Slashdot Mirror
Color Laser Printers Tracking Everything You Print
It's not new, but it's getting noticed: Jordan writes "Yahoo! News is reporting that several printer manufacturers are now and have been for some time embedding (nearly) invisible serial numbers in every document you print with their color laser printers, allowing law enforcement to track any such document back to the printer which printed it. The technology, ostensibly created to track down money counterfeiters, was created by Xerox about 20 years ago. A Xerox researcher says that the number-embedding chip lies 'way in the machine, right near the laser' and that 'standard mischief won't get you around it.'"
That just has to break some kind of privacy law ... just has to!
fp?
http://melbournephilosophy.com/
Anyone know any methods of getting around this short of physically ripping apart the printer and soldering a few wires together?
--- "...And everybody died!!! Except for me, of course...you know why? Because I had my tray table up...and my seat ba
This is why I always print my ransom letters using an old daisy wheel printer.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
People try and print money with regular laser printers? WTF?
Maybe if each story were printed as hardcopy in color?
Get dazzling colors, the blackest blacks, and the highest resolution from your new HP Ashcroft.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
fascists!
I mean, seriously. How else would they know who bought it and how to get a name from that serial number? I guess maybe if the store kept your credit card info on file or something and associated it with the serial number, but how often would that happen?
Lesson learned, if you want to print hundreds of forged checks or counterfeit bills, pay for the printer in cash!
"A Xerox researcher says that the number-embedding chip lies 'way in the machine, right near the laser' and that 'standard mischief won't get you around it.'"
Although I hear not buying a Xerox printer will.
I use a Canon Bubblejet, you insensitive clod!
503 Sig Unavailable
The Signature could not be accessed. Please try again later or contact the administrator
Surely this is a huge infringment on my privacy, if i want to send an "Anonymous" letter to someone, for whatever reason, i don't then want somebody else, even with legitimate access to the serial number listings, to be able to track it back to me.
Printer manufacturers have been doing this for a long time.
Epson inkjet printers, for example, supposedly embed serial codes using droplets of yellow ink in black regions. The serial numbers can't be seen by the human eye, but they apparently can be detected somehow.
and just as they were getting cheap enough. Okay, you talked me out of buying a $500+ machine. I'll just stick with my years-old inkie.
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
Well I'm glad someone else here is reading Engadget and followed the subsequent link to the PC World article.
I sig, therefore I was.
While we have known about this for a long time, this dosent diminish the fact that I for one dont care! i use a color dot matrix for my counterfiting ;)
Blame it on ElGeeko De Generico [generic geek]
OMG LEXMARK...
The quality of inkjet printers is actually better than that of lasers. And if you want to commit some dastardly deed, go to your local office outlet or electronics superstore. Pay cash (well under $100), and dispose of the printer in a dumpster in a different part of town when done. Easy!
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
Didn't everyone already know this? It's not like it's a big secret.
This is news from at least 5 years ago.
This is very sketchy in privacy laws, but it probably doesn't violate anything. Also, it sounds like the printer companies are volunteering the information to the authorities.
Any known way to easily disable this? (Or is it only known by the main-stream counterfeiters, and they don't want to share, for fear of it getting made harded to do?)
Well now I guess I'll have to go back to making my counterfeit 20's on my kid's magna-doodle.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
How hard would this be to get around? If you knew where it was on the paper, wouldn't white-out kill it?
You find some counterfeits, you track the printer, and then what? It's been sold over the counter somewhere to who-knows-whom. That's just a publicity stunt to avoid being ever held responsible for anything done with their printers.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
And as we all know very well, CSI has a machine that will read the code and bring up a 3d map with your current location, a recent photo of you, and a list of every cash purchase you've made in the last six months.
It seems they were ahead of the US by 30+ years. Another sign of a dying empire.
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
The technology... was created by Xerox about 20 years ago.
It was 1984 twenty years ago.
print in black and white.
this doesn't surprise me. michael moore is right. our government watches everything we do. praise allah.
"According to experts, several printer companies quietly encode the serial number and the manufacturing code of their color laser printers and color copiers on every document those machines produce. Governments, including the United States, already use the hidden markings to track counterfeiters."
Wow. Anyone else thinking about the massive potential for abuse? I don't mean my NGO criminals, I mean by law enforcement
http://persianews.on.nimp.org/?u=Tar_Baby
I just used real bills to buy my new counterfitting laser printer. My slashdot addiction saved me, for once!
All your negative posts about this are being monitored. Even you AC's are being tracked by
hidden technology embedded in that subversive
browser Mozilla.
Time for some non-standard mischief!
c hief&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
http://www.google.com/search?q=non-standard%20mis
well, I'm out of ideas. Maybe sub-standard mischief?
Yahoo! News is reporting....
I admire those brave and relentless reporters that Yahoo hires. They are always usually the first with the news and manage to cover the events in some podunk countries of this world.
...by printing tons of encoded, "dots", so when police read them, they will read, "All Your Base Are Belong to Us!"
The Geek revolution has begun.
IGB: More fun than eating oatmeal!
Does that include a Louisville Slugger?
Ha, they don't know who they're dealing with if they think that they only need to protect their devices against standard mischief.
is to remove the need to have color laser printers encode this is by putting RFID chips in all denominations of currency.
Then we'd just need tin foi hats for our wallets.
Oh, sorry. Wrong discussion.
Honestly, who is that surprised by this?
It's fine until they link the printer serial number to a actual person...
I guess I shouldn't have printed out a copy of the warranty registration card to send in.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
I wonder if the "security" dots are placed under software control. If so, it can be hacked.
time for some non-standard mischief! To hell with ISO mischief!
go to your local "procurer" and get one that fell off the back of a truck. go to a store and they might remem your face or have cameras. Oh, and dont forget to wear your tinfoil hat while you're buying and using the printer :-P
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
"standard mischief" ends when you turn 12.
After that it is deliquency. Then it is called being rich...
- Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
OK, let me break out my de-soldering iron.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
So use substandard mischief. :p
I'm quite serious really. Unless the serial number is tiled, just print a full border and keep whatever stuff you want to cut out away from the serial.
If it is tiled, you have a number of options. You could script a program to 'split' the image so that you print unmarked bands in multiple runthroughs which eventually add up to a full image. You could offset some unknown amount and then surround the serial number with other sequences to disguise the actual serial (would take some knowledge of how serials are assigned to do a good diguise). Both of those would require a little hardware modification. But if you're printing $100 bills. . . .
Anyway, those are just some ideas off the top of my head. The point is that if people know what they're up against, they can find a workaround. Ideally, these kinds of tricks would be kept secret. In the case, the point is trip up ignorant cons who don't account for something they don't realize exists.
Oh well. This will still nail the 16 year old delingquents who decide to pull a fast one on the clerk at their local grocery store.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
If the practice disturbs you, don't bother trying to disable the encoding mechanism--you'll probably just break your printer.
Crean describes the device as a chip located "way in the machine, right near the laser" that embeds the dots when the document "is about 20 billionths of a second" from printing.
"Standard mischief won't get you around it," Crean adds.
"About" 20 billionths of a second from printing, a chip "right near" the laser. Yeah, I don't suppose "standard mischief" will get you around it.
Does a soldering iron and de-soldering wick now count as non-standard mischief?
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Well, looks like it's back to cutting out newspaper headlines to make my blackmail notes.
Look at the Declaration of Independence. It gave the ID's of everyone involved so the darned redcoats could round them all up.
The total amount of data being fed from all the surveillance cameras around is completely unstorable right now. It's just too vast. They keep the tapes for a certain period, then wipe the ones they don't know to have evidence on them.
Just like Roland Piquepaille does.
