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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
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?"
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
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.
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.
What makes you think we still have such archaic things as privacy laws anymore? Dont you know that if you have a private life the terrorists win?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
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.
...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!
Oh, sorry. Wrong discussion.
Here's a worse one:
Did you know that every time you touch something, you leave an invisible mark that's unique to you and can be used to track where you've been?
It's a privacy nightmare.
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.
Well, looks like it's back to cutting out newspaper headlines to make my blackmail notes.
All your prints are belong to us
http://melbournephilosophy.com/
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.
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
Nobody prints with green ink. That's a primary color in RGB, and surely nobody prints in RGB. The printing primary colors are CYMK: Cyan, Yellow, Magenta, and blacK. No green.
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 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.
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.
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...
Sure, that's hyper-paranoid, but when you're printing counterfeit bills you kinda have to be.
My sig is blank, I typed this by hand.
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.
"we'll you'd hope" is the key.
Say you print some literature that the government doesn't like. There's all sorts of things the government doesn't like. It doesn't (at least the current republican government) like abortion, marajuana legalization, protests against the war in iraq. You print these up and post them around, pass them out. Laws don't change themselves, it takes action. Disagreeing with a current law is perfectly legal but in the current climate in America might be considered subversive. So if you print them on these printers the FBI can track you down, build a file on you, and perhaps bring Joseph McCarthy back from the dead you commie, tree hugging, pot smoking hippe. That's just an example. Of course you could print money and then the secret service would track you down.
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.
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.
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."
"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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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
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
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.
And if you dont They've already won
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
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.