He tried the same challenge which caused Archie Battersbee’s death
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A teenager who was found dead in his bedroom was taking part in a dangerous viral TikTok challenge, according to his heartbroken mum. Leon Brown, 14, was found unresponsive by his mother Lauryn Keating, 30, at their home in Dunbartonshire, Scotland on August 25.
As reported by the Daily Record, she later learned he had tried the same shocking challenge trend believed to have caused 12-year-old Archie Battersbee to suffer a fatal brain injury which later led to his death. Mum Lauryn has been left devastated by her son’s passing and has issued an important warning to other families about the online game.
Lauryn said: “One of Leon’s friends told me he had been doing the challenge on Facetime with them after seeing it on TikTok. My Leon thought he would be the one to try it first. Him and his friends probably thought it was a laugh and a joke.
Read more: Archie Battersbee, 12, dies as life support turned off after legal battle row
“One of the kids who he was on Facetime with told me what he had done. She said they thought they would wake up. But Leon didn’t come back around. It went horribly wrong.” Lauryn said she wanted other parents to be aware of the dangers of the challenge.
“I had heard of this challenge, because of what happened to Archie Battersbee,” she said. “But you just don’t expect your own child to do it. Please warn them, these online challenges aren’t worth their lives. They aren’t worth ‘likes’ or whatever they are doing it for.”
A TikTok spokesman said the ‘safety of our community is our priority’ and any content of that nature ‘would be removed if found’. Speaking of popular youngster Leon, who was a pupil at Our Lady’s High School in Cumbernauld, Lauryn said: “He was the happiest, funniest wee boy ever.
“He was a bit of a class clown and he liked to make people laugh. Everything was always a joke and a carry on to Leon. He was just a wee cheeky boy. But he meant so much to me.”
It is understood Leon and his friends had seen the challenge on TikTok. Lauryn added: “I went on TikTok and wrote out words similar to [the name of the challenge]. The amount of video results that came up on it is ridiculous.”
The tragedy of Leon’s death comes just weeks after Archie Battersbee died on August 6. Archie was also found unconscious by his mother Hollie Dance at his home in Essex in April this year. The young boy had suffered a “catastrophic” brain injury and was placed on life support.
He passed away after his family lost a long-running legal battle to continue the treatment that was keeping him alive. Ms Dance has publicly spoken out on her belief that Archie had participated in the same challenge.
TikTok told the Record it has measures in place to prevent users from sharing videos on the trend and searching the challenge in question takes users to a safety centre on the app. Users are also able to report any videos that contain graphic content.
TikTok also deletes videos of the challenge from the platform.
Leon’s friends and loved ones gathered to release balloons in his memory last week. A Celtic strip, signed with moving messages from his pals, was also mounted on a railing at their local park.
Lauryn now hopes Hoops football fans will get behind a round of applause for Leon during the 14th minute of the Old Firm match on Saturday so her much-loved son can be “14 forever”. Loved ones have now created a fundraiser to support Leon’s family. To donate click here.
A TikTok spokesperson said: “Our deepest sympathies go out to Leon Brown’s family during this incredibly difficult time. The safety of our community is our priority and we take any claim about a dangerous challenge very seriously. Content of this nature is prohibited on our platform and would be removed if found.”
A Police Scotland spokesperson said: “We were made aware of the sudden death of a 14-year-old boy at Ochilview Court in Cumbernauld around 8am on Thursday, 25 August, 2022. There are no suspicious circumstances surrounding his death and a report will be submitted to the Procurator Fiscal.”
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Nottingham millionaire pays heartfelt tribute to ‘soulmate’ brother who died in Spain
Fury in ‘filthy’ Nottingham estate where homes and cars ‘covered in dust’
Sheffield United star Oli McBurnie denies alleged assault during Championship play-off semi-final
Read more Nottinghamshire news

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Open source is free software built collaboratively by a community of developers, often volunteers, for public use. Google, iPhones, the national power grid, surgical operating rooms, baby monitors, and military databases all run on this unique asset. 
However, open source has an urgent security problem. Open source is more ubiquitous and susceptible to persistent threats than ever before. Proprietary software has responded to threats by implementing thorough institutional security measures. The same care is not being given to open-source software—primarily due to misaligned incentives. 
First, open source’s primary beneficiaries—software vendors who profit from its use—are free-riders who lack incentives to contribute to the open-source projects they use. Second, these software vendors also lack incentives to secure the open-source code they use, introducing potentially vulnerable products into the software ecosystem. 
Attempts to address the open-source problem do not go far enough—a comprehensive institutional response to the incentives problem is needed.
Open Source Has a Security Problem
The free and critical software that keeps society online remains at risk. In early July, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and U.S. Coast Guard Cyber Command (CGCYBER) issued a joint cybersecurity advisory. The advisory warned companies that hackers, including state-sponsored advanced persistent threat (APT) actors, continue to exploit organizations that failed to patch the Log4Shell vulnerability, gaining unfettered access to proprietary systems. Just last week, the Cyber Safety Review Board, established by the Biden administration last year to systematically review and learn from cyber incidents, released its first report analyzing the Log4Shell incident and its implications. It echoed CISA’s concern about the vulnerability’s lasting impact on critical system security.
Log4j is Apache’s open-source Java-based error logging library and is used by major companies such as Google and governments alike. The vulnerability in Log4j, called Log4Shell, is said to have existed since 2013. Due to the nature of open source, this one bug, originally discovered in the Minecraft video game, risked taking down networks worldwide. Despite this risk, an April 2022 expert security report found that 60 percent of the nearly 3 billion devices affected by the Log4Shell vulnerability remain unpatched, even though it has been seven months since the vulnerability was discovered. Log4Shell remains a national concern because vendors are not exercising due care in incorporating open-source components into their products.