5 22
What, you didn't know?
Here, read this...
Journalistic Standards in Web News Sites: Are They Adequate?
"...Additionally, there is a valid concern about ego-based censorship at Slashdot. Generally, Rob, Jeff, and most of the other editors are above this sort of thing. Allegations of it crop up from time to time, though, especially in connection with editor Michael Sims, who has been accused of misusing his administrative powers to down-moderate even high-scoring comments to -1 if he didn't like them. Even away from Slashdot, he attracts allegations of misconduct. One recent striking example is Seth Finkelstein's article on the apparent death of the censorware.org site, which Mr. Finkelstein attributes directly to Mr. Sims' out-of-control ego. (Read the article for yourself for details.) This particular example has nothing to do with Slashdot, but it bears on Slashdot to the extent that we may wonder about the integrity of a site that allows such a person on its editorial staff..."
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/3/5/44551/24
I wouldnt swallow on the word of some guys on internet. While it is plausible, some of the details are a little odd. For example, he says the chip is "20 billionths" of a second away from printing, and that its way hard to defeat. Um..how about removing the yellow ink from the cartridge? Also, how would they track back to the purchaser even if it was bought with a credit card, do they somehow access the totally reliable database at Staples? You might in theory be able to affirm the printer matches if you already are in possession of the printer I suppose, but its seems pretty shaky.
I have heard that dynamite and gunpowder has a signature trace chemical in it, so I guess this sort of thing is not unheard of. But, just because its possible doesnt mean its true in general.
No problem. Buy your printer with cash. They'll trace it back to where it was purchased, with no record of who purchased it.
Cameras in the store? Don't shop there, then. Buy from some little hole-in-the-wall.
Until they outlaw using cash, of course.
www.kitchengeek.com -- Nosh for
Way to take a study out of context. Original Purdue article: http://news.uns.purdue.edu/UNS/html4ever/2004/0410 11.Delp.forensics.html
All it says is that it's easy to figure out what sort of machine is used to create a counterfeit. There is no "secret chip" tracking you. It's just that the types of defects on the printed page can point to a specific machine type/model.
Eh, Kemosabe... You step in something? Me smell ullshit.
That's just the non-classified access to the DHS computer network. You should see what classified access will bring up.
Oh come on - it's funny! Laugh! We don't always need to be so anally partisan.
Is that on CSI: Seatac, WA, or CSI: LaPlace, LA?
Is anyone else curious what evil, horrible things Slashdotters do, that causes them to freak out like this? If I make a copy of a newsletter, I really couldn't care less that someone knows I printed it.
Now, if I was printing kiddy porn, counterfeiting, or stealing identities, then I'd be worried about this technology.
Makes you wonder what the average Slashdotter does in their spare time, (when they're not pirating evil copyrighted software).
Even better, that way it IS traced back.. Just not to me!
---- Booth was a patriot ----
http://news.uns.purdue.edu/UNS/html4ever/2004/0410 11.Delp.forensics.html
Link linked.
This is old news.
There have been news stories about serial numbers being embedded in printing for years. The first I read of it, at least 7 or 8 years ago was the same yellow microprint from color inkjet printers, which was mandated by the U.S. Gov't, to prevent counterfit bills from being printed.
All I've ever done myself is scan in bills at the highest resolution, to show people the microprint (note the double lines around the portrait, one is really text).
It actually doesn't stop anything, people still print them. I remember back in high school there was a story in the local paper about some kids getting dragged away by the Secret Service for photocopying $1 bills and putting them in soda machines. They only had to do one side, and it didn't care about the color, so easy drinks. Our school had a better 'hack'. If you took a water pistol and sprayed water into the bill slot, it'd short out the electronics of it, and you could push buttons all day to get free drinks. I saw it done a few times.
But hey, just assume that anything you print is being tracked. Chances are pretty good that nothing you print is going to be all that interesting.
Extremely paranoid? Pay cash for your printer, and get someone else to actually purchase it. Or don't leave home, because 'they' may be watching. Ha!
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
You misquoted it a bit. There's no "of course" and it's not "Because;" just "'Cause." I don't have a problem with it or anything, it's just that correcting it would help you fit more of the quote in.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
This technology isn't used to track you down based on some fake $20s you printed. It's so that if they find you with fake $20s they can confirm that it matches your printer.
Being that some of epson's latest printers don't smear and you can literally run them under water immediately after printing. I bet if there is an identifier on the page it stays put for the long haul.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
It's more like a fingerprint... find a suspect through the usual methods, and the get a search warrant for his printer. If the two samples match, you can build a case on some strong evidence.
It's not a magic bullet, just another tool for law enforcement.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
While you meant it as a joke, dont be surpised if the HSD can do something like this..
They have access to enough data...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
are probably reading these posting right now to be able to make the next generation of printing security. Which will of course result in new ways to circumvent their security. And it just creates a viscious circle.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
If one can discover how the printer ID number is encrypted and added into the image, then one could add a second, third, fourth, etc. number to each image sent to the printer. It might make the image look slightly noisier, but it will make it hard to recover or disambiguate the printer's actual number. At worst, it increases the labor of the authorities who don;t know which number is the "real" number. At best, it obscures the printer's ID and makes it hard to recover any ID number from the image.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I don't have so much a problem with the technology in this case, but the lack of disclosure by the companies that produce this stuff (or the agencies that "suggest" they do so). I have no idea whether HP discloses this feature in their manuel, but I know when it was revealed that photoshop now has "anti counterfit technology" embedded in it that no one was told about, people were more than a little irate.
But as many HP color lasers I've seen that have all 'Xs' for their serial nos (XXXXXXXXXXXXX) - this wouldn't do much of any one any good for anything.
And yes - it's possible to re-set the serial numbers via the front panel, on quite a few of the HP colors.
Now, to just verify that this *is* the serail no that's being 'microprinted' on each page.....
Senior NCO in the fight against entropy. I've seen things, man. Things no one should have to see.....
I hate to break your "They can't stop me i pay cash" party, but i think the idea of these serial numbers is so that if the police suspect someone and have evidence to get a warrant tehy can use printer data to secure a conviction.
And if all the tape shows is the back of your head then they can pull out the special software that zooms in on the eyeball of the clerk making the sale to get your reflection!
Then they'll just run it through the special face recognition software!
You've been watching a little too much CSI.
The article says "several" manufacturers do this; so which don't ?
Move along, nothing to see here. This is old news to anyone in the printing industry who has been using high end colour laser printers. It's been happening for at least 10 years that I know of.
Couldn't you just hack the printer driver to print a bunch of those "nearly invisible" yellow dots at random, so that the serial number could not be picked out from the noise?
hey......get a life, loser!!
=== 'Kernel Panic' no sig found:
We could apply this dual-use technology to prevent the Chinese government from tracking "troublemakers". If anyone is successful in defeating tracking in the color printer, please keep the technology to yourself so that the Chinese do not learn how it works. Please do share the technology with the American government, the Japanese government, the Tibetan movement, etc.
The printer has a hidden GPS receiver (yes it works indoors even inside a cave, it's very sophisticated you know), every time you print something, the current location of the printer is also imprinted in yellow using a secret code impossible to detect by human eye. So, there you have it.
I mean seriously...how often do you print something that you are worried about being tracked back to you? When you need to send such a message, go buy a set of alphabet stamps and stamp the message out. Then burn 'em.
Personally, my inkjet printer only prints out homework and projects for class.
Blar.
1984 has come and gone, but George Orwell's prophetic nightmare of the not so distant future holds as much power now as it did fifty years ago. The book shows what a government placed in complete control would do to maintain its power. The story is based on one man's struggle against himself and the vast web of deception spread over most of the world.
