Slashdot Mirror
EFF Requests Help to Identify "Evil" Printers
jason writes "In preparation for a possible legal challenge, The Electronic Frontiers Foundation is requesting your help in identifying which printers are embedding traceable information in the documents they produce. Printer manufactures added this technology under persuasion from the government inorder to help combat counterfeiting operations, however this technology defeats the presumed anonymity most people expect from the documents they print."
From TFA:
The millimeter-sized dots appear about every inch on a page, nestled within the printed words and margins.
Can anyone produce a human-readable example of this?
Perhaps it's time to unfold my tinfoil hat and use it to cover my printouts instead.
Bang Logic - Serious Small Business Services
I wonder if the government will be using these printers themselves, they have more to hide than anyone else. Now when a confidential document is leaked it can be more easily tied to a government official.
The slippery slope gets slicker every day...
Only a Sith deals in absolutes.
(I got it first!!!)
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Just about all of them? I'd be surprised if a major color printer company wasn't adding something to the print job as it came through.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
"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."
Sounds like your classical security through obscurity bluster. It is probably not that hard to bypass at all using no more than a chewing gum wrapper and a paperclip. The best way to defeat this might not be legally but instead with some simple FAQ's on the internet describing how to disable the "feature".
Can someone work out how to do this please.
This explains all of the random pin-misfires I'm having on my dot-matrix printer! Thank God that it's just my government protecting me from terrorists^H^H^H counterfeiters.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
My old Epson LX: printouts are so atrocious you just know they come from an LX: they embed the printer model in the form of smears and distortion in the text.
Then again, I just use it to print listings, it's not exactly photo-quality...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Finding Evil Printers should be easy. Just test for the Evil Bit.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
In short, you have no idea how it works and want someone else figure it out. Wow, that's just what the EFF just asked in the story.
The print heads rotate 360 degrees while ejecting green ink at great force and saying, "your mother svcks cocks in hell".
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Yes, the first thing I think about when printing out mapquest directions is whether the government will know which printer printed it! OMFG what if they know someone wants to go to Boston?!?!?! HOLY SHIT!
But I guess it'd be easier for them just to track my ezpass tag!
Let me go ahead and print those model names out for you. Oh no! They know now!
EFF deserves a bit of respect for this. They're trying to let everyone else know what companies are doing behind their little white walls to lock you down. Personally, I'm going to make a donation right now to EFF. They need some big-time exposure to change the normal cow-like brainless mob of AOL users into intelligent thinkers.
Send your current model color laser printer to me. I'll even send you a 7 year old inkjet that I currently use as a footrest.
pics or stfu
.cig
Wouldn't it be cool if some printers are also secretly imbedding sexy pictures as well, ala "grand Theft Auto?"
Good luck tracking me "evil" printing bastards... I haven't replaced my ink-cartridge in years!! BUHAHAHAH
Don't anthropomorphize computers: they hate that.
Without a doubt those Selectric[tm] typewriters circa 1969 all had type balls with tiny imperfections to let them be identified if ever used to leak documents potentially affecting a presidential election. Whereas Microsoft would never stoop to putting personally identifiable information into Word document files, or print to printers that weren't at least as evil as they are.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The EFF is after: me
When the postman knocks on your door the next day, holding the blank page and demanding "postage due", you know it your printer is evil and nasty.
Where were you when the voynix came?
I think my Epson 1280 does.
If I print anything, even one line of text from notepad, it will print the text, advance the sheet of paper most of the way, print something else you can't really see, then spit out the paper.
I think this is a good test. If you are printing only to the top of the page, and then it appears to spend time printing where you had no text, you've got one of these...
-Joejoejoejoe
Silly Rabbit: tricks are for kids.
I'll send them $100,000,000 in American currency that I've been printing in my basement. If I don't hear back from them, then I guess my printer is ok.
I believe EFF on this one, since it sounds exactly like something the government would come up with: expensive, secret, very effective in theory, but in practice probably totally destroyed by simply making a low-res photocopy of the document in question.
How about printing out some of JSG Boggs' counterculture art? It's countercounterfeit countercounterrevolutionary!
--
make install -not war
Use bad quality paper, the version which always smudges the ink a little. That will make super small print into super small smudge.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
Guess I Better whip out my dot matrix printer.
I know about the Naughty Bits, (SetUID, SetGID and Sticky) but the Evil Bit???
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Please Mod that Up '+1, Funny.'
It's the funniest thing I've read in a while.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
How exactly is this supposed to work? I buy a printer with cash from Office Max, take it home, and print some phony money. The money is reported to the secret service, which takes it to the printer manufacturer, which tells them that the printer was shipped to an Office Max in my town.
Assume I had the common sense to only use the printer for counterfeiting. What exactly do they do now? Get a warrant for every house within 50 miles of said Office Max, and check the serial number on all the printers?
Can you do anything these days without having to be tracked, monitored, or identified in some manner?
They use yellow dots, so don't have yellow toner, use another colour to do the printing of yellow, and swap the cart out.
And there I was thinking that all printed information is traceable.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
What if I buy a printer at, say, Staples, buy cash and do not send in the registration? How can they track me then? I think the worse that would happen is they would know that two particular documents originated from the same printer.
Anonymous Cowards suck.
Of course, only criminals use cash.
Yesterday's boingboing.net headlines, today (with worse spelling)!
And here I was thinking all along that it was just a crappy printer that messed up every inch or so.
Maybe I could add a few more of mine in Photoshop just to make things more interesting.