This lack of due care puts individuals’ data at risk, exposes companies’ intellectual property to theft, and endangers sensitive national security information. CISA Director Jen Easterly called Log4Shell “one of the most serious that I’ve seen in my entire career, if not the most serious.” It had a Common Vulnerability Scoring System Calculator severity score of 10 out of 10. (CVSS v3 is an open framework describing the severity and characteristics of a software vulnerability.) Despite these dire warnings, many companies continue to drag their feet in implementing the free and publicly available patches that would secure their systems against exploits of the vulnerability. 
The Log4Shell vulnerability is not alone: It is just one of a series of vulnerabilities found and exploited in open-source libraries. Most notably, the Equifax hack, which compromised the personal information of nearly 150 million Americans, was courtesy of an unpatched open-source vulnerability. Importantly, the culprit was not the developers of the code but the company that failed to implement a patch that promised to prevent the very thing that happened. Many observers complain that Equifax has suffered little consequence for its negligence, highlighting weak oversight and accountability structures. Just last month, the same type of open-source vulnerability at the root of the Equifax hack was found in popular Atlassian products. The vulnerability has been deemed critical on a severity scale and will impact affected devices “for at least the next couple of years.” 
Open Source and Its Vulnerabilities Are Everywhere 
An April 2022 industry study found that 97 percent of software contains some amount of open source. Open-source code was found in 100 percent of systems related to computer hardware and semiconductors, cybersecurity, energy and clean tech, “Internet of Things” devices, and internet and mobile app software. And it is not a negligible amount of open-source code—78 percent of the code reviewed was open source. Most concerningly, 81 percent of the codebases containing open source had at least one vulnerability, with an average of five high-risk or critical vulnerabilities per application that remain unpatched. 
But, open source’s ubiquity and the characteristics that make it valuable are also what make it a unique risk to digital infrastructure. With proprietary code, or closed software, a vulnerability would impact only that company and its customers. While these threats are still severe (like with SolarWinds), they are outmatched in scope by a vulnerability found in open-source software. When the same piece of code is used by hundreds of thousands of networks internationally, one vulnerability in one project can take countless critical systems offline. 
The solution is not to move away from open source. Freely available software offers numerous public policy benefits—from decreasing barriers to entry to increasing innovation. Simply put, its primary beneficiaries save the cost of developing or purchasing proprietary code by using open source instead, allowing them to invest limited resources in other valuable endeavors. The United States owes its dominance in technological innovation in large part to open-source code.
Moreover, open source is not inherently less secure than proprietary code: 89 percent of information technology executives believe that open source is at least as secure as proprietary code. Source code visibility has not been found to correlate to increased security risks. Rather, it can make projects more stable and secure. Indeed, corporations and government agencies recognize this. They are moving away from relying primarily on proprietary software, or closed-source systems, toward using more open-source code, according to a February RedHat study. Corporations are setting up open-source program offices (OSPO) to coordinate the use of open source and the Department of Defense has a formal policy permitting the use of open source in critical government systems. 
The issue is not the code: It is the lack of institutions securing the code. 
Open Source’s Problems: Resources and Incentives
Open source, like many public goods, suffers a free-rider problem. This resource is free, so anyone can use it. And it is infinitely reproducible, so any number of people can use it simultaneously. This is also technically true of roads and bridges; however, as many of us have personally experienced, roads and bridges are somewhat susceptible to overuse. Overuse, without adequate maintenance, can lead to deterioration, sometimes rendering these resources wholly unusable. Open source also suffers an overuse problem. As projects grow in popularity, support for them needs to ramp up—but that is not happening. 
About 30 percent of open-source projects, including some of the most popular ones, have only one maintainer (a developer tasked with reviewing code contributions, scanning for vulnerabilities, and addressing reported bugs). The 2014 Heartbleed attack—which affected nearly one-fifth of the internet—exploited a vulnerability in an open-source library that was maintained by two full-time developers who were solely responsible for over 500,000 lines of code. If software development resources were allocated optimally, then attacks like Heartbleed and Log4Shell could have been avoided. 
But, as is characteristic of public goods, market participants lack incentives to correct this inefficiency. Companies can profit from open source without expending any resources to improve it. Psychologists call this the bystander effect. When multiple parties have the capacity to solve a problem, each individual party feels less responsibility to take action. Although securing this public good is in every company’s self-interest, very few companies want to be the ones to take on that burden. There is little reason to think the market will correct itself without intervention. 
Researchers have called for targeted investments from government and consumers of open-source projects to fund more full-time maintainers for important projects and entities offering open-source security services for free. The open-source community has requested upstream contributions from its consumers—support in the form of code review and improvement. The open-source community is doing the best it can to maintain the large, critical projects the public relies on. To avoid open-source potholes, its developers need resources for sustained maintenance. Tax dollars fund public roads and bridges. Open source deserves the same support. 
Don’t Forget the Vendor
The weakest link in the software supply chain is the irresponsible software vendor. Even if the open-source community had all the resources it needed, open-source code would remain vulnerable due to poor vendor security practices. Heartbleed is illustrative. The open-source community responded rapidly, developing and distributing a patch on the same day the vulnerability was disclosed. Yet as of July 19, over 41,000 devices remain vulnerable.
Software vendors take open-source code out of the incubator, where it has no real-world effect, and incorporate it into a product they sell to the public. Often, there are several vendors in between the open-source developers building the project and the end users buying the product that uses that project. And vulnerabilities can be introduced at every stage of the supply chain. But they can also be mitigated at every link of the supply chain. 