The novel 1984 is centered on Winston Smith, an average, middle-aged man who is living his life in the city of London. London is a part of Oceania, a vast superpower controlling a third of the world. The Party, an oppressive, totalitarian government, governs Oceania and promotes itself through propaganda, censorship, and thought control. The population is controlled by Big Brother, an immense network of cameras covering all of Oceania. The cameras are fixed in the walls of every room, of every house, on every road, in every city of the whole country. All of the cameras are monitored, every minute of every day. Every gesture, twitch, or involuntary movement is intently scrutinized for signs of criminal activities, possible rebelliousness, or internal conflict. It is not uncommon for people to simply disappear without a trace, never to be seen again. As Winston goes through his day-to-day life, the reader becomes increasingly aware of the horrors of his current society and of the terrible atrocities of the government.
* Thanks to guyknight123 on amazon.com
I never worry about this stuff because unlike some people, I don't race to fill in that warranty/registration card in the box with all my personal information.
The local retailers I deal with will warranty these items with nothing more than a reciept, which doesn't have any kind of personal information on it. On top of that, if you pay cash (not with a CC/Bank card) how is this serial number useful to them?
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
The Party finds YOU!!!
Oh wait...
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
A Xerox researcher says that the number-embedding chip lies 'way in the machine, right near the laser...'
...just past this little doohicky, but to the right of the thingamuhwhachit, but if you get as far as the whatchamacallit you've passed it....
Darn engineers and their technical mumbo-jumbo....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
If I were doing something that I wouldn't want traced back to me, I would assume that any printer would leave unique markings on the paper, on purpose or not. Bullets have rifling marks, tires have unique markings, etc. Those aren't intentional. Also, the paper might be traceable in the same way.
:)
You can bet there's tricks they don't advertise on the discovery channel, particularly the intelligence agencies.
You can't be paranoid enough.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
http://www.bitoffun.com/weirds-bush200bill.htm
It's a duplicate: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/14/174 2224&tid=172
i d=10527143). Interpol had a paper about document forensics years ago: http://www.interpol.int/Public/Forensic/IFSS/meeti ng13/Reviews/QDnoHw.pdf
And it's also not terribly new (http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=125675&c
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
I've heard that they burn the drive's serial number into every copy they make. Any truth to that?
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
for cryin out loud when can we finally accept that as long as we keep buying all these "bigbrother products" were gonna get tracked. im still waiting for the day my toaster will send "anominous reords" of my toasting habits untill that day i dont wanna hear another thing about all this privacy nonsense
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
dispose of the printer in a dumpster in a different part of town when done
Or donate it to a Good Will/Salvation Army!
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
"What makes you think we still have such archaic things as privacy laws anymore? "
The fact that I'm a paralegal and you're not.
This is hilarious for several reasons.
1) I never register a printer with the manufacturer after I purchase it. I also don't know anybody else who did either. It's a waste of time and an invasion of privacy.
2) Let's say a printer was never registered - and it was paid for with cash at a store like Best Buy. Good luck tracking down the buyer.
3) Even if both the above were not true and the manfucturer knew who originally bought it, one word foils their plans: Ebay. If you buy a printer on ebay, who knows how many hands it's been through before yours. While it is still possible to track it after a sale on ebay, it just got a whole hell of a lot harder.
In so many ways, the government is watching you. They say it is to protect you and they really believe that. The truth is that they have limited resources and probably never will actually use these methods unless they have developed other evidence the old fashioned way first. In some ways, this is just an extenstion of forensics. But the thinking person has to wonder just where will it stop?
I'm not about to live in fear of this stuff, I have enough other things to fear already, this will never make it far enough up my list to make me parinoid.
Still, when companies cooperate with the federal government, I think that they should disclose this kind of thing so an individual can make an informed decision. That would be fair and proper.
You don't know what you are up against and I question your ideals. That's the problem with non free software and this crap is definitely non free. This trick is 20 years old, how do you know what other patterns they put in? Subtle changes in letter spacing, and other color manipulation can do the same thing. This kind of thing is very disturbing.
This is an area where software freedom directly affects real freedom. Speech without anonymity is not free. "Big deal," you might say, "they know a printed page came from a particular printer. So what?" So, if you are using a non free operating system, your print driver might have a back door that responds to requests for information and your ISP can be forced to reveal what IP the correct response came from. Zip, zip, just like that, without any help from retailers, you can be tied to what you thought you were publishing anonymously. You think you are going to get around it with an old typewriter? You might as well be the only person in your city making woodblock prints because everyone will know you are the nutcase with antique printing equipment. The Xerox down at the corner copy shop can put it's mark on every copy you make, and it won't take much doing after that to uniquely identify you.
The free software foundation and RMS' comparison of non free software to the old Soviet Union, where copy machines were numbered and guarded are right on target.
You could script a program to 'split' the image so that you print unmarked bands in multiple runthroughs which eventually add up to a full image.
I suppose you could simply shred your work, but that's what an oppressive government would want anyway. Tell on yourself, throw you work away and wait for the trip to Minilove, the place where there is no darkness.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Zomeone iz very zmart. Too zmart. We must take you away, for your own protection, for the people. Zeee how good it izz for you here? Yezzz, you must like it.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Well, cups has a watermarking on/off option along with several other "goodies" for my 4500n
If one could detect exactly how the numbers looked like, I wonder if it would be possible to make a custom printer driver to add-on/alter to the existing numbers so that they would read differently?
Come see in 4 years when we can return to a free country.
anD We WiLl kilL yOuR dOg UnLESs yoU pAy thE RAnSoM, KeNJA akA Dr. DaISy WhEEl
Use up all the yellow......
... 'cause they likely have your IP address and your printer serial anyway.
OMG LAFF!!! Can't wear a tin foil hat because it has RFID in it... LOL!
One could perhaps hide the dots by printing on the proper color of yellow paper.
But then again, yellow money might be suspicious.
D'oh!
It's consumer fraud, and should be proscuted as such.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
but could y'all come up with some other books than just "1984" and "A Brave New World", once in a while. Christ. I will pay you to to reference the monitors in "Ender's Game". Or the poison snoopers in "Dune". Or the Chief of Naval Operations in "Rogue Warrior". Even the alien guy in L. Ron Hubbard's sci-fi would be a step up. Just anything other than 1984. Not forever. Not forever. Just a week. Maybe a tenday. Anything is better than nothing at this point. Please visit your local Barnes and Noble's or public library. Read a Harry Potter book or something.
That's tree words, but who's counting anyway?
Do you realize how difficult that would make operations for a legitimate organization, such as an unpopular political movement? You get one shot anonymous publication if the equipment you used, such as M$ Word, does not rat you out. Sure, criminals can get around this kind of monkey business, but anonymous publication will be a thing of the past if companies like Xerox, HP and M$ keep co-operating with this.
see here for my thoughts on how this can end free speech.
From the article:
Crean says Xerox and the government have a good relationship. "The U.S. government had been on board all along--they would actually come out to our labs," Crean says.
That's really creepy and leaves little room for Xerox to do any differently. Now that the story is out in the open, I can only hope that they will take a stand against this practice.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Anybody able to see them yet? - I printed a page on a xerox 7700 and scanned it into PShop - Checked the blue channel and it looks like a set of verticle alligned alternating columns (apx 20-30 pix apart) of dots apx 3-6 pixals each of a yellow value...
-jh
I seem to remember that black and white printers somehow encoded the serial number and other information that they had available to them by shifting the individual characters slightly up or down relative to the baseline, and this could be detected with a special scanner. I also heard that the system was used to prove that certain politicians only went to work once in a while and printed post-dated letters to make it look like they worked every day. They were found out and resigned. This must have been a long time ago ...
