed up by some Xerox machine. Apart from this, I think there is reasonable hope for the issue being able to be solved by a software update, which is positive. A further, obvious strategic disadvantage resulting from Xerox' silence is, that technical information about affected machines, as well as workaround proposals actually arrive in my mailbox and not at Xeroxes. Not bad for you though – once I get a running and tested workaround I am able to reproduce, I'll be most happy to let you know at this place.

Another thing becoming increasingly unlikely for Xerox to do, is forward defense like “the issue is a consequence of handling errors”. I want to take this opportunity and preventively express a warning not to handle this, like other enterprises did in the past. If the issue turns out to be some sort of simple handling error, that's fine with me, but in this case different Xerox support employees would have had more than one week of time to figure this out. Instead, the company where the issue occurred to me Wednesday, July 24th, is still sitting on the number-mangling machines, with Xerox being aware of the issue since July 25th. Additionally, Xerox or Xerox related companies have been on-site several times in the mean time without coming up with a solution.

Let me point out one last thing, as I am getting emails that tell me to bash Xerox: This is no Xerox bashing site here. They are ringing me up self-motivatedly, they seem to be investigating, and such errors just happen (even though this is one heckuva bug, admittedly). They might be getting more than enough problems in the future, as they might get sued for myriads of subtly incorrect documents, possibly produced over years, in maybe tens of thousands of enterprises across the whole planet. If this is what's coming to them, then the last thing they need is some blogging dude in a corner of the internet telling them “See?”. This site is not for gleefulness, it's for finding solutions.