Better that than suggesting that Xerox (and Canon and HP) should be shot for caving into foreign governments who use this to suppress free speech, all the while not telling us that they're doing it.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
From the article linked to in the article linked above:
According to the article, since information about a user is not encoded into the arrangement of markings, law enforcement agencies work with manufacturers to obtain the identities of the persons to whom the printers were sold. In a typical scenario, when distributors sell printers, they obtain information about the purchaser, which is maintained in a database. The purchaser's identity is then associated with the serial number and the manufacturer's name of the machine. A document whose author a governmental agency wants to discover contains only the serial number and the manufacturer's name of the machine on which it was printed, so upon extracting this information from a document, it must consult the distributor responsible for selling the machine. The distributor performs a database query to match the serial number with a purchaser; manufacturers can also do searches if they have access to the database.
So at least right now, unless the person you sold it to has the serial number tied to your name, they're not going to find you that way. What's disturbing is that there are a lot of ways for a distributor or manufacturer to get that information even if you didn't provide it up front (or "register" your product after purchase). Service quests, telephone support, etc. all gather similar dated.
Of course, I wonder how long before Congress just passes a law requiring this technology on all printers as well as a comprehensive database of all purchasers tied to serial numbers.
Who cares? So the government could possibly link the printout from MapQuest, cheats for Grand Theft Auto, and Timmy's Amazon wishlist that I threw away came from my printer. Big deal.
The only time when I can see this being useful to the Government is if I'm doing something wrong. You know, harassing my ex, threatening the President, and that junk.
Free of Flash! Free of Flash!
---------
mobile search - coming soon
What kind of evil are we talking about here? The kind where replacement cartridges cost more than the printer itself? Or drivers that are fully supported under Windows but Linux requires black magic to work? Or that cables are not included?
It's nice to see the EFF trying to stamp out the evil printers. But there's a lot of work to be done.
Yellow dots have just become the new white.
Plan ahead and incorperate random millimeter-sized yellow dots throughout your document...
If done correctly their tracking info is useless.
Isn't having this feature a good thing? Its definitely not human-readable and easy to trace, but I'm sure to some CSIs it's good to have for investigation into ransom notes. Wouldn't this technology be similar to being able to have bullets which they can trace back to the gun by the markings made on it? Why doesn't the EFF fight to make it impossible to trace bullets while they are at it?
"... but in practice probably totally destroyed by simply making a low-res photocopy of the document in question."
Oh yeah! I always turn in "low-res" copies of money into the cashier.
---
The "are you a script" word for today is veracity.
Somebody ask
- Alexander Hamilton (later the first Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, the same Treasury that Lorelei Pagano now works for),
- James Madison (later fourth President of The United States), or
- John Jay (later first Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court)
why they published the Federalist Papers anonymously under the name "Publius".Ask them if they'd have been able to write the these brilliant arguments that shaped the Constitution of the United States of America if the very paper they'd printed it on could have been used to strip then of their anonymity?
Could they have made their arguments as forcefully, would they have allowed their ideas to have been so revolutionary, if they had known any political opponent could trace those papers back to them, perhaps deny them jobs or political offices because of disagreement with their ideas?
Would we even have the Constitution that we have today if these great men had not been able to use the pen-name "Publius"?
Hamilton and Madison and Jay forged (ahem) our Constitution in anonymity, but counterfeiting specialist Lorelei Pagano tells us that those three silly boys didn't need their anonymity? That in order to be safe from counterfeiters, we have to give up our right to anonymous politically agitation?
How much more security can this country -- this nation conceived in anonymity -- survive?
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
s/Frontiers/Frontier/g
but why not just take out the color cartridge, if you're really concerned? My color photo printer has separate black and color cartridges, and operates perfectly fine on only the black one (for grayscale images and text only, obviously). If there is no yellow ink, there can be no yellow dots. And if it still uses the black for this marking, then you've got visible dots all over the page...hardly covert.
This administration is neither the first nor the last one to use law enforcement officers to harrass the opposition. Practical freedom of the press is undermined when it is too hard to write anonymously.
Oh, wait, no . . . never mind.
If someone leaks information in violation of the equivalent of the Official Secerts Act, they should be found out and put in jail.
This reminds me of when Alger Hiss was convicted of Perjury during the McCarthy trials. The FBI traced some leaked documents back to Alger based on a mechanism that uniquely identified his typewriter.
Most laser printers now have considerable processing oomph, with a RISC CPU or two. Hows about instead of putting down yellow dots, the printer just refuses to print anything resembling the size, shape, and color of money? A little rough pattern-matching against the top 50 currency images would do most of the job.
Back during the Cold War, anyone who owned a typewriter was required to submit a typing sample to the government. The idea was to create a database so to assist in tracking any given document to a specific typewriter.
The US Government has removed the ambiguity from this process, and made it far easier to definitely tie a document to a printer.
Well, except for the fact that I'm sure the government has a couple printers lying around that can add whatever serial number and printer model they want.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
There were several articles on Slashdot and elsewhere a while back about software like Adobe Photoshop and color printers detecting and refusing to scan/print/copy images of money.
Look at the back of new U.S. currencies or the Euros and you'll see patterns of "o". In the U.S. version, they are in the little "20" (or whatever) and in some Euros they are the body of musical notes. They form a star pattern that is the same when viewed from any angle. This is easy to detect in a scan, no matter how you rotate the bills.
The question is -- is it in the DRIVER or printer firmware. Some of this stuff was in the DRIVERS of Windows/Mac scanners.