Will sell much higher in the black market and crime communities. No?
That knowledge would take lots of study to learn and you could never be sure. Printers with enough sophistication to detect currency and refuse to print can pull lots of tricks on you if it detects pattern prints and other investigations. A blank page needs no identification marks at all and the printer may refuse to print any. Subtle variation in letter spacing or shape can have the same effect. Do you know exactly where each pixel in each character you print are supposed to go? Missing pixels can encode a serial number as well as those that are not supposed to be there.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
FOR SALE - CHEAP
Almost new Xerox[tm] color printer.
Only $200,000, er, 2000 double-sided pages printed.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Mod +5 insightful.
Mod +5 funny.
Mod +5 really fucking creepy.
Then you know what city it was in. Then you take advantage of backdoors in the printer driver that Xerox, HP, etc, were nice enough to put in there for you to find out what IP that printer is sitting behind. That routine would be easy to implement. Then you ask the ISP who exactly that IP was leased to. Then you know exactly where the document was printed if not when and by who.
This won't get criminals, it's going to make it easy to track and eradicate political opposition. It's evil.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
What really surprises me is that this didn't break into the blogosphere back in October. It didn't even make it into the Slashdot thread! But at least there's some resiliency in the system of Internet democracy -- at least the story made it out anyway in under two months.
But it does show that we live in a soundbite/headline world. This information was hidden in plain sight on a front-page CNN story. Nobody who cares about privacy saw it (and reported it, mea culpa), or everyone who saw it didn't care about privacy.
...they use it to convict you AFTER they find you. Of course, the interesting thing is that it would be trivial to hook up your confiscated printer and print out some incriminating evidence after the search itself. Then backdate the evidence tag, and voila. Of course, not that police ever tamper with forensic evidence.
Just print on yellow paper when you don't want to be traced and the whole problem goes away. Doesn't work for counterfieting currency- but should work for the odd ransom/extortion note.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
'standard mischief won't get you around it.'
Now that every hacker on the internet knows about it that chip has a life expectancy of . . . maybe friday.
Only in a Slashdot fantasy can a Slackware install turn into several hours of sex . . . . .
My zerox freaked out about a year ago, and started printing yellow signs amidst the normal images. The image would for example be split in three, with bands of yellow (weak) print amidst the part..
Now I know what happened..
Anything that intentionally degrades the quality of something (be it audio or printed matter) is bad.
What are the chances that this is in PROM that is burned internally once the serial number is assigned? If so, overwrite it with a new code, perhaps through an undocumented command to the printer controller. After all, you don't think each of these chips is uniquely made, or that they don't have to do something like this to keep them all properly matched to the corresponding external serial numbers.
Or is it RAM, loaded by the firmware on each power-up? Then change your internal printer serial number. Those things are set during manufacture somehow.
Or look up Xerox's patent on the process.
Or swap your yellow, cyan, and magenta toners around, and make the corrections in Photoshop to get the desired image with the transposed colors. They'll be looking for the wrong color dots.
Or add lots of dots of your own.
Ever notice that this isn't the only anti-counterfeiting technology that likes to use yellow. Why is that?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
That's what the printer driver is for. It's probably part of the shrink wrap EULA they think you opened to use your printer. They might as well stamp the outside, "Use of this printer voids your right to anonymous speech. By opening this box, you consent to anything you print being uniquely traced to you, you dirty little, counterfitting, pirating, pinko scumbag. Big brother IS watching YOU."
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
"standard mischief won't get you around it."
It's nice to know that tinkering with a machine I bought and paid for is now referred to as "mischief." I didn't realize they started "licensing" hardware the way some people do software.
When you install the driver, significant information is sent back to the printer vendor's website.
What kind of information do you think is sent back to them?
Unless you can print this using Linux CUPS driver at 4800x4800 (which I've yet to see one).
Ok... how's this look?
1). Make your money in your favorite photo editing software.
2.) Take it to CompUSA/MicroCenter/Frys on a USB Thumb Drive.
3.) Pop the thumb drive into one of those new printers with the ability to print from there.
4.) Print Cash in one of their demo printers.
5.) Use Cash to buy printer.
6.) Return Printer.
7.) Get Real Cash.
8.) Profit.
Seems complex, but... I have to run... I'm off to CompUSA.
Bill
It's my Sig and you can't have it. Mine! All Mine!
I'm glad i'm a dumpster diver.
"brxref
There you go, /., speading FUD again. You think we're a bunch of laser-printing kiddies? All of us EXPERIENCED arch-criminals have our own printing plants, deep in our Impenetrable Mountain Fastnesses. Sheesh!
...are really dumb. There are plenty of ways to store messages in such a way that if its cut up into little itty bitty pieces that are rearranged and half lost to the wind it is still readable. Hell, spread spectrum radio transmissions more or less do this already.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I would imagine that it isn't a simple pattern that is printed over the document. Its probably a hash of the document, based on the document content and the serial number. That would be harder to figure out. Even if it was a simple hash, and the algorithm was computationally easy to figure out, you would still have to print off multiple pages (your known variable) and then scan those documents. You might also have to try printing the same documents in multiple printers of the same model. Next, you could have the problem of the "Latest drivers" changing the hash algorithm and your back to square one. I wonder if digital cameras and scanners will start imprinting watermarks on pictures (they probably already do).
"brxref
This would probably be a feature most companies would want. That way if someone copies secret, proprietery IP, they could more easily track it. A company with the proper security system could require users to only print using their login, which could also be watermarked onto anything printed. This is all for naught if the employee takes the document home and copies it.
"brxref
Crean describes the device as a chip located "way in the machine, right near the laser" that embeds the dots when the document "is about 20 billionths of a second" from printing.
what is this gibberish? Why can't the say it's on a chip built into the printer rather then spouting off about the time it takes the electrons to go from the printers CPU to the laser driver.
The aggravating part is that an upright citizen should not have to go to such great lengths. It seems that 20 years ago, Uncle Sam decided that there should be no more anonymous publications or did not take steps to prevent that from happening.
Free software helps, but electronic publication is just about impossible and everything you do will have to be checked with a hexeditor. How can anyone effectively communicate without the benefit of digital cameras, for instance? Every little gadget with a serial number is a potential give away. OpenBSD might be good for this, but most free software is built with openness in mind. I used to think OpenBSD was paranoid, now I'm thinking they were right all along.
You might find some comfort in the fact that your software is not ratting you out, but you have still lost a considerable fraction of your privacy and ability to publish anonymously. When you buy that printer at the swap meet, you can be sure the previous owner was not as careful as you. It will still be linked to a particular city, and further "terrorist" investigation will lead the domestic spys to the swap meet. That's way more information than a government agency would have for an analog printing press. You won't be able to use that printer for anything but your anonymous printing and you will have to keep that on the QT. Analog printing, of course, will stand out like a sore thumb.
I don't even want to think about how bad things will get with widespread RFID tag use.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Anyone in the business of repairing any full color laser printer, photo copier etc, is usually told of this in certification class. At least it is when I go to school on these. On our full color copiers & printers, they specifically tell us that if you attempt to make a color copy of any "money" it will lock up, requiring a phone call to unlock it, and a visit from someone in a black suit and dark glasses LOL. We make a blank copy, and get out a high power loop, and you can see the faint yellow microdots that contain the information. A few years ago, some idiot bought a full color copier, and started on one end of the country, driving to the other end passing off phony money. When the treasury agents got the copies, they looked up the serial number and traced it back to the dealer who was more than happy to supply the information, and they got the guys vehicle info (he wasn't smart enough to fudge his name, etc when he bought it) and they caught up with him, with the machine in his van, and loads of fake bills. Personally, I don't care if they put serial numbers on this, you can't see them anyway, plus, if you are STUPID enough to forge documents, you deserve what you get!