Why are these open-source vendors so lax about open-source security practices? Because the only way to find an open-source vulnerability is to proactively look for it. Vendors are not similarly limited. They can learn about vulnerabilities in their proprietary code from security researchers, impacted customers, and software vendors contractually obligated to inform their customers about vulnerabilities. They are more likely to lean on these sources than invest in open-source money they could be using to protect their proprietary code. But the same incentives to find and disclose vulnerabilities do not govern open-source code. Unlike proprietary code, open-source code confers no intellectual property benefits to vendors, is not visibly tied to the vendor’s brand or reputation, is not governed by stringent contractual obligations, is not disclosed in contracts, and does not undergo the same rigorous code review. 
Software vendors regularly fail to scan for known and unknown vulnerabilities in the open-source code they use while building their products in the first instance—selling a product whose integrity cannot be assured. They often fail to continue scanning their products for open-source vulnerabilities discovered after the software has been sold. Software is dynamic—while the code in a product may not change, new vulnerabilities are being identified daily, creating an ongoing risk that one’s software can be exploited. The Log4Shell vulnerability illustrated the importance of multiple scans—Log4Shell was not a known vulnerability when vendors first incorporated the code into their products. Only those who scanned again later had a chance to find it.
Finally, some vendors fail to patch their software upon identifying a new vulnerability and provide that patch to affected customers. Even if a vendor scans for new vulnerabilities, it is a separate task to determine which vulnerabilities affect their products. Not all vulnerabilities in an open-source library require urgent fixes, but some do. Some vendors avoid this analysis and instead wait for evidence of their products being impacted before issuing a patch to customers. At that point, it can be too late. CISA has issued guidance recommending a Vulnerability Exploitability eXchange (VEX) document that would be able to inform customers proactively whether the product they were sold contains a vulnerability that requires a patch. These vendors are best suited to find the signal through the noise.
Current Interventions Are Not Enough 
What has been done about this? The question of software security has been on the government’s radar for a while. Since the Log4Shell incident, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has threatened companies that are slow to implement patches with enforcement actions. Even before Log4Shell, the White House issued an executive order addressing the software supply chain. The order required those companies selling to the federal government to take precautionary measures to identify and remediate vulnerabilities in software and to provide agency customers with a software bill of materials (SBOM) enumerating the various software components, including open-source components, contained in their products. 
SBOMs are useful. Without them, even the largest, most sophisticated technology companies took weeks to identify where they were vulnerable to attack, let alone patch each of those components. SBOMs specify where a reported vulnerability is in their system, increasing the speed with which they can fix the issue. The Biden administration imposed requirements on federal contractors, many of whom are the largest technology companies, hoping the rest of the industry would feel pressured to follow suit. 
But, SBOMs are insufficient. Thousands of devices remain vulnerable to Log4Shell and companies on average take 98 days to fix a vulnerability. This shows that existing requirements are too little, too late in the software lifecycle. They remain entirely voluntary for companies that do not sell to the federal government. They also do not address the failures of intermediaries who first introduce open-source code into software earlier in the supply chain. SBOM requirements and threats of enforcement actions for failure to patch vulnerabilities will not, on their own, provide necessary institutional oversight on open source. 
An SBOM is simply a list of the ingredients, or codebases, that comprise software you purchased. It does not provide a list of vulnerabilities nor does it impose any minimum security requirements on the vendor generating the SBOM. Comparable to a list of ingredients on a snack or medication you purchase, the information is only as useful as your ability to parse it. 
To operationalize an SBOM, a company must be able to read it, which is a challenge as there is no mandated standard format for an SBOM, and actually use it to check databases such as the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) for new vulnerabilities found in the software components the SBOM lists. These activities are costly and cumbersome. While Google and Intel might have the resources and security maturity to demand machine-readable SBOMs and regularly scan databases for new vulnerabilities that impact their systems, there are countless small businesses using open source that cannot. 
These small businesses are the companies that are driving the numbers such as outstanding critical vulnerabilities and average days to patch. One study found that 43 percent of all cyberattacks target small to medium-sized businesses. These are businesses limited in their ability to respond to a security issue reactively, which underscores the importance of shifting security left and developing more proactive measures.
Therefore, institutions must impose security requirements on software vendors just as those minimum quality requirements imposed on foods and drugs. Smaller, less sophisticated companies are beholden to the information provided by their software vendors, who may or may not be providing them with accurate SBOMs and the timely patches they need to secure their systems. A small business needs to be able to trust its vendor and cannot be expected to recreate the security checks a vendor should be doing.
The liability of any harm caused by an open-source vulnerability should lie with the party most at fault. Currently, software vendors attempt to shift security liability to the open-source maintainer by soliciting certifications of security practices via gargantuan questionnaires. They also attempt to disclaim all warranties on their products, shifting any liability for a defect to the end user. However, when a design or manufacturing defect in a product, such as a car, injures a consumer, the law holds accountable every link in the supply chain capable of having identified and remediated the defect. National Cyber Director Chris Inglis has suggested a similar approach for open source. 
Software vendors are best positioned to know the open-source code their software contains and to remediate vulnerabilities. They are the least cost avoider and reap the greatest monetary reward from these open-source libraries. The only open-source project with no vulnerabilities is the one with no users—by exposing the public to open source, vendors arguably introduce the vulnerability. It thus stands to reason that they should bear responsibility for finding and patching flaws. Minimum standards and accountability structures would expose vendors to liability, thereby motivating them to preemptively invest in better security practices.