If it is in the driver, then they're going to have a hard time with OSS drivers. If it is in the printer firmware, it is a bit different.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
How do "most people expect anonymity from the documents they print?"
Printed pages are NEVER anonymous. Apart from fingerprints, DNA traces, ink and paper matching, how many people print stuff that they pass out anonymously? Most letters have a sender, books and other prints have a copyright note. And once you distribute any printed materials, others can trace it back.
If you go to the trouble to buy the printed at Best Buy at a best buy 500 miles from your home with cash that you got from a bank while wearing a full body condom and face mask, don't transport it in your car, and keep it in a clean room at an anonymous location, I agree that you probably expect privacy. But at that point, you have probably been arrested as a weirdo somewhere along the way.
From what I understand Adobe photoshop and Canon brand copiers already refuse to allow you to scan and/or print US banknotes http://www.inventionandtechnology.com/xml/2005/1/i t_2005_1_feat_1.xml
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=13522
Would it be possible to find out the yellow colour of the dots and use this as a background for all of your documents? Sure, it would waste ink, but unless they XOR the code, it should work.
Don't go to a brothel if you want to buy broth
Just because you have nothing to hide, it doesn't mean what you're hiding isn't important.
Yeah, right.
What if the Government decides that somthing you think is right, is actualy wrong?
Like Hunting, Fishing, Writing complaint letters...
In Soviet Russia the yellow dots print YOU!
Greenpeace? A criminal eco-terrorist cult?! What is that crack you're smoking dude? Perhaps you think they carry bombs under those baggy sweaters... ROFL.
--
USA: home of the world's largest terrorist training camp.
I worked for Lexmark back in 98-99 when I heard this was being worked on. I'd suspect any Lexmark laser from that point on (if you would even use one after their attempts to force you to use only their "official" toner cartridges). Too bad their management is so clueless - their laser hardware is usually pretty decent. Anyway, I thought this was already common knowledge??
OK, so when this story last hit slashdot I was at work with other computer types and we tested this out. We had a large Lexmark color laser printer, so we printed out a webpage in color.
We then took the paper over to our rework station(for reworking PCB's) and looked at it with the optical equipment there(microscope of some magnitude). Sure enough, there was the blue dots, faint but there.
Then we photocopied the paper on a black and white photocopier and were unable to find the dots again. My guess is that they were too faint for that particular copier.
So why is everyone so upset ? The stupid people who counterfit money will give away the printer model they used, not a big deal.
- "Never let a computer tell me shit." - DelTron Zero
I work for a large printer/copier manufacturer in the technical services area (IT related) and can confirm we've been doing this for MANY years in our colour products.
We refer to the technology as "micro dots". Each dot can uniquely identify the device by it's serial number (which is not only printed on a label but also hardcoded in to the machine).
I also happen to live in Australia, where it'd be a cold day in hell before we told anyone who didn't have a court order the serial number of a printer that produced a page or who we sold it to.
The dots are MUCH smaller than 1mm as suggested here, however I can confirm that yellow toner is used. If you have a good magnifying glass (at least 8 times) and a sharp eye you can spot them, but it's really not easy.
Additionally, our machines all have anti-counterfeit technology anyway. If you try to print or copy a banknote from any major world currency, all you'll get is a black square and possibly an error code being displayed on the panel.
In the entire time I've worked for this company, we've never once had to do a micro dot check for the police/government/whatever - I'd know because there's only about 3 or 4 of us in the company that have the knowhow to do it and they all work in my department. (no, the govt doesn't know how to do it themselves and even if they did, they'd still need to ask us where that serial number is now).
I've deliberately avoided mentioning my employers name in this post. I'm pretty sure I haven't broken any confidentiality agreements with this post (all I'm doing is confirming, not supplying new info) but you can't be too careful. Suffice to say, I don't think it matters which major manufacturer, I'd bet my bottom dollar we all do it.
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
Aye to that. I'm a hiker, a hunter, and a lover of the great outdoors, which means I often get involved in environmental projects and causes. Yet for some reason I think that the French were fully justified in sinking the Rainbow Warrior. Greenpeace are a little far out there. I guess like all things environmentalism needs to be done in moderation =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
it seems like you would be better off trying to find this stuff with IR, or black light or whatever it is they use to illuminate bills to verify their authenticity. I've heard my conspiracy theory friends tell me that photocopiers do this sort of thing as well.
"Printer manufactures added this technology under persuasion from the government inorder to help combat counterfeiting operations, however this technology defeats the presumed anonymity most people expect from the documents they print."
Yeah most people expect anonymity when they print out letters that they sign. And certainly when printing out mapquest instructions, people are really concerned about anonymity, since they are showing the printouts to no one else. Oh yeah, and when printing out photos of their families, people are really concerned about anonymity. And don't forget, when printing out your tax form (with your ssn), you certainly want to remain anonymous.
Think for a second people, and you'll realize that only a very small fraction of people printing out anything are concerned about remaining anonymous. Most of the time the document never changes hands, and when it does, the person receiving the document knows who gave it to him.
Vote for Pedro
It's prints "Page 1" at the bottom, dumb ass.
If your a counterfieter.. well.. just remember to print extra yellow dots in a specific pattern all over the sheet if possible. or just go buy new printers all the time..
So now they know which printer I printed all my TPS reports on??
/. spaztech
The EFF is concerned about this technology because they've read their history books. And because some people who participated in writing the history books... had to be very careful about what they printed those books on. And because the systems of government used in the Warsaw Pact countries from 1917-1991 was - to many people, myself included - "evil".
