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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.'"
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
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!
not realy, your the one who keeps that infomation, they only way (we'll you'd hope) they'd get there hands on that serial if you done something with the document that was "legaly challanged" =) but this does remind me of the story a few years ago about the printer manafactors having to recall there green inks because it was the same color as dollar bills.
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.
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
Ha, they don't know who they're dealing with if they think that they only need to protect their devices against standard mischief.
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.
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.
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.....
So as long as you're not doing anything wrong you don't mind being tracked? Where do you draw the line?
Let's put a camera in every room of your house (including the bathrooms and bedrooms). If you object to that, clearly you're molesting children in your house.
We also need to get a sample of your DNA on file. If you oject to that, you're clearly guilty of every rape that's occured within 500 miles of your home in the last 20 years.
Do you see the point yet?
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...
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.
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."
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.
I was thinking of that as well, and realized it's easier with ebay. You've got a shipping address at least. However, if you bought it at something like a farmer's market or flea market then you're safe. However, they usually won't have counterfeit-strength machinery.
I remember reading an article a long time ago in Esquire, I believe. Basically the author owned up to counterfeiting in the mid-80s using nothing more than a regular color printer and some paper dyed in tea. He said it worked best to make copies of $20s and use them at stores where you bought a single cheap item and the clerk was usually a bored teen. For example, flower shops. He said convenience stores and such usually were wise to the whole game.
He said his friend and him made about $1500 in fake money that summer and spent it all that way. They had a close brush near the end and gave up but said that it was pretty easy.
Like they say, do it big, do it once, disappear. Otherwise you'll get caught.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
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.
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?
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
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 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
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?
Yellow paper, what? Just because you print in yellow ink on yellow paper doesn't mean it won't show up at some other wavelength. I don't think printing on yellow paper would help you at all.
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?
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.