Open Source Cannot Do It Alone
The open-source community is aware of its security problem. In fact, the community is already attempting to build out institutions and standards to secure open source. For example, the Open Source Security Foundation, or OpenSSF, has already met with the White House twice and has 10 dedicated workstreams all focused on securing the open-source ecosystem. Companies like Microsoft and Google, large open-source contributors, have pledged $30 million to support OpenSSF’s efforts. The Open Source Technology Improvement Fund (OSTIF) was founded recently to provide free security auditing services to open-source projects and continues to grow.
However, on its own, the open-source community does not have the leverage to demand the resources and minimum security practices required. To preserve its core ethos as a free service and commodity, the open-source community cannot impose conditional requirements on its projects. As a collaborative of many volunteer developers, it also struggles to impose requirements on its own contributors. 
Recently, one of the most popular collections of open-source projects, the Python Package Index (PyPI), announced that it will impose minimum security measures on “critical” projects—the top 1 percent of downloaded projects. This comes out to about 3,500 projects and requires that maintainers of those projects secure their accounts with two-factor authentication to continue contributing to the project. This resulted in an outcry from the community—authors of extremely popular projects threatened to abandon their posts, which could potentially break the systems of any end user reliant on that code.
This development provides three lessons. One, the open-source community recognizes the need to raise minimum security standards. Two, the open-source community, no matter how well-intentioned, cannot accomplish that alone. And three, raising the floor on open-source security will be met with pushback and an exodus from the open-source community. This makes the development of an institutional response even more pressing—critical projects need to remain sufficiently resourced and maintained. 
Protecting a Critical Public Asset 
Open source is at least as important to the economy, public services, and national security as proprietary code, but it lacks the same standards and safeguards. It bears the qualities of a public good and is as indispensable as national highways. Given open source’s value as a public asset, an institutional structure must be built that sustains and secures it. 
This is not a novel idea. Open-source code has been called the “roads and bridges” of the current digital infrastructure that warrants the same “focus and funding.” Eric Brewer of Google explicitly called open-source software “critical infrastructure” in a recent keynote at the Open Source Summit in Austin, Texas. Several nations have adopted regulations that recognize open-source projects as significant public assets and central to their most important systems and services. Germany wants to treat open-source software as a public good and launched a sovereign tech fund to support open-source projects “just as much as bridges and roads,” and not just when a bridge collapses. The European Union adopted a formal open-source strategy that encourages it to “explore opportunities for dedicated support services for open source solutions [it] considers critical.” 
Designing an institutional framework that would secure open source requires addressing adverse incentives, ensuring efficient resource allocation, and imposing minimum standards. But not all open-source projects are made equal. The first step is to identify which projects warrant this heightened level of scrutiny—projects that are critical to society. CISA defines critical infrastructure as industry sectors “so vital to the United States that [its] incapacity or destruction would have a debilitating impact on our physical or economic security or public health or safety.” Efforts should target the open-source projects that share those features. 
© 2022 The Lawfare Institute

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NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Today, Paradigm, a leading provider of legal software, has announced its acquisition of LollyLaw, an award-winning cloud-based practice management solution built for immigration law firms. LollyLaw is consistently rated as one of the easiest-to-use legal case management platforms and serves law firms across family and business immigration. Co-founders, John and Todd Levesque join the Paradigm team as Co-General Managers of LollyLaw.

“We are thrilled to welcome LollyLaw to the Paradigm family,” said Colin Li, CFO / CRO of Paradigm. “Our mission is to give attorneys the best-in-class legal software solution for their specialty or other unique needs. With LollyLaw, we can now offer immigration attorneys a single intuitive platform to streamline the major functions of their firm and manage the cumbersome, but ultimately rewarding, immigration process from start to finish.”
Founded in 2014, LollyLaw was designed to simplify the complexities that come with running an immigration firm through:
“We are incredibly excited to partner with the Paradigm team,” said John Levesque. “We want LollyLaw to be in the hands of every immigration firm in the country so it can help as many people as possible during some of their toughest moments. With Paradigm’s industry expertise and resources, we can make this vision a reality.”
“We have been working with immigration firms for over 8 years to build a system tailored to their unique needs,” said Todd Levesque. “With the backing of Paradigm, we can double down on providing our customers with the best possible product and support.”
This is the second major acquisition for Paradigm this year, who announced the acquisition of trust accounting software, TrustBooks, in February 2022.

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Since nobody has an actual scanner anymore, everyone defaults to the next best thing: Snapping and sending a picture with their phone. Of course, if you’re submitting critical work documents, financial information, or schoolwork, those off-centered, shadowy images aren’t very professional.
With iScanner, users have a rock-solid digital tool for turning your favorite iOS device into an all-purpose document scanner. Without all the hardware, iScanner creates high-quality, ready-to-send, and sharable scans of documents, photos, IDs, receipts, and other essential materials, so they’re prepared for use in the digital world.
With iScanner’s AI-enhanced system, users get an ultra-clean, ultra-focused version of the document without blurriness, pixelation, or other image flaws. Whether it’s a JPEG, a PDF, or another file format, iScanner also lets you edit scans like adding e-signatures, then share docs easily via email or your preferred cloud service.
And that AI doesn’t just clear up your scans. It also turns your iPhone or iPad’s camera into a nifty problem solver, providing an accurate count of similar objects and even solving complicated math problems.
With over 70 million downloads, iScanner is the top scanning app in Apple’s App Store, sporting a prestigious 4.8 out of 5-star rating from happy users.
iScanner is usually $199, but with the current deal, you can use the app for life for just $39.99, a savings of almost 80%. 
iScanner App: Lifetime Subscription – $39.99
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For office document management, a sheetfed and a flatbed tie the knot
I focus on printer and scanner technology and reviews. I have been writing about computer technology since well before the advent of the internet. I have authored or co-authored 20 books—including titles in the popular Bible, Secrets, and For Dummies series—on digital design and desktop publishing software applications. My published expertise in those areas includes Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Photoshop, and QuarkXPress, as well as prepress imaging technology. (Over my long career, though, I have covered many aspects of IT.)
