Xiaomi Camera censoring German postal voting documents (opens in new tab)

Now that Apple has changed the rules, everyone should be under their impression that their phone is a cop and will snitch them out to the re-education board for punishment. This is reality.

I just took a picture of every Euro banknote (which of course have EURion on them) in my wallet with my Poco Phone (which has the same MIUI version / camera app) and all photos are perfectly normal

But could of course be a special change in this Xiaomi model :-)

The german postal voting documents do, with 99,9% certainty, not include any EURion constellations (---and they have no window, the return address is printed directly on the envelope--- EDIT: they do in cologne! See [1], last image, sorry for the misinformation). Wouldn't make much sense, as the envelope is thrown away immediately and the inner letter (which is not the ballot) contains a unique number per postally voting citizen that's not trivialy guessable.

They are however made from non-bleached (only coloured) recycling paper, so maybe the camera is picking up some artifacts from the different visible paper fibers?

[1] https://imgur.com/a/SCHGo4N

Oh god, I am waiting for law enforcement to print this on their uniforms so they can't be photographed.

Looking at OP's photos, I can't discern any such markings.

There is something really scary about this being all secret functionality. How do I know my scanner/printer/camera/... isn't snitching on me when connected to the internet?

Also can I put those dots in any picture/document to mess with cameras/editing software? Or is there more than those few dots to it? Would be kinda useful for public images, to at least annoy some stalkers, impersonators and other creeps. Doing this all over the place could also really support open source projects like GIMP!

There is nothing special about this shade of green that causes it to come from a codec issue. This green is what you get when you convert a 0-buffer from YUV to RGB. Depending on what colorspace you convert with it will be a slightly different shade.

You can play around with this yourself in imagemagick:

    dd if=/dev/zero of=zero.yuv bs=480 count=240
    convert -depth 8 -size 320x240 yuv:zero.yuv green.png

Conversion from YUV to RGB will be at one of the last steps of the image capture pipeline. Anything in between could wipe the buffer to 0s. It could be due to a simple bug in the image pipeline or it could be censorship. It tells you nothing.

When you click OPs link you get to the reddit thread where as an explanation they cite your very comment here on HN. And we've come full circle.

I don't think that's right.

Why would a codec problem, repeatably, affect images of a particular document, but not other images?

Yes indeed. This was a really common bug on iOS 13 beta, too.

@dang or other mods, can you change the title to be a little less inflammatory?

The user supplied a link with a number of sample images, including the photo taken with ProShot at the bottom.

https://imgur.com/a/SCHGo4N

This is not a quirk. It may be targeting the wrong document, but it’s a feature. Somebody spent time on making this behavior happen.

I'd say something like this is more likely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation

The envelope contains no barcode :-)

They have:

- The strings "Entgeltfrei im Bereich der Deutschen Post" (free shipment in Germany), "Wahlbrief" (postal voting document), "An <address of your local election office>"

- The name of the manufacturer and an order number for the envelope (which is identical on all envelopes), "Fachverlag Jüngling-gbb, Bestell-Nr 109 024 9319 099"

- Two fields that are filled out by hand (with a pen) by the election office before sending them to the citizen, "Wahlscheinnummer" (serial number) and "Stimmbezirk" (polling station)

They have not changed in the last... 30 years? :-)

I don't think any of that could trigger a barcode library :-D

EDIT: This is not true for all postal voting documents in all German municipalities, every municipality can order their own postal documents from several sources (or even print their own), but the specific envelope with the "green image problem" still does not contain a barcode, as seen in the last image the user posted: https://imgur.com/a/SCHGo4N