I posted this a few months ago, the last time the topic came up. This is not just about counterfeiting. (And as a guy who likes money, I hate counterfeiters with a passion almost equalled to my hatred of spammers, which is pretty freakin' intense.)
In Soviet Romania [google.com], a sample page from every typewriter had to be registered with the police, so that any samizdat produced could be quickly traced back to the typewriter's owner. Use your imagination as to what happened to the owner, or Google for it.
In Soviet Russia [geocities.com], all photocopiers were registered with the KGB and kept in secure rooms, to which physical access was restricted.
The West is probably still playing catch-up.
We still don't have a national database on bullet striations to uniquely identify all guns by the bullets they fire but the government is all over making sure that we uniquely identify all printers by the paper they've printed? That's crazy.
I doubt the EFF will be as successful as the NRA.
Cable subscriber box uniquely identifies household...
I'm thinking the EFF is trying to make this some kind of poster child for moving their agenda into the minds of more people. Someone way up in the EFF probably is really hooked on the idea and used their affluence to move it forward.
I just wish they had picked a more compelling topic than printers.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Do this, and the EFF will have a larger, more diverse database of printer identifications than any manufacturer. And just where's their Privacy Policy on this?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The FBI can match a document to a particular typewriter because of the inherent inprecision in manufacturing.
Granted printing the serial number makes it much easier especially if there exists a database of users!
I wonder if they used their karma bonus though?
Personally I'm guessing they did it so the British or anyone else didn't mod them '-1 DEAD!'
What happens if you print in B&W and empty out your yellow ink?
Yes, the "evil" bit. Something along the lines of RFC 3514.
I think many of you are missing the point here. This is NOT to be able to take a document and track it back to a specific printer, but rather to irrefutably link the document and the printer.
"They" will never find a counterfeit document and then look for the printer, they will find the printer and then link the documents printed as corroborating evidence. This will be used once a suspect is available and a with a search warrant present and the printer seized, now with the micro-dot encoded serial number they can prove that Document A was definitely printed on Xerox Model X3Y Serial number: sdf78s6d5sdf46s4df98 which resides in the office a Mr. John Q. Public. at 321 Main St. Spingfield, MA; this removes plausibly deniability from the case. No more will a printed document carry any form of anonymity, there will be no reasonable doubt if this is called into evidence at a trial, do you REALLY want an almost iron-clad evidence of every document printed to be available?
THOSE were traceable. I suppose the EFF is against them also because they were, in theory, anonymous.
Sheesh.
"Which is exactly why it should be REQUIRED for all government offices, and optional for citizens. Remember, "Where the people fear their government, there is tyranny, where the government fears its people, there is Liberty." - T. Jefferson (? sorry, quote's off the top of my head)"
Well their would be if the American people hadn't spent the past couple decades on their fat, twinkie eating ass, complaining about the government, but doing little else. Now I got to come here and spend half the time listening to the latest generation complain about "lost right this" and old dead person said that, and the rest of the time listening to the whining about how they can't do this, or do than and won't someone else do for them what they apparently will not do for themselves. e.g. voting with your consumer dollars.
---
The "are you a script" word for today is retreat.
Star: "Hey guys, would you rather see all this confedential information we've collected or see me hit a few dingers?" Citizens: "DINGERS!! DINGERS!!" Star: *grabs information from evil NorthAmerican Baseball Association printer* "yoink!"
I understand the marking is done with yellow ink. It seems one would be able to expose a lot of these printers by replacing (or contaminating) the yellow ink with black.
I'm going Office Space on its ass!
insert inflammatory anti-microsoft comment here
...for all that yellow ink?
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
Dude, I think you got lost on that last inter-dimensional jump. This is the dimension where the earth is round, the sky is blue and Greenpeace is a charity that saves Whales & Dolphins. I think you want the one where they blew up the twin towers and Al Quaeda run a Gorilla sanctuary. I think it's the third on the left.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
perhaps someone should develop software that examines a scan of a printed page, then queries a public database for the identity of the printer that printed it. putting that power in the hands of the people might make for some interesting revelations. imagine:
"well, we don't know who leaked valerie plame's name to the press, but the letter doing it was printed on the printer sitting in the corner of karl rove's office. the secret service is looking into it."
I, for one, welcome our evil printer overloads.
Easy counter measure: When you print out your great govt conspiracy expose, take the set to the Office Max where you bought the tagging-printer and photo-copy the document.
Retail photocopiers wont catch the yellow-on-white and the small size of the dot because their resolution is too crappy. The copier does the work of getting rid of your tracks.
Now burn the originals and leak anonymously!! Woohoo.
The only PT Boat Journal on the web: http://www.PT171.org
Let's have some A4-size versions.
Granted, I think that these tracing technologies, "encouraged" by the SS and slipped into printers with no fanfare needs more examination.
r far more reach and far more anonymity than paper - why use a printer to get your message out?
But, in this day and age, with the Internet giving any anarchist/revolutionary/savior/rebel/whistleblowe
It seems to me that those who commit crimes that actually necessitate the creation of physical print that will suffer from this. I don't think the government will get much power-grabbing traction out of this one.
Maybe in the days of the photo-stat and typewriter this would be a huge advantage for the State, but the Internet far supercedes the ability of ink-jet printers for the kind of speech that people are worried will be repressed.
"PC Load Letter?!?! WTF does that mean???"
and now back to the fallout shelter...