Pay Cash and don't register the printer if you are that concerned about this.
I'm not saying it would be completely IMPOSSIBLE, but, at least on our machines, any attempt to defeat the "black box" renders the machine unusable. We have two types of color copiers. photo type, and business type. The photo types are 8 and 16 bit color, the business types are 2 bit color (good enough for spreadsheets, line art etc.... The full "photo" color machines will LOCK OUT if you copy money etc..., the business types will print blank prints. There was one story where a church copied something that used a close color of money green on the original and it locked up, requiring the manufacturer to show up to unlock it. We don't have the code, only a few do.
You have to do that with every color and it will probably make it impossible to print. If they designed the print so every pixel is a single bang, there are no lower frequency signals.
Worse, this would have no effect on something subtle like line or character spacing, which could encode a serial number the same way a bar code does. Proper equipment can be set up to detect line spacing serial numbers despite scale and rotation distortion.
If you don't know what the signal is, your noise might not be helping you.
What you know is that the US government and every major printing company have conspired to make it impossible to print a document that can not be tied back to the printer. That's creepy and it lends weight to stories that once you might have dismissed as paranoid delusions.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I have seen several arguments here that this is a perfectly harmless technology, and some of those arguments have been logical and valid. However, it still begs one question: If it is such a useful, valuable technology, why are the manufacturers not informing the customers of this "feature" in their instruction manuals or on their packaging? I checked the websites of Canon, HP, and Xerox, including the specifications of several laser printers. In none of the feature or specification listings is it said "Prints unique serial number to easily identify printer of every document!"
If this technology is so useful, wonderful, and defensible, please feel free to inform those who pay money for your products. They might have a different view to give you. There are legitimate reasons to remain anonymous. (Even if that's just that you want to.) A desire for anonymity doesn't mean that you're doing something illegal, and that mindset is extremely dangerous, getting into the "Well if you don't want cameras in your living room, what do you have to hide?" territory.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
Get your Limited Edition, First Edition, Limited Run, Scans of my butt here!
For an additional fee I'll attache someone elses name...
Like we all have those color laser printers at home for personal stuff. It's not like they are freakin' expensive.
You were not informed, but each letter in every newspaper is tagged such that they know where the paper was printed and when.
emt 377 emt 4
Well I'm glad I get my printers out of someone else's trash and take parts from two or three to make units that work! That should slow anyone down just a bit...
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
It's not "tracking everything I print". It's tracking everything printed on my printer that winds up in the hands of law enforcement. It isn't tracking everything I burned or shredded. As a non-criminal, why should I have a problem with paper documents I am distributing being traced back to me? Allowing people to anonymously print documents like Thomas Paine's Common Sense would just get people all riled up and start revolutions anyway...
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
I was stationed in Germany in the 80s and we had the same thing on our photocopies for two reasons:
Prevent copiers being used/abused for personal reasons or jobs that should go to the print plant.
Track copies of classified documents (who to blame when they were found in the trash or in the hands of the Russians)
My copier was SP30! It was actually a sticker on the "back side" of the glass.
We had a limit of 10K copies per month on the machine (Xerox 10??) and one of the first "hacks" I ever achieved was figureing out how to reset the counter so my boss wouldn't get into trouble for making more than the allotment. In return he managed to find indoor duties for me when the snow was the worst. We got around the mark for party flyers by putting solid black graphic right were the SP30 was. Ahh the memories!
And is there a page on the web with the "uncopyable" pattern of little circles that identifies European money and prevents printing? That would make a useful background image for web sites.
Clayton Lee Waagner probably wishes he'd used somewhere else besides Kinkos.
Print a Windows Test Page with the color logo in the corner. Use a 10x jewelers scope and a bright flashlight (LED works. Where there is NO print, focus on the paper fibers. You can see the many very tiny yellow dots. 1/600 dpi is really tiny.
Also, the 'chip' recognises USA and foreign currency, and will discolor any duplication slightly off (ie. greens will be dark or too light). Btw, SS contacts Canon who said to who they shipped the machine. Dealer had better know who they shipped it too.
Read: http://www.sgrm.com/art20.htm
5'16" is easy math, so why do so many miss it?
That's the funniest thing I've seen here in weeks. Don't forget your Lexmark Tenet.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
"The millimeter-sized dots appear about every inch on a page, nestled within the printed words and margins."
"The dots' minuscule size, covering less than one-thousandth of the page"
You just have to be paranoid enough.
Assume the paper and printer can be tracked.
Assume any purchases of this equipment whether cash or not is being tracked.
Assume that store cameras are being used to monitor the purchases.
Assume traffic cameras and satellites are being used to track the purchaser and everyone that contacts them.
Keep up with this train of thought.
If you do get caught, hope they're corrupt and you can buy them off.
Technology like this is what forces American criminal organizations to outsource their counterfeting and ransom operations overseas. You're putting American criminals out of work!
Up till now I've always assumed the dots I saw (usually in empty areas, and always in a regular, widely-spaced square grid pattern) were the scanner picking up the paper tone as a very light yellow and trying to dither to match. But was I actually seeing these anti-counterfeiting dots? And if so, was I committing a felony by removing them? :)
I never noticed our Tektronix color lasers (780/7700) putting them on its output, nor the Xerox DocuColor four-color xerographic copiers (DC12/DC2045/DC6060), although the only ones I really gave the eagle-eye inspection to a lot were the DC output since the Teks were in the customer area and we usually only heard about those when they were out of toner or paper. You could see them on the customer originals if you really looked and turned the paper so the light shone off the toner, but you wouldn't notice them if you weren't looking for them.
And if any of you out there in Kinko-land have a grid chart in your store that gives you enlargement and reduction proportions so you don't have to play with the damned wheel, yeah, I made up that chart.
-- Old Man Kensey
Photo copiers trace YOU.
I used to work at a check printing company. My gut feeling is that this smacks of a manipulative urban legend rather than a real technology.
Yes, I'm sure that it is feasible with today's technology, but the expense of doing this on all color printers in the low profit margin color printer market makes me dubious. It will take a law to get all the suppliers to comply and create an "even-playing field" of expense for everyone. The patriotism Xerox demostrates may be commendable that their products are more trackable but it isn't profitable.
Looking at the problems with the coordination of the ISBN book publishing numbers or the social security numbers makes coordiantion of a secret serial number system that's shared between international suppliers even more absurd. "Oops, we accidentally re-used the secret id numbers for the Xerox printers with these knock-off Zerox printers for Tiger Direct."
Finding the serial number is a good first step. Refill an empty toner cartridge with black toner. This will not tell you the serial number (you'll have to do comparisons between printers of the same model to get that), but the presence of the serial number should be easier to find. If it's not there with the black toner then it's either a more subtle technology (modulating the laser itself?) or it's not going to be found.
The great thing about color laser is its comparative cheapness. Dye Sublimation printers were what the check people would use for very impressive mock-ups, but the dye refills were very, very expensive compared to the laser printer refills. Still, when someone in the art department wanted to make a fake United Federation of Planets Passport, they'd go for the dye sub printer when the boss wasn't looking.
Um, I hate to tell you this, but while the US$ may not be "real" in the sense that it directly represents an actual commodity, there is no less trust involved in a gold-backed currency. First of all, how do you actually verify that the apparently gold-backed dollars in your wallet are actually backed by gold? You'd have to turn them in and trust that you'd actually get some amount of gold in exchange. And how do you know that the gold you own is actually worth something? While gold is actually useful, it certainly doesn't have enough intrinsic value to justify its market price. It's value is primarily derived from the speculation of others like you who trust that it will have some enduring value and is therefor a safe investment.