The Fujitsu fi-8270 is a fast, accurate document scanner for midrange to high-volume loads. A combination of sheetfed and flatbed designs, it packs capable OCR and archiving features, too.
Fujitsu’s Image Scanner fi-8270 ($2,195) plays multiple roles in the company’s business scanner lineup—it’s an update to the fi-7260 that premiered in 2015 and an upgrade from the fi-8170 Color Duplex Document Scanner that won our Editors’ Choice honors in March of this year. It also plays dual roles in your office, as a middle- to high-volume sheetfed document scanner combined with a flatbed scanner. In other words, you get the best of both worlds, scanning multipage documents with a 100-sheet feeder, or putting photos or bound book or magazine pages on the flatbed as needed.
Like the sheetfed fi-8170, the fi-8270 is a fast and accurate scanner with a multitude of high-end features and a highly useful software bundle that manages scanning and document management. We liked most everything about this scanner, barring perhaps its steep price and costly software upgrades; some of its more-than-capable competitors are several hundred dollars cheaper. If price isn’t your company’s top concern, however, the Fujitsu fi-8270 will serve you and your busy enterprise office well.
The fi-8270 is the middle of three new high-volume combination sheetfed/flatbed scanners from Fujitsu. The fi-8250 offers most of the same features for less, but it’s a bit slower, and its daily duty cycle is a couple of thousand pages smaller. The fi-8290, on the other hand, is considerably faster than today’s model, with a duty cycle 3,000 pages higher.
Like the Raven Pro Max, another PCMag favorite that combines that company’s Raven Pro sheetfed document scanner with a flatbed attachment, the fi-8270 teams Fujitsu’s fi-8170 with a flatbed, as you can see in the image below. The combined devices measure 9.2 by 11.8 by 22.7 inches, and the unit weighs just over 19 pounds.
Those specs are similar to those of the Raven Pro Max. Another recent sheetfed/flatbed combo, the HP ScanJet Enterprise Flow N6600 fnw1, is much shorter and leaner, closer in size to lower-end models like Epson’s DS-1630 and PCMag’s Best of 2019 winner the Xerox Duplex Combo Scanner.
As it’s primarily an enterprise or a fleet scanner, you and your team will most likely access the fi-8270 via the company network, though many tasks such as setting up and executing basic scans or selecting workflow profiles can be performed from the device’s control panel. The latter consists of a few buttons and a navigation rocker for scrolling through options on a small display.
And of course, most scans from the flatbed—photos, book pages, fragile documents, or whatever—are usually handled from the control panel.
Multipage documents, whether single- or double-sided, are handled by a 100-page automatic document feeder (ADF), which is the standard for document scanners in this class. The Fujitsu’s recommended daily duty cycle is 10,000 scans, exceeded among the machines mentioned here only by the fi-8290 at 13,000. In any case, as I’ve noted before, reaching the daily limit with a 100-page ADF takes dedication—i.e., loading the feeder at least 100 times. 
The Raven Pro Max’s daily max is 6,000 scans, and both the Epson and Xerox are rated at well under 5,000 scans daily. (They have 50- and 35-page ADFs, respectively.) The HP N6600’s duty cycle is 8,000 scans daily, though that company’s soon-to-be-reviewed ScanJet Pro 3600 offers a 60-page ADF and a 3,000-scan daily limit at a considerably lower price.
At least two of the fi-8270’s more direct competitors, the Raven Pro Max and the HP ScanJet N6600, come with Wi-Fi wireless and Wi-Fi Direct peer-to-peer networking, in addition to Gigabit Ethernet and USB 3.2 connections. This Fujitsu supports only USB and Ethernet, offering little or no support for scanning from handheld smartphones or tablets. The Raven also has an auxiliary USB port for scanning to flash drives and other USB storage devices.
As I said about the fi-8170 a few months ago, Fujitsu reps tell me the company’s high-end business scanners are usually deployed within existing document-management environments and workflows, whose users often already have a software solution in place. If you’re rolling out a new document-archiving system, however, the fi-8270’s bundled PaperStream programs and utilities (and available add-ons) should have everything you need.
The Fujitsu’s long list of apps and utilities includes PaperStream IP Driver (TWAIN x32/x64/ISIS), WIA Driver, Image Scanner Drivers for macOS and Linux, PaperStream Capture, PaperStream ClickScan, Software Operation Panel, Error Recovery Guide, ABBYY FineReader optical character recognition (OCR) for ScanSnap, and Scanner Central Admin. For enterprise-level document management, you can upgrade to PaperStream Capture Pro and PaperStream NX Manager.
Industry-standard TWAIN and ISIS drivers connect the scanner to the many third-party programs (including most Adobe and Microsoft Office apps) that support scanning into them directly. PaperStream Capture is an adroit front-end scanning utility. Fujitsu says PaperStream Capture Pro offers “an efficient yet easy way to convert paper documents into digital files for high-level data indexing and extraction” and charges $470 per seat for it.
Finally, PaperStream NX Manager is a built-in server solution designed to integrate centralized client-server document management systems easily.
Like its flatbed-free sibling the fi-8170, the Fujitsu fi-8270 is rated at a brisk 70 one-sided (simplex) pages per minute (ppm) and 140 two-sided (duplex) images per minute (ipm), where each page side is counted as an image. (This scanner’s humbler and grander siblings, the fi-8250 and fi-8290, are rated at 50ppm/100ipm and 90ppm/180ipm respectively.)