The article suggests that there's no way to remove the yellow dots from print-outs. Instead, I suggest that it may be possible to hack a printer so that it prints an additional set of yellow dots every time to interfere with the dot analysis.
...ok, so the EFF wants eight PDFs printed on my printer. Fine.
When opening the PDFs, I find that they are made to be printed on a sheet of paper roughly 71 by 92 inches in size...?
What kind of printer do they think I have, anyway?
(and when scaling down to about 11% of original size, the detail of the original document was partly lost in printout... Somebody there obviously hasn't tested these PDFs...)
Why not cleverly stick your own pattern of little dots in everything you print to "scramble" their data?
I remember seeing something about hidden markers in fertilizers, in response to the Oklahoma bombing a few years back. Tiny little bits of whatever, with a serial number on them, embedded in all fertilizers sold in the u.s... that way it can at least be traced back a few steps. Why do the same thing with the inks that printers use ? feasible ?
I bet that would really mess up their records. Mine too, if my swappee decided to go on a counterfitting spree ;[
'For we walk by faith, not by sight.' II Corinthians 5:7
When did the Greenpeace become something other than a criminal eco-terrorist cult?
Too much Rush, not enough critical thinking.
Greenpeace has always been about non-violent direct action.
If you could get an idea of the scheme used to decide where the little dots go, you could just print out a bunch more in your document to foil the unique identification. IMHO this is just another case of 'the bad guys can get around it if they want to, while the "good" guys get the screw in some form or another'
I use to work for a copy shop and a copier reseller and its true. Or at least on some of the machines. As it was described to me: At every random sheet(somewhere between 1 and 10) the machine's serial number will be embedded into the text/picture that is printed. The reason for doing this is to prevent large scale counterfeiting.
Now, if you think that every printer out there has this feature then you'd be wrong. Black and white printers never have this in them for a simple reason...they are B&W. This technology was put into machines that could quickly and accurately copy currency. A B&W printer will not fool anyone. On the other hand, if you think that the desktop HP that is sitting next to you has this, think again. Look at the resolutions that is need to embed the serial number into the picture/text.
This technology, from my understanding, is only put into medium to high end color copiers. For example, a Xerox 3535 or Doc-10 or Doc-50 would have this technology in it. These machines usually cost somewhere between 25,000 to 50,000 USD. So if you want to find the 'evil' printers, start there.
Yet for some reason I think that the French were fully justified in sinking the Rainbow Warrior.
You approve of bombing a ship and killing one of it's crew? That's tantamount to condoning state sponsored terrorism. Expect a visit from law enforcement any minute now.
The day they were founded.
As to any argument that you want to print stuff out and have it untracable back to you - why? Do you want to print money? Why would you want to print anything and be able to disavow the action of printing it? Sounds foolish.
Here is a real-life example... You disagree with the direction a company is taking. After discovering your boss seems unlikely to recommend your preferred course of action, you write a scathing, slanderous "newsletter" announcing to the world that you think your boss is an idiot, his boss is a drooling retard and everyone that disagrees with you is misguided at best. I assure you, if the originator of that document could have been traced to an individual's printer they would have been fired that day. AND SO WHAT?
Similarly, it has gotten to the point where you can print money on a sub-$1000 color printer and with the "right" paper it will be accepted some places. Think about it - if you knew you could get away with it because it was untracable, wouldn't you try it? Why not? What harm would a couple of $5 bills do, right? Yes, this thought has already occurred to hundreds of people and about the only thing holding them back is the sure knowledge that IT IS TRACEABLE.
http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/index.php/id;1002274 598
"The code, in yellow, can be printed on a line as thin as 0.1 millimeter."
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I hear they record the unit's serial number on every copy they make too...
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Hold a swap meet, mutual garage sale, etc. Deal in cash, keep no records, don't stare, ...
Can you imagine the survivors telling friends about how they got their ass kicked by the French? lol
I know this is old news which I didn't pay much attention to until I got an inexpensive laser printer 2 weeks ago. Does anyone know if the "tracking dots" are also printed on B&W laser printers? I have the Samsung ML-1740 buy.com had for $30 after rebates, I think it's up to 50 after rebated, but it's still a good deal. I remember over hearing the evening news covering this a few weeks ago, yes the common folks news has mentioned this.
Used to convict, used to prove innocents?
these dots could be used to discredit someone claiming to have incriminating documents from you, but only if all the papers they have from you but the documents in question match pages you know are from your printer. Then the counter arguement of you know docs can be traced back to printers and you printer that one somewhere else.
It would be nice if printers that did this were clearly labeled as doing so and the manual contained instructions for the end user to find and verify them.
If someone gave me an old document they claim I gave to them, I'd like to be able to confirm that it was from me. In the unlikely event someone claimed to have a document from you, you could confirm it was from you or at least your printer. Just's just as easy to fake email headers as it is to put someone else's name in the from part of a letter and hit print.
F7 doesn't work, ignore spelling and grammar
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.
The guy sounds absolutely grateful that the Government would deign to come out to their labs and help them put this plan into action. No worries about their customers, though... lets just do whatever the Government wants and keep them happy.
It's the land of the brave, and the home of the free
Where the less you know, the better off you'll be.
So it's happening. I knew there was the thing in CD and DVD burners who's name escapes me right now that does essentially the same thing. I remember searching on that, and there is virtually zero public info about it anywhere on the internet.