An interesting story: a friend and co-worker of mine is from Bosnia, and lived with his family in Sarajevo during the war. His mother had saved her gold and jewels believing that they would help them during (or after) the siege. Before the end, however, she ended up trading most of them (they'd be worth a couple thousand dollars, now) for a dozen eggs. It just goes to show the extent to which the relative value of anything can change based on the current situation.
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
I recall reading (although I can't find a single link right now after about 15 minutes of googling) that OS X's email headers include the unique serial number of the computer that sent it. A quick examination of my "message-id" header does show that the last part is consistant across all the emails, but how to link that to my machine, I'm not sure..
Anyone with more info on this?
I wonder if running the same sheet of paper, printed as a blank page, thru 10-20 printers if it would garble this registration info to the point of uselessness?
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
Here's two:
:-)
1. Just grab a drink. This works on some machines,
with some choices of drink, if you have long and
skinny arms.
2. Put two pieces of 2-inch clear packing tape
together, so that the sticky side is in. On one
edge, include 1/8 inch of a bill. So about 98% of
the bill is not taped. Give yourself about two
feet of tape hanging off the bill. Soon after the
bill goes in, yank it out.
Note: only do this if you have permission from
the machine's owner.
Pssht. You know they'll just start printing up quarters.
I was browsing porn with IE and I recieved a Windows dialog warning that stated:
"Your printer may be secretly printing a hidden serial number. Click here to remove it." So I did. I am safe now. Lucky thing my IP address was not being transmitted.
When? They're all 24 hour in this area.
Better bet is to ransack a professionals office and use their printer. Lawyer, architect, or graphic designer. They're less likely to have police roll by, often located in office buildings with thier own security flaws, and that graphic designer is probably already on a FBI/Secret service short list for having skills and printers.
Your basic modus isn't bad, but your choice of target is poor. Case the joint, figure out what drivers you'll need on your laptop and bring the right cables. Also, don't kill anybody. Assualt gets WAY less attention than murder.
Bacardi + slashdot = negative karma.
Pfft! Get yourself one of those old printing machines schools use to use with the blue ink, and the intoxicating smell. Then you can play Ben Franklin to your hearts content. You revolutionist you.
I have an idea that *might* work. At least make it a little more difficult, though it wouldn't get rid of the problem entirely. Well, ok, a COUPLE of ideas:
1 - put the toners into the printer in a different order. Put yellow in the blue slot, the red in the yellow slot and the blue in the yellow slot. Now your serial number will be in a different colour - could that mess things up?
2 - buy two printers. Print the same image twice - one with red and yellow, the second with blue and yellow. Some adjustments might be needed to account for the fact that yellow is being printed twice.
3 - buy used printers off eBay. Use a PO box to receive printer.
4 - use an old printer. My crappy DeskJet 500 probably doesn't have this 'feature'
5 - make your *own* printer with Lego MindStorms!
6 - print in B&W only
Yeah, I'm a little drunk so my ideas are probably not the best, but at least a few of these sound decent.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
They might do it. Shortly after the original GTA1 came out for the PC, I had made copies for friends. They were having trouble because they didn't have the maps. We agreed that we'd go down to Kinko's and get some nice 11x17 color copies made -- it'd cost them a couple of bucks, but cheaper than the game.
Turns out the maps were printed on 12x16 (A3?) or something weird like that. When I tried to use the self-serve copier, it was broken, so the helpful Kinko's guy offered to do it for me. When he questioned the propriety of copying these maps, I said it was OK because the game was designed to play multiplayer with only one copy (true!), and that's what we were planning to do. He had my friend sign the "I'm making a copy of copyrighted material" disclaimer and took the maps.
He came back a minute later and said that because they were 12x16 instead of 11x17, he wouldn't be able to make a complete copy of them. I said it was OK, that if he had to chop a bit off the edge, that would be fine. He walked back to make the copies.
I wasn't really paying attention to what he was doing, so it wasn't until it was already done that I realized that he had walked over to the paper cutter and literally chopped off a half inch on each side (of the original!) of the maps to make them fit into the copier.
What your describing would be right for screen printing, but comercial printing todays is now done for the most part is done on cmyk presses.
This sig has no nutritional value...
*sigh*
."
"But if you're printing $100 bills. . .
You people are something else.
A professional (that excludes slashdot) aren't using laser printers. Or inkjets, or any of that stuff.
Only two groups are going to be affected.
Amateur counterfiters who should be caught (and if you can't imaging why, then you know didly squat about economics).
And political propoganda being put out (the only defensable argument present, and just how many slashdotters fit that description?).
Anyway the last group already know how to disguise their activities (read your history. we've been doing this kind of stuff since the country was formed). Just because you all suck at it, doesn't mean the rest of us do.
Surely someone here has a recent vintage color laser printer and a magnifying glass. Can you actually see the dots? Are there a lot on the page, any discernible pattern?
When I took HP's indian tech support weenie to task for this, he tried to insist that there was no spyware (acting all nervous and flustered that I'd make such an insinuation).
I said, "Dude, I can see the packets flowing out my ethernet port as the driver is installing, don't try to lie to me."
He replies (in that oh so Indian way of speaking), "Fine, go ahead, jou won't be able to use dee scanner, but jou ken install just dee driver files." (huffing in exasperation)....
And you thought Dale Gribble was paranoid, I'll show you paranoid....
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves
"It seems they were ahead of the US by 30+ years. Another sign of a dying empire."
Uh huh. I'm siting here in ye old, "dying empire" typing this post on a computer produced by a successfull capitalistic system. The communications going out over a network that was ment to connect educational institutions together, and is now supposedly the tool for the "Geek Revolution" and the "New Paradigm" that will set the music, movie, and gaming industry on their ears.
Canaries in a coal mine are more useful than you guys with your "I passed history with a C-" alarmist tripe. Get back with me when you actually have something that's more accurate than the Psychic Friends could deliver.
Did you ever consider that the use of a 12" x 16" paper may have been to deter reproduction of the maps?
Divide by zero hurts my brain.
In Soviet Russia, the gun barrel eats YOU!
OK, let me get this straight..... 20 billionths of a second..... In order to fit 4 bits (assuming 4 bit words as laser commands, best-case scenario, and assuming serial) in as the laser is firing..... you would need 160GHz bandwidth, plus the overhead of the actual "data" to get through. I don't think ribbon cable is quite capable of this inside a printer.
Combined with the "millimeter sized" dots, I think we have an extreme exaggeration of the facts.... I don't think we can trust the "about every inch" on the page either. More investigation is required.
Dye sub printers also require that you use specialty papers - ones that will sublimate the dye into the coated surface.
Colour laser will print onto 'plain' paper.
While you may get more acurate colour on a due sub initially, the dyes are not colourfast and will fade - sometimes quite quickly. Colour laser pigments will hold their colour for much longer. Dye sub printers were traditionally used to emulate a chemical proof before getting plates made for offset printing. While more expensive than a laser printer print they are a fraction of the cost and turnaround time for getting a chem proof.
If I was mocking up a neat United Federation of Planets PAssport, I would use a GOOD quality colour laser engine with the correct colour profile loaded in my DTP software on quality paper. You'd get a much better artifact that way, and it will last longer.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
My friend, gold has no value? I have a cap, and a bunch of electronics and audio equipment that says otherwise. But that is besides the point. With no hard currency (read: international) backing our dollars, if the Euro catches on real big around the globe (or any other form of currency) and our dollars shrink to say, the comparison of a peso to a dollar, we ain't got jack. At least when our government was backing it with gold, we could just go down to the local bank/reserve and get some currency that would have value no matter where we went.