The Raven Pro Max is just a tick slower at 60ppm/120ipm. The HP N6600 is good for 50ppm/100ipm, and Epson’s DS-1630 and Xerox’s Duplex Combo trail at 25ppm/50ipm. 
I tested the fi-8270 via a USB 3.2 connection to our testbed, an Intel Core i5 desktop running Windows 10 Pro and Fujitsu’s PaperStream ClickScan. First, I timed the fi-8270 and its software as it captured both our one-sided 25-sheet and two-sided 25-sheet (50 sides) text documents and converted them to and saved them as image PDF files.
As in all our tests, the Fujitsu performed very closely to its sheetfed sibling the fi-8170. At 72.2ppm and 143.7ipm, the fi-8270 is one of the fastest scanners we’ve seen recently, and certainly the fastest sheetfed/flatbed combo. It beat the Raven Pro Max by about 10ppm and 20ipm and the HP ScanJet N6600 by about 20ppm and 40ipm. The Epson DS-1630 and Xerox Combo finished way back.
Next, I clocked the fi-8270 as it scanned, converted, and saved our two-sided 25-page text document to the more useful searchable PDF format. Like the fi-8170, it captured and saved all 50 sides in an impressive 25 seconds. That beat the HP by 3 seconds and tied the Raven.
To round out my tests, I scanned several colorful business documents, drawings, and other graphics and photos on the flatbed, focusing not on speed but color accuracy and detail. Other than the unavoidable tedium of removing and replacing content on the scanner glass, the flatbed performed fine, reproducing colors accurately with no graininess or loss of detail.
As I’ve said more than once, OCR accuracy is at least as important as raw speed; the fastest scanner on the planet is worthless if you must spend too much time fixing conversion errors. The Fujitsu fi-8270 proved error-free down to 5 points in our Arial font test and 6 points with Times New Roman. That’s superb—and these days, fairly average for professional-grade scanners.
Like most Fujitsu scanners, the fi-8270 comes with everything you need to scan and archive most document types, ranging from business cards with contact information management to financial data such as receipts and invoices. It offers convenient workflow profiles with multiple scanning destinations and a wealth of high-end correction and enhancement features.
The only things that put us off about this scanner are its over-$2,000 list price (though we did find it for $500 to $600 less at some outlets) and the extra cost of Fujitsu’s most advanced document-management software. Even so, the fi-8270 is an excellent product that should, like most Fujitsu document scanners, hold up for years. If your budget allows it, the fi-8270 will not only get the job done, but it will do so elegantly and reliably.
The Fujitsu fi-8270 is a fast, accurate document scanner for midrange to high-volume loads. A combination of sheetfed and flatbed designs, it packs capable OCR and archiving features, too.
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I focus on printer and scanner technology and reviews. I have been writing about computer technology since well before the advent of the internet. I have authored or co-authored 20 books—including titles in the popular Bible, Secrets, and For Dummies series—on digital design and desktop publishing software applications. My published expertise in those areas includes Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Photoshop, and QuarkXPress, as well as prepress imaging technology. (Over my long career, though, I have covered many aspects of IT.)
In addition to writing hundreds of articles for PCMag, over the years I have also written for many other computer and business publications, among them Computer Shopper, Digital Trends, MacUser, PC World, The Wirecutter, and Windows Magazine. I also served as the Printers and Scanners Expert at About.com (now Lifewire).
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signNow vs PandaDoc: Electronic signature software comparison
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PandaDoc and signNow are electronic signature solutions that support the management of electronic documents and contracts. Here’s how to choose which works best for you.
A safe and effective e-signature and document management process is vital for organizations to maintain the safety and efficiency of their operations. Electronic signature solutions like signNow and PandaDoc each provide features designed to simplify users’ electronic signature workflow process. Read on to learn more about these tools and their similar and unique features and capabilities.
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signNow is an e-signature software solution that enables users to manage their document workflows. In addition to electronic signatures, the tool also provides additional features for businesses and organizations, like team collaboration capabilities, court-admissible audit trails, and template editing options.
PandaDoc is a document workflow automation software platform. It comes with features and capabilities to assist users in creating, managing and signing their digital documents. Furthermore, the software supports individual users and organizations with signature workflows, automated actions, customizable document creation features, and approval process solutions.
signNow provides customizable documents and templates for its users. Organizations can create their own templates of commonly used documents so that staff members can use them for fast and easy document completion. Users can generate the templates within the platform or import them from Word documents. This way, similar documents will not need to be reuploaded into signNow each time. Instead, a fresh copy will always exist, stored within the platform. Users can also create Document Group Templates. These are document templates merged into a group that can be reused as necessary and convenient for multiparty electronic signing.
PandaDoc enables users to choose between more than 750 document creation templates that exist on the platform. These preexisting templates exist for many common business purposes within various industries. Users may then customize the template they choose to suit their needs by adding variables within the document body. PandaDoc users can also create their own custom documents online and utilize them within the platform by integrating popular third-party tools like Microsoft Office, Hubspot, Google Drive and more.
signNow connects different members within an organization to work together through their collaboration features. Users can create teams of designated individuals, enabling them to easily share documents and templates through the team’s shared folder. Shared templates are also beneficial for collaborating with other staff, as members can upload these templates into the team’s shared folder for easy access. signNow also provides features and capabilities for organization leaders to manage their members’ accounts. Once leaders log in as admins or moderators in the system, they can create their organization, dedicate membership roles and manage their staff’s access to the organization within the platform.