Anyone who supports this sort of shit should be ground up into little pieces and fed to dogs. People have to take a stand now, the way the world is going..is fucking insane.
ooooooh....a terrorist might print a document...for fuck sake we are as a world DOOMED. People must take a stand. Wake the fuck up. Whether you think it's a conspiracy theory on not, it doesn't actually matter, the world is moving in that direction. If you care about that and believe in the freedom and that of your loved ones DO SOMETHING.
Each dot can uniquely identify the device by it's serial number
I can see the extra dot added, between the "t" and "s" of "its".
I thought they were meant to be yellow?
Ydco co
Critical thinking. Hmm...
k ingcoalport111
My critical thinking considers this an invitation to take non-violent direct action against you, because you are a twit.
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/news/bloc
I will be occupying your house shortly, and letting the air out of the tires of your car. Don't bother calling the police, because I'll just come back. After all, this type of action has your seal of approval.
Di551 and Bizhub C350...
We will see if I am returning these to Minolta..
All of these are non-violent or fall into the category of "I would be surprised if you were not making it up". My friend runs legal support for arrested Greenpeace activists and would not be involved in anything more drastic than trespassing on an illegal incinerator so the owners have to call the police (and be shut down).
Any evidence forthcoming that Greenpeace have ever engaged in spiking trees (not Earth First or ELF), or is this just mongolboy asshattedness?
Let's say somebody buys a printer to use for counterfeiting. To be safe, they buy it cash, using false ID, in a different city... etc etc
While the serial ID might be somewhat less-than-useful in tracking down the individual culprit to his/her home, if you start finding a lot of bills with the same serial you could at least determine that they were all produced by the same person/printer (rather than several different printers/counterfeiters). From that, you might gather logistics based on the area-spread wherein the phony bills are used, etc.
You've been watching too much CSI, if you think this type of evidence is easily tracked and stored. Since it is obvious that you don't know much about guns, I will explain something. Markings on bullets and shells are very easy to change and is very much subject to conditions. It would be a waste of money to try and store and track all of this information. It appears however that tracking serial numbers on printers is not that hard.
Sie ist tunbar!
[i]Of course, only criminals use cash.[/i]no, smart criminals will use stolen credit cards.
Just wait until they smuggle this evil puppy out of the Initech offices!
As such, it won't work.
I was talking to a cop about counterfeiting a few months back. He said a lot of the counterfeit bills they receive haven't even been printed on both sides! They're *terrible* fakes.
As long as it looks anything like a real bill, you can slip it in. I wouldn't be surprised to hear people have passed green construction paper.
So you can do all the wild things you're talking about to the money, but by the time you get something that looks so strange and shiny that nobody's going to accept a fairly simple fake in the heat of a busy shopping day, you're going to have something too strange for the American public. The public does not take well to new money. They don't trust it to be real, so it isn't.
Canada has a pretty cool approach to this. They've done so many memorial coins and bills, so many promotional design changes over the past twenty years that the populace no longer expects the money to look particularly the same for more than about three years.
... as in many investigations, the police were no closer to the unabomber after years of crimes: it took a family member ratting him out to break the case ... you do not need a perfect record, just a complete absence of people prepared to rat you out
For some reason I doubt that your average counterfeiter will use a color laserjet they picked up from Best Buy. The tool of choice for this activity is the offset printing press.
Most DVD and CD drives capable of writing embed the serial number of the driver in every DVD or CD written. Like the printer serial number this can and will be tracked to you.
Suppose the printer can steganographically introduce information in the text. It depends on the resolution you can achieve but...
... a replacement for barcodes? What's the difference between that and a barcode? It's fully integrated.
Then you could
- add the id of the printer in decodable form, so that the sales document of the printer can be traced back from the document. Or the sales document of the printing head, depending where you squeeze in the technology.
- or you can add the id of the printer in a non encodable but verifiable form: once you have the printer, you can confirm it did print the document, but you cannot in any way trace back the printer.
- Obviously the information can be lost during all kinds of processing, unless other tools take care to preserve it. Take a copying machine.
- or you can add copyright information to a printed book so that the copying machine afterwards automatically calculates the royalties for copying, and adds extra info to the copy
- the copying machine can detect any kind of classified document or banknote, and flag it
- the copying machine can detect the parental advisory signs and refuse to copy unless you have adult rights
- the copying machine can be used selectively for spying because it detects classified documents and stores them.
- add a pgp signature to the document, signing the printfile, in the print.
Like it or not, there's a feel of peeking in future applications here. How about publicity panels with hidden messages? I'll stop now before it gets too silly.
Will further thought rapidly discount these ramblings ? Find out after these messages. Stay with us..
My printer, under the influence of mother-pucking TNN, said "Your mom has socks that smell!" while ejecting that green minty wusabi sauce.
without prejudice
1972, actually. Last time I checked, Greenpeace was non-violent and always has been.
Of course, if you consider civil disobedience to be "criminal eco-terrorism", then I might see where you're coming from.
Won't it be priceless when the EFF's lawsuit is dismissed in the name of homeland security, and the next day they're told to hand over all of their collected "evidence", also in the name of homeland security? And of course if they ever reveal that they've been told to hand over the information, they'll all be tossed in jail without charges other than violating some classified measure in the so-called "patriot act".
At least they're not photographing train stations, public parks, or doing something else equally dangerous to national security, but just think of the intelligence goldmine present in all those test pages being sent to the EFF. A goon...er...security agent could get a promotion out of this!
This is by far the funniest comment I have ever seen on Slashdot.
I hate to disappoint you, but I can significantly change the barrel rifling that creates those bullet striatations with a rat tailed file...in under 90 seconds.