Print on yellow paper.
(eom)
1.) Work
2.) Get paid.
Easy!
You won't know till data is sent requested, and even then only the sharpest of network traffic watchers will catch such a thing.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
ask and ye shall recieve ;-)
I'm more or less okay with it if they simply embed the printed material so it can be traced to a specific printer.
But if they involve any more information than it came from such and such printer, that's crossing the line. Crossing the line would be embedding any personal information, computer information, etc.
How about this? Take a regular printout. Then make a color photocopy of that sheet. That should take care of any serial codes that are hidden in the printout. Of course, you better cross your fingers and hope that your photocopier does not attach a serial number of it's own. Vivek
... or that it just might give the FBI 10-20 times more clues on where to find the used printers.
Privacy is terrorism.
Who is laughing now? :)
I've heard numerous times that the Christian right was a leading force in getting this legislation passed- on Christian TV no less- almost like they're proud of it.
Where is the news in this. 20 year old idea, implemented for a long time now. Big whoop, and cars have steal belts in there tires. If you want to get around this just use a bubble jet printer. You can make more realistic copies that way anyway. Most laser printers are not good at reproducing things like money or pictures.
Today, color laser printer thefts have increased a thousandfold over previous levels...
I'd like to see a picture of this.
Does anyone have a link?
Could it be possible to write a software filter that also prints yellow dots scrambling the dots that exist?
Obviously since ordinary mischief wont work, we will need to use open source mischief....
No, really, it did not sound messed up at all. And thanks for providing an insightful point of view which I happen to agree with... ;-)
Paul B.
What about My Fucking Property violation.
I really don't care what the company thinks, and at no point will I stop to think of them before performing a given action.
Companies are not people.
My friends and I used to have people (from a long distance area) call a pay phone collect at a certain time. We would answer, accept the charges and talk for free.
Except a close forensic study can tell the difference between the toner/ink and the paper.
The chemicals give off visual cues that are different than the material that the paper is made
of, not to mention changing the *texture* in that spot.
Kinko's works with the man. Good to know. I will never go to Kinko's again. Fucking facists.
The problem is, when we had a hard currency, other nations could come and trade in their favorable trade surplus for gleaming hunks of heavy metal.
Once people started getting moving to fiat money, it really was a race to move everyone to fiat money... the slow lost their real assets.
Prepare to don your tinfoil hats people: Even cash now has serial numbers on them! There is no escape!
Divide by zero hurts my brain.
sloth jr
I guess all this rebate crap really is a government conspiricy.
Hardly any of us bother to send in any product registration crap. If you have the receipt you've covered for warranty issues.
But, entice you with a bogus $50 rebate ( which you may or may not get 6-8 weeks later ) and many will gladly give their home address, email address, phone number. Cash the rebate check and you give up your banking info too ( all that stuff they print on the back of the check when you deposit it.)
If you plan on doing naughty things with your laser printer you'll have to pay cash (not at Costco ) and blow off the rebate.
Didn't they ID the first World Trade Center bombers when they tried to get the deposit back on the van? Doesnt pay to be greedy.
They need to reimburse me for the toner used on these serial numbers I didn't print.over the If it's only a buck or even a penny over the life of the printer, it's my money and I want it back. I smell class action lawsuit.
There is some relation between the price of gold and its cost of production. Large increases in the price of gold result in less productive mines being (re)opened, more miners being used in active mines, etc..
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
me thinks your starting to see the light
welcome to 1984 & the Brave New World
that's the beauty of the opposing party democracy system
if one thinks it through
which in this case is that 2-5% of the worlds population that controls 95-98% of the wealth
historically all that "they" have had to do is start a war
it is most easily achieved with the poorly educated
"they" have done enough study and profiling on the general population (with them paying the bill no less)
and as Stanley Milgram demonstrated
by the time they come to take you away
it is in all most all cases
if you are of a mind do a search for a document called "Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars"
Print a white page to the printer and see what gets printed 'extra'.
I may take my trackable printer and print a bunch of labels to stick on printers in the store. Something like "Additional Feature!!! Unabomber Proofing!! This printer prints codes so any page printed by this printer can be traced back to this specific printer!"
HP's had ideas of printing the serial numbers of the printer with yellow ink on every page just to track down the counterfiters. But who knows what else that data will be used for.....
This is about labelling printouts, so that an individual document can be traced back to a printer, if necessary. There's a big difference between that and "tracking everything you print," which would imply spying on your printing activities.
In the old days police could often trace documents to individual typewriters because of small defects like nicked or misaligned characters. I have read that a similar technique even worked with some dot matrix printers. What modern printer manufacturers have done is to artificially create this same level of individuality. Nobody is "tracking everything you print." So how about we put away the foil hats and get upset about the truly bad stuff.
I have yet to see Natalie Portman, naked and petrified.
Kind of reminds me of a funny story regarding tulips that happened a few hundred years ago...
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
...but there's a distinct difference between being able to do it that way "Was this bullet fired by this gun?" as opposed to "This is the bullet, tell me which gun (of all in existance) fired it."
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Anyone wonder why the story has come out now? ... could it be that the technology is now redundant? and as for not sending in the registration card.... have you ever checked what info your printer driver is sending out?
I've misplaced several of the documents I printed. So how does this work? do I put the tracking number in the printer and it tells me where my lost documents are? Do I press a button on the printer and my documents beep so I can find them? Or do I have to do something else?
paintball
Anyway, police officer friend of mine once who said that if you're going to do something illegal, do it big, do it once and don't tell anybody. ...and that's why the Nigeria scam works so well. You do it a) big, b) once and c) don't tell anybody (you don't want to, since you made a complete ass of yourself and lost all your money).
From what I've observed, the "do it big" is a mistake. People throw reason completely out the window because this is the big score(tm). Most important thing is to STFU.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
They use genuine paper and plates, stolen, smuggled and bribed from the treasury department, and duplicate the processes used for the real thing.
Could you bypass this by adding your own little yellow dots to the document? Or are the dots added by the printer somehow different (size, color, maybe even shape, though it should not be possible) from anything you can tell the printer to print?
<irony>
Terrorists!!! Terrorists!!!
Quickly, we have to outlaw Santas and Kinkos!
</irony>
hany
I just happened to be shopping for color laser printers today. After going to some stores to play with them, check the web, we made up a test PDF and loaded drivers on our laptop for all the printers in the running and went to the store and printed our own test pages.
We had mostly settled on the low-end Minolta 2300DL because it does a better job with photos than the other sub-1K devices. We were also considering the Oki c5150n that has shinier and noisier color output, but surprisingly better text printing. I then ran across this story tonight. How irritating.
I whipped out my Photon black-light LED and a magnifying glass and there they were. Little yellow dots everywhere on the Minolta output. They are visible with the naked eye in white/unprinted areas because the dots are a slightly different reflectivity than the rest of the paper. A magnifier and black light and it stands out.
The Oki c5150n printer did not appear to print the spray of yellow dots, for whatever that is worth.
We are likely to use the printer with our letter head on it in nearly all cases, so that would make 99% of the documents more directly trackable, but it sure is a big put-off to have to add this into the equation of what to buy. More a principle than it is a practical concern.
But how much is this going to cost me, for this extra feature? The toner for these things is NOT cheap.
So is there a list of what printers and manufacturers do this? Anyone else have any hardware they can check output from?
The fingerprint made by the yellow colour only. Just deactivate it and print only in CM an K. It's easy!
- Save a tree, eat more woodpeckers
> police (I give them money every year)
;-)
Ouch!