PandaDoc helps team members collaborate on document-related work processes. Users can easily invite new members to their workspace by sending an invite link. Once another member becomes part of your workplace and team, you can edit documents simultaneously in real-time or reassign document ownership to them entirely. Authorized members can also create approval workflows to streamline collaboration in the system. The chat feature enables users to send private messages to each other for easy communication. The comment feature lets them share their thoughts directly on documents within the platform. This way, team members and stakeholders can collaborate on creating important documents. The system even provides a way to store contacts for easy access, sharing documents, or populating recipient information.
signNow offers more than 270 integrations with popular business apps, CRM and ERP systems, cloud storage platforms and more.
signNow helps users get more from their e-signing solution through built-in integrations with third-party tools. With the Salesforce integration, users can manage the life cycles of their contracts within Salesforce. The Microsoft Dynamics integration enables leaders to gain more data for team reporting and tracking team progress on tasks and projects. The BIM 360 connection accelerates construction projects with the signNow e-signature capabilities. The Box integration is helpful for document management, and the Dynamics 365 connection provides data for prefilling documents and updating records. Gmail users can quickly and easily send email attachments for signature. Finally, the signNow API allows users to manage their eSignature workflows based on the needs of their organization.
PandaDoc has native integrations and connectors with many other third-party solutions. It lets users connect their platform capabilities with productivity tools like Slack, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Workspace and other solutions for easy collaboration on documents. CRM tools like monday work management, Omniscient, Salesmate and more can help update and streamline sales workflows. Storage integrations with tools like Microsoft OneDrive use automation to back up your documentation and enable easy document and template access. The tool also integrates with Canva for incorporating media and design features within documents, single sign-on for simplifying login management, various payment solutions for requesting and collecting electronic payments through sales documents, and many more interesting integration options. PandaDoc’s built-in integration features provide a wide range of capabilities to users. It also connects with Zapier Connectors and Integromat to enable users to create integrated workflows. The PandaDoc API may also be helpful for users who wish to enhance their document capabilities with automation.
signNow’s API is great for users who wish to create and customize eSignature workflows for their organization. Users can utilize the SignNow API to set up their documents with custom branding, templates and field options. They can then organize their documents into groups to send out to signers.
The signNow API also enables users to perform bulk signing, share files and generate signing links. Documents can be embedded for easy signing and sending on websites and apps, and users can collect payments by adding payment fields to their documents. The API is mobile-friendly, simplifying on-the-go e-signing processes.
Developers can use the PandaDoc API to build automated documentation and e-signature features. The PandaDoc API uses standard HTTP response codes, authentication and verbs, and resource-oriented URLs. Users can automate their documents workflow to create documents from templates and files, list and filter their documentation resources, and update and delete their documents or templates.
Through the PandaDoc API, users can also share documents via emails, links, embeds and downloads, link documents to CRMs and manage their folders. Using Webhooks and the PandaDoc API together allows users to subscribe to document events. The API enables users to access log details and manage their workspace members.
signNow and PandaDoc are two robust solutions for e-signature and document management. Considering your organization’s current needs and solutions is helpful when choosing the best software option for your organization. For example, an organization that uses e-signature documents for multiple purposes may benefit from signNow’s collaboration features which allow users to organize documentation among teams within shared folders. However, PandaDoc’s wide range of integration options may be best for an organization that already uses or plans to use one of those third-party solutions. By considering these aspects, you can get a better idea of which solution has features that would be more beneficial to your organization’s needs.
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signNow vs PandaDoc: Electronic signature software comparison
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By Joe White • 6:00 am, June 9, 2022
Gone are the days where folks needed a document scanner sitting atop their desks. Instead, we have our trusty iPhones! When friends ask me which app they should be using to turn paper documents into PDFs, I point them in the direction of SwiftScan. Let me tell you why.

SwiftScan (née Scanbot) is the perfect app for your paperless workflow. It makes capturing images of printed documents — like letters, contracts or reports — as simple as ABC. I’ve been using SwiftScan for years because of its ease-of-use and powerful feature set. Chief among these features is SwiftScan’s auto-capture.
Point SwiftScan at a piece of paper and it’ll automatically recognize the edges, focus the image, and capture a scan. Wait a second or two, and that scan will be transformed into a PDF. And if you’re a VIP member (more on this later), your PDF will also be searchable. Capturing multiple pages is incredibly easy. The whole process, from start to finish, is lightning-fast.
You might use SwiftScan to capture quick scans of receipts and bills, or – like me – digitize physical, printed letters as they land in your mailbox. We’re currently in the process of moving house, and SwiftScan has been invaluable for scanning forms and contracts to send to the legal team.
While scanning is incredibly easy, this isn’t even my favorite feature. Instead, what I love most about SwiftScan is how easy it is to process PDFs once you’ve captured them. This is made possible by a handful of buttons that appear along the bottom of the app’s interface.
First, Actions scours the scanned document for action-able text – like emails, phone numbers or URLs – and presents them in a menu for you to interact with. Second, Send lets you easily share your document or save it to the Photos app, iCloud Drive or Google Drive. And third, Edit lets you annotate, redact or add a note to your scanned document.
There’s also the ability to encrypt the PDF – a feature I really appreciate – or to have SwiftScan automatically upload your scans to a cloud service.

Next, let’s talk color optimization. After completing a scan, you have the option of choosing a filter – presets include grayscale, black and white, and magic color (a personal favorite). There are also the usual crop, rotate and page-delete options to deploy if needed.
We mentioned SwiftScan VIP earlier. Although this sets you back $7 each month, it adds support for a selection of power features that I find indispensable. The main one for me is text recognition – SwiftScan VIP will convert your PDFs into fully searchable documents. Electronic signatures, widgets and an ad-free experience also ship with the pro-level subscription.