A database of "bullet signatures" would not only be useless but create yet ANOTHER government agency in order to track them all.
If it doesn't have an open source driver: it's evil. HP has official open source Linux drivers.
With enough forensics, couldn't we figure out what printer it came from just by unique toner marks, like from that time i accidentally spilled out a little toner? Or how about other unnoticible things like creasing or PC Load letter?
I think there is now a market for blank paper which has a large number of random fake microdots of yellow toner.
Raisins. PORK PENIS.
What exactly do they do now? Get a warrant for every house within 50 miles of said Office Max, and check the serial number on all the printers?
Like others said, first they'll use the surveillence camera tapes from the store to get your face. They they'll just enter your house (and anyone else's they feel like) to check out your printer and get it's serial number, print off some test pages, and probably install a keylogger inside your PC keyboard, spyware on your PC, and good old fashioned bugs on your landline, and perhaps even video and/or audio RF bugs in your attic or inside walls. No warrant will be issued yet, they don't need one anymore since the 4th Amendment has effectively been nullified. Once they've got enough evidence to positively nail you, THEN they'll go see a judge to get a formal warrant with some very specific terms in it, and come back and bust you in person with that warrant and gather *everything* technology related that you own and it'll happen so fast you'll never know what hit you.
While you are at an Australian group, the USA still punishes major corps that do not cooperate with them. And I am willing to bet that at this time, the USA is still a major buyer of your product.
If you work where you say you do, you should know a lot more than most yahoos here know (and what many of the semi-knowledgeable think that they know).
I've been thinking of some possible countermeasures to protect you in the occasional episode of civil disobedience
1) Insert a random scattering of microdots in the document prior to printing
2) Include a yellow background in the document(doesn't really work for counterfeiting)
3) Overprint the same document using multiple identical printers, rendering the pattern of dots undecipherable
Without knowing the technical details of how the microdots are inserted, I see a potential problem: if the microdots are overlaid on another color, it may not be possible to obscure them because the RIP (Raster Image Processor) may create color separations which do not overlay colors. It's been reported that the encoding happens "just before the laser" which indicates that it is post-RIP processing. In this case, it would certainly be possible to overlay colors, even if the RIP doesn't do it. If, however, the RIP does allow overlays, then it shouldn't be a problem. (I may just have given Big Brother a new idea here. Hope not.)
Option 3 isn't immune to the above either, as layered encoding could be deciphered by sorting the layers.
There must be SOME way to obscure that bomb threat, ransom note, or anonymous source.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Could print drivers be devised to tamper with this? If the little dots are "invisible" to the human eye, I guess it wouldn't hurt to have a printer driver randomly throw these little dots all over the page? I guess it might have to change the color depending on what model of printer is being used. But it sounds like it could be done... or am I missing something?
I printed out a RewardZone coupon from Best Buy on the company laser printer (HP LaserJet 4100tn) and instead of a barcode I got a useless black rectangle.
So is my HP printer trying to prevent me from giving any further purchase demographics to Best Buy?
(and yes the cashier still tried to scan the black rectangle).
Perhaps tracking who bought what printer is what all these rebates are for (well, that and to give all these big companies thousands of dollars in free loans every year)?
as long as you don't use your "multifunction office printer/scanner" to do the copy?
I for one am planning to print all my color documents with a faint solid yellow background. Perhaps the EFF could help by providing instructions for printing the correct solid yellow on each model printer?
The US will not make the same mistake the USSR did. If another Bulgakov surfaces in Dubya's America, this printer-ID technology will rat him out before that freedom-hating Nobel Prize Committee has a chance to work its evil. Why does the EFF hate America?
That may be what Greenpeace says, but their actions speak different words. Unless breaking and entering is now considered non violent protest.
Problem solved.
In the entire time I've worked for this company, we've never once had to do a micro dot check for the police/government/whatever - I'd know because there's only about 3 or 4 of us in the company that have the knowhow to do it and they all work in my department. (no, the govt doesn't know how to do it themselves
presumably if EFF can work it out then so can NSA.
and even if they did, they'd still need to ask us where that serial number is now
"They" can still match up the digital signatures of different documents and get a lot of information that way. Just as (for example) other forensic evidence, like fingerprints or DNA samples, can tag a suspect at multiple places/times even if you don't (yet) know who that suspect is.
Honestly, how many parallel or USB cables do you need? I think I've bought a grand total of one of each type for printing purposes over the years; they are removable after all.
That other stuff? That's still pretty evil.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I will be occupying your house shortly, and letting the air out of the tires of your car.
The day those things are considered terrorism will be the day you have a point.
"Try, there is no try. Only do or do not do" -- yoda. Does that mean that Yoda is a Sith?
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
People still play LambdaMOO?!? Umm, the stone age called, it wants its prehistoric text based games back.
This printer has been gone over several times and its always the same story. After a few copies the printer seems to print "dirty" copies. Could the "dirt" be these yellow dots?
If anyone can shed light on the problems I'd really like to get some information. A solution would be even better because Okidata did not seem to have one - the result being the printer is considered junk and could never be put into service.
Publius did just fine without yellow ink.
I've deliberately avoided
You've deliberately avoided sharing any evidence that you know what you're talking about. While you've guessed right that the dots are smaller than 1mm, you haven't mentioned that they're significantly smaller, and require something better than a dime-store jeweler's loupe to actually read.