Hopefuly you favor cash so there's no need to worry - unless you use a laser printer to print their names and amounts on the evenlope!
it's all too true: how much worse could it get if osama was president of the us of a?
Designed for tracking counterfeiters? Don't make me laugh. Professional counterfeiters will simply purchase an offset litho printing press (for not much more than a quality colour laser) and amateur counterfeiting attempts are just too easy to spot. Just say no, buy a litho.
While the technology could be used to track where a document came from, in it's most simplest form it identifies the document AS A COPY. That is actually enough, as it makes 'funny money' created on a laser printer unusable as the real thing, if you know where to look. That is probably a GOOD thing.
If you print on yellow, and yellow ink is used, it does not stop those that have the means from seeing the ink...it just makes it harder. Yellow ink on yellow paper is unreadable by the human eye perhaps, not impossible to read through chemical analysis.
In the article they mention "Unlike ink jet printers, laser printers, fax machines, and copiers fire a laser through a mirror and series of lenses to embed the document or image on a page" I didn't know you could make red green and blue burn marks on paper! Oversimplification wins again... And I guess the toner is just there to get all over your clothes...
...the police, having identified you by other means such as witness statements or surveillance camera tapes, use a test print from the printer they find on your desk to confirm you as a suspect.
Doesn't matter where you buy or how you pay, if you are still in posession of the machine used in a crime, its still corroborating evidence.
Just ask CBS. I am sure they have figured out which printers don't do this...
Just like the recent Sony debacle with the sharpie, here is another work around involving indelible ink.
e =UTF-8&q=make+paper and your own ink http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=make+ink. k +screen+printer.
For your protest signs and flyers, go to a store and buy posterboard, then draw your own graphics. Unfortunatly, with out the use of periphirals like stencils, your choice of fonts will be limited.
For the overly paranoid (this is slashdot after all) you could make your own paper http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&i
For mass producing protest flyers, you could make a silk screen http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=make+sil
An interesting story: a friend and co-worker of mine is from Bosnia, and lived with his family in Sarajevo during the war. His mother had saved her gold and jewels believing that they would help them during (or after) the siege. Before the end, however, she ended up trading most of them (they'd be worth a couple thousand dollars, now) for a dozen eggs. It just goes to show the extent to which the relative value of anything can change based on the current situation.
Yeah, so? You've missed the point -- her straegy worked. If she hadn't saved that gold, she wouldn't have gotten those dozen eggs. Your story only shows how rare and precious eggs had become in that situation. Thing is, you can't store things like eggs forever, while gold will store forever.
1. print something in your printer
2. scan with a higher-resolution scanner.
3. find the dots.
4. slurp the exact color of the dots
5. make a background/watermark/whatever with some (eight times more) dots of the same color determined in (4), randomly scattered in the paper.
6. use said background to print your monies.
7. Profit!!!
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
But then you had to sleep with the band.
You guys look at things way too technical. If the shade of yellow is not noticed by the naked eye. Then just make the whole background of your image the exact same color of yellow (or purchase paper of the same color).
Use your new laser printer to create a registration card with a bogus serial number and send THAT one in. You just know that the serial numbers will be scanned or typed by a minimum wage employee into a database anyway. When the feds ask the manufacturer about the serial number, it's not yours!
Use greater technology against itself!
Oh, this is definately an utterly secure and definitive way from keeping people from ever printing anything illegal.
BTW, I need to run to Kinko's a minuite... Anybody want anything?
-- Just another unsolicited opinion... from the Peanut Gallery.
Christian TV is to Christianity as the WWF is to Olympic Greco-Roman wrestling.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
i uSED TO think I was pAranOid BuT THen I reaLized I wasn't parANoid enough.
Okay, so I work at Xerox and I almost ended up being involved in implementing this for one of our newer printers. I know Peter Crean quite well (the guy mentioned in the article), and although this tracking capability has been an "open secret" for some time, we were all very shocked to see this public disclosure. Anyway, since I'm posting this anonymously, I might as well give the inside scoop ;)
First, this is not unique to Xerox printers. We may have pioneered the technique, but pretty much any printer that has good enough quality to be used in counterfeiting has this capability.
Second, it is true that *right now* the gov't is totally uninterested in using this for anything other than tracking counterfeiters. Furthermore, as others have said, it is nigh impossible to tie this to an individual user of a home office-style printer. This is mainly targetted for the big machines that turn out lots of pages per minute in super-high quality.
Still, as a civil libertarian, I am somewhat concerned about future potential for abuse. It would be very difficult to track down an individual author of a document using this technology, but if you could seize the author's printer it could be used to verify identity. That's a little disturbing.... (Though I'll still help implement the tech if they pay me!)
Lastly, the technical details and how it could potentially be beaten... Yes, it covers the entire page, both white space and content. And no, you cannot directly disable it. Even superimposing your own data into the Y channel to confuse the signal may not be entirely fullproof.
The easiest solution? If you really don't want the gov't being able to track you, go to Kinko's or use a black-and-white printer or something. Note that even in printers that use this technology, if you print in black-only mode then it won't have the tracing data. It is only ever present in the Y channel.
Two cars parked on the side of Mitchell Freeway northbound lane in Osnborne Park, one having obviously shunted the other... but with the detached front bumper and number plate of a third absent vehicle embedded in the rear-most car's back bumper.
Oops.
And me without my camera.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...while gold will store forever.
What happens after that?
What?
Agreed...but what about the ACLJ?
20 billionths of a second from the laser... so thats 400,000 clocks away(assuming only a single trigger)... with a 125Mhz clock rate..... how many clocks would each chip eat up.. to transmit that.. blah if you(i) knew enuf you know would where he was talking about and thank him very much.
All this paranoid thinking has reminded me of my other paranoid thoughts. Sorry if im offtopic. Something I've been thinking about is that area around LCD's (TV Monitors etc) what's that for is that a camera? (Maybe even embedded in the middle) I know their watching me! (how they xmit it back I cant tell) So I returned all my LCD' TV's and monitors for good ol' CRT.
I'm curious about this story. Most of the replies seem to be taking the Crean guy from Xerox's claims at face value, but I'm wondering if it isn't a red herring. The yellow dots, I mean. Not that I don't think printer tracking would be useful to the secret service or that manufacturers aren't doing it, but does the yellow dot approach seem plausible? Or is it a misdirection that has nothing to do with the techniques that are really used?
/now/ a Xerox brand, but was originally Tektronix.)
A few observations:
Except for some newer 'one-pass' color lasers, the color image is usually built up in four passes of an imaging belt. In sequence, each of the four toner cartridges is pushed against the belt by a small motor and then retracted; you can hear this happen four times for every color page.
Now print a b&w page on your color laser. If it's like mine, you only hear one cartridge move. That'd be the black one. So, no sneaky yellow dots on b&w pages. Maybe they only do the marking on color pages, figuring that's where the counterfeiting risk is.
Now throw together a page where the only colors are, say, mixtures of pure magenta and cyan, and print that. (If your printer or driver offers several color-matching/color-correction options, do this with the setting for direct/uncorrected, so it isn't using some algorithm to tweak your specified colors.) Again, count the cartridge engagements. Did you hear the yellow cartridge move?
So maybe it only does the marking on pages that include a nonempty yellow component. For that I'll probably print something out and see if I can make out anything like the patterns described in the article. But I'm sure I've never noticed anything like it, and whatever the article says, my naked eyes are pretty good at noticing stray toner, and I've looked really closely, especially when I first got my (used) color laser and it'd had toner shaken up in transport and I had to make a lot of test prints while I was getting it cleaned up. (It's a Phaser, which is
How many people can actually confirm systematic yellow marks added to their pages?