Slashdot Mirror
Are Your Peripherals Monitoring You?
An anonymous reader writes " Engadget is reporting that
'Lexmark, makers of printers and scanners, has been caught monitoring users' printer, scanning, and ink cartridge usage.'" Newsgroup comp.periphs.printers readers noticed the software; the Engadget report says that "Lexmark say they're just tracking printer and cartridge usage, but the registration information and packets being sent say otherwise."
My webcam does it too
I don't think anyone or anything could stand the sight of me before clothes or caffeine.
Mix the failings of Usenet with the shortcomings of the World Wide Web and the result is slashdot.
Just as long as my Dvd burner isn't monitoring what I am burning...
The trouble began when I had to buy new cartridges, I bought 3 in a row, and they were all empty, what the hell is up with that.
You are an engineer for [evil printer company] and are told to increase profits 50%. So you increase i=20 in the cartrige purge program.
Sadly, the joke, in this case, would be:
In Soviet Russia, you monitor your peripherals!
I recommend a pencil and paper. One caveat is to always use a single sheet of paper instead of a pad though so spies cant find out what you wrote by rubbing graphite over the pad. Also tell the recipient to eat the page after they have read it.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
...your monitor monitors you!
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
I guess we now know what the 'Plus' part is. :)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
That's really only going to work on a counterfeiter dumb enough to have an Internet connection on his currency scan'n'print LAN.
The people they're most likely to catch are the kids that watch National Treasure, and then start scanning $bills and loading the images into a pirated copy of PhotoShop to see if they can find the clues...
I prefer the Leeloo Dallas Multipass.....
Duly firewalled.
Can they track why their craptastic printers keep breaking all the time? Never buying one of them again.
...but the toaster has been laughing at me from time to time.
Want sound effects for ZoneAlarm? (Shameless plug.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Imagine a perl script to generate spoof statistics. Imagine a million ./ readers running the script as a cron job.
They'd soon stop trying to spy on the users, if the data was all that everyone keep on printing the same url all the time, something with "goat" in the URL...
to the phrase "peripheral vision".
Come on now, the ink has to be the smallest part of the cost there is. It probably breaks down like this:
2% Ink
5% Cartridge
15% DRM chip
7% ???
70% Profit!!!
Unknown host pong.
Hey, I am sure they are doing it in the name of national security!
Their plan to catch Osama was to flood Afghanistan with cheap Lexmark printers and hope that he or one of his buddies buys one. Then wait until Osama or one of his followers prints his digital camera pics on one of those printers. [Assume anyone in Afghanistan who can afford such a printer has Internet access as well] It should not be that hard to match and existing [reference]photo of Osama's face (embedded in that DLL file) with one in a solo or group photo.
It's not that hard to track someone down once you have their IP address.
Don't forget about the $20million reward!
The right way to do this would be to trigger data upload only if match was found, otherwise sit quiet.
OK, that was movie-of-the-week fantasy, but what they could have really done is monitor anyone scaning or printing $20 or $100 dollar bills.
Doesn't Photoshop alert you if you are trying to scan US currency? (or is that another urban legend?)
I don't see why people need to restrict the
bad idea of a unique EULA for each object
that you own to software.
See http://bunop.com for pencils with EULAs.
That'll fix the guy up above who recommended
using pencil and paper for security...
Why would anyone waster their mod points modding down a post that complains about a lack of mod points? The only thing that would be dumber would be to mod this funny or insightful...
2% Ink
5% Cartridge
15% DRM chip
7% ???
+70% Profit!!!
______
99%
+ 1% Evil spying software
______
100%
As far as I'm concerned, if your still running windows connected to the internet, buying Lexmark gear, and reading this with IE, then you deserve everything you get.
Damn straight. There's no way my Lexmark z23 is spying on me, because it doesn't even work in Linux! Yeah! Take that Lexmark... oh, wait...
Now THAT would be sleazy.
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