I remember that one: the two blacks were not slightly different, they were both exactly black but written in different ways.
The image was in PPM format, which stores the color components of the pixels as ASCII text (so a white pixel is stored as "255 255 255" and a black one is "0 0 0"). To redact the image, the code replaced every digit of the numbers with '0', so white became "000 000 000" and black stayed as "0 0 0". Both are black and indistinguishable if you're viewing the image, but you can tell them apart by looking at the file text.
Not 100% sure offhand, but I _think_ the the final step in my process chain (repack everything into a PDF) would have converted the input image formats and thus defeated that type of input. As it was, they were effectively 'redacted' using MSpaint to clobber over the rasterized data, so I was more concerned with minimizing the file size.
The image was in PPM format, which stores the color components of the pixels as ASCII text (so a white pixel is stored as "255 255 255" and a black one is "0 0 0"). To redact the image, the code replaced every digit of the numbers with '0', so white became "000 000 000" and black stayed as "0 0 0". Both are black and indistinguishable if you're viewing the image, but you can tell them apart by looking at the file text.
Sadly the UCC homepage seems to have vanished, but I found this account from the author: http://notanumber.net/archives/54/underhanded-c-the-leaky-re...