While SwiftScan VIP is available for power users, the app is perfectly usable free of charge. Like we said, SwiftScan is available for iOS and iPadOS and won’t cost you a dime.
Price: Free
Available from: iOS and iPadOS App Store
Awesome Apps is a Cult of Mac series highlighting the best apps around. We will feature our favorite apps as well as new and notable ones. Apps are transformative, and these are the best.

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Your phone is more than capable, and we’ve got the best app for the job
Scanning PDFs is one of the most annoying things many of us have to deal with in our personal and professional lives. Be it mortgage documents, a car loan, or other sensitive paperwork you need to preserve and share in a secure digital format, Adobe's ubiquitous PDF is a reality of dealing in docs in the modern world. Fortunately, you don't need a hardware scanner or big, bulky multifunction printer to digitize your paper documents. You only need a smartphone, a capable scanner app, and a few minutes. In this post, we'll break down what you need to do to get your docs converted to PDF using an Android phone.
There are plenty of ways you can generate PDFs in a pinch, and probably a hundred apps that claim to do it, but we'll be focusing on three good ways from three specific and well-known apps to generate PDFs from real-world documents: Google Drive, Adobe Scan, and Microsoft Office Lens.
Since each of the scanning apps has its own advantages, you can decide for yourself. In general, we recommend the Google Drive app if you only need to scan a document once or twice, since it's probably already installed on your phone and will save you time. However, our readers' favorite is Office Lens, and if you're dealing with scanning documents frequently, it's definitely your best choice
Although we've provided directions for Android devices, the process is much the same for the iPhone and iPad (iOS) apps. All of the apps in this explainer are available on both the Google Play Store and the App Store.
Of the four options here, Microsoft Office Lens is probably the best. Whether you're deeply integrated into Microsoft's Office suite and services or not, it's pretty fast and easy with a dead-simple interface and all the tools you probably need.
If you're scanning documents regularly from your phone, this is the app you should be using. Its perks include:
Of all the apps on this list, it's the easiest to use:
Left: Firing up the app for the first time. Center: Viewfinder. Right: Selecting images from the camera roll.
Just download the app, fire it up, grant it the required permissions, and you're off. Apart from an interstitial screen that you'll see the very first time you launch it (above left), you'll always be dumped straight to the viewfinder (above center), as with Adobe's app.
The viewfinder has all the tools you need immediately accessible with just a few taps. Along the bottom of the viewfinder, below the shutter, are different modes you can switch between based on what you're scanning. You'll probably just use the default "document" mode, but you can quickly switch to scanning business cards, photos, and whiteboards as well, each of which triggers its own preset modes. Above the shutter is your camera roll, offering easy access to images you've already captured with your camera app — just tap the images you'd like to add to a document and then tap the orange arrow that appears to the right of the shutter button (above right). You can also tap the photograph/gallery icon to get to a file picker if you need to manually navigate to images outside the camera roll.
When you've got the document lined up in the viewfinder, an orange-red rectangle indicates that it has a solid lock on its perspective and dimensions (which it can automatically crop and correct for). Just note that if you take photos on a grid-like background like you see pictured above, it might bug out a bit with that automatic cropping. There is a manual crop tool if that happens, though, and only very specific circumstances like that triggered any misbehavior for me.
Tweaking images before you turn them into a document is very easy.
When you've captured a page for your document, the workflow to tweak it is simple. If you need to add another page to your document, tap the "Add New" button, and you are taken back to the viewfinder to add another image — repeat that process as necessary with each page of the document.
When multiple images are loaded in, you can swipe between pages by scrolling left and right. There are filters if you prefer to convert your documents to black and white, etc., easily accessible with a quick swipe up.
Along the top of the screen, you have most of the other, less frequently used options. You can delete images in the current document, change their crop, rotate images, change their document type (which adjusts pre-set filters), make a text overlay, or draw on the document. With pinch-to-zoom working, you can even add a signature or annotate, if you need to.
Simple export process.
When you're done, tap "Done," and you get options for how to save your document. If you save it to your Android phone's gallery, that saves it as a JPEG image, but there are options to save a PDF file to your phone's storage as well. You can also send the image to OneDrive, PowerPoint, or OneNote, and documents can be imported to Microsoft Word for OCR if you prefer to convert them into text.
When the document has been saved in a specific format, you're dumped to a list of files you've created in the app, from there you can share or delete them via the three-dot menu on each. If I had to come up with one complaint about this app, it's that a share option could be integrated into the export screen before this one, but that's a very minor concern.
There are two other ways to create a PDF on your Android device that we've listed below. The Google Drive app is the most convenient choice for users in a pinch, and Adobe Scan is a good tool if you live in the Acrobat ecosystem, but if you scan documents regularly, we still think you owe it to yourself to try Microsoft Office Lens, it's easily the best document scanning solution we've used.
The reasons to use the Google Drive app for your PDF needs are:
Drive can automatically correct for perspective, too, so you don't need to worry too much if you can't snag the perfect shot, it will stretch and tweak things to compensate all on its own, though some content might end up a bit off-kilter.
If you need a different set of features than the Google Drive s app can provide, and you're willing to give up the deeper integration with G Suite's services, Adobe Scan is a robust alternative to old-school document scanners. Its advantages include:
Once you've scanned and organized all your documents, you may want to push things a bit further. If your photo gallery has fallen into disarray, you may want to take a few minutes to organize your Google Photos galleries.
Ryne was ostensibly a senior editor at Android Police, working at the site from 2017-2022. But really, he is just some verbose dude who digs on tech, loves Android, and hates anticompetitive practices. His only regret is that he didn’t buy a Nokia N9 in 2012.

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