And I can't think of any "large printer/copier manufacturer" that is headquartered out of Australia - which you'd pretty much have to be, if indeed "there's only about 3 or 4 of us in the company that have the knowhow to do it and they all work in my department."
we've never once had to do a micro dot check for the police/government/whatever
That you know of. One word: compartmentalization. If you truly work for a "a large printer/copier manufacturer," then they're a far-flung organization, and the database that links printer identification codes to serial numbers to purchasors or lessees is probably similarly far-flung. And why not? As a private institution operating in a new realm, there would be no government oversight preventing that information from spreading out a bit.
Anyways, this same technology that might be used to track counterfeiters can also be used to track down whistleblowers and dissenters within govt's and corp's alike. Bad thing all around.
It's not the dodgy greenbacks I'm worried about, it's the other uses of the information.
"Oh look, this tax return was printed with the same printer used to print this flyer complaining about the administration's policies on Iraq, better add him to the blacklist too."
Maybe you could just use a refill kit to fill a blank yellow cartridge with black ink and find it easier. Or add something that glows, etc...
No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades will seriously cramp his style.
No, standard mischief won't. But non-standard mischief, like not buying one of those printers, does and works very well.
Print a test page at the store and have a look; the dots are easy to see once you know they're there.
- http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=157201&cid=13
1 79743
- http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=157201&cid=13
1 80055
- http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=157201&cid=13
1 80086
- http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=157201&cid=13
1 80125
- http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=157201&cid=13
1 80157
- http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=157201&cid=13
1 80283
- http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=157201&cid=13
1 80529
Play long enough and you, too can win theI think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Could this be obscured if you used more than one printer to print something out? Say print out alternate lines or paragraphs of a document on two or more different printers? You could try every other letter or even photos I guess, but even with the best consumer printers, getting the output from the different printers to line up correctly would be difficult.
That's the sound of an NDA breaking.
:P
Prepare to get fired! Bzzzzzt.
When did you start calling yourself BigBuckHunter instead of the more accurate Dumb Fuck Hunter?
OK, so let me be sure I understand this.
You're telling me that your printers always include a dot, printed with yellow toner, visible only with an 8x magnifying glass, in which is encoded enough information for you to identify exactly which printer that you made was responsible for printing that page?
Sorry, but if that's all you've got, I call bullshit. Too much doesn't add up.
Printer manufacturers have high enough resolution to do this, yet only put out 600dpi/1200dpi boxes, where you can easily enough see jaggies with the naked eye?
If the dots are really that small, they could be messed up just by bleed in average quality printer paper.
Alternatively, this isn't a microdot in the classic meaning of the term, but rather the system is supposed to rely on the relative positions of the dots on the page, with dots spaced inches apart? How is that going to help fight conterfeiting? I don't know many bank notes that come in handy US letter or A4 size for counterfeiting convenience.
You say your department has never had to look up a serial number for the authorities, yet strangely according to TFA, the authorities seem to do this all the time with other makers?
Only a tiny number of people in your department know how to do this, it's all so secret that other printer manufacturers cited in TFA wouldn't even comment and you can't tell us how to find the things, yet you're prepared to identify your employer, thus practically waving a flag about who you are and the fact that you're willing to disclose this sort of information?
There's no obligation to register where you buy your printer, nor to notify anyone of selling it on, so there's nothing to connect to the serial number unless someone bothers transferring warranty information (even after the usually pretty naff warranty has expired).
And here's the kicker: governments all over the world use these things. If there were security marks being printed on their documents, they would know about it, not least because they all do it routinely with confidential documents themselves. How am I supposed to believe that government departments are allowed to use these things when anything they print could be traced back to exactly where it comes from by someone who isn't cleared by that government's security people, and works in another country?
Sorry, but this just doesn't ring true. There is absolutely no factual information in either TFA or all your posts to this thread that's good enough to reproduce this effect reliably, and what's more I'm looking at full-page print-outs from two colour printers, following the directions given in TFA, and unable to see anything even remotely resembling what's described.
I'm happy to change my view on this if more information is provided, but I'm very sceptical about this whole story right now.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
why yellow is the most often replaced color in inkjets.
good thing ink is cheap otherwise people would be up in arms about it.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
So yellow toner/ink should run out faster than you'd think?
...are old news... and are a government requiremnt (in several countries) for all hi-res color laser engines. I suppose the government of the US told the manufacturers that a engine will not pass the FCC test if it can't be identified and located.
I can just see someone down at the local computer store now, with a stack of 400 pages containing a printout of all of these printers 'nope, not this one, nope, on the list too...hey, they're *all* here! Drat!'...
Has anyone seen this on consumer-market inkjets yet?
It's like this.
Anonymity is a tool.
It's a tool that can cause harm, and it's a tool that can produce benefit.
If you're in law enforcement, you tend to see more of the down sides, so you're going to try to eliminate anonymity. Even better, you're going to try to get people to have the *illusion* of anonymity when they really aren't anonymous.
If this was really to eliminate counterfeiting, each printer could just carry a logo on the side saying "all documents produced by this printer contain a unique and identifying signature". Stick that on all the printers on the market, mandate that printers have to have said signature, and you're golden.
There's a good reason that this is secret -- it's because the FBI has a good deal of benefit involved in giving you the illusion of anonymity when you don't actually have anonymity.
Frankly, I don't like that. I want to know where I stand. If everyone decides that we must live in an Orwellian society, and I am outvoted on all sides, then by God, I want to know that every device surrounding me is monitoring what I do. I *don't* want to have a random subset of devices *secretly* monitoring me. That makes me unhappy.
And the FBI has engaged in wonderful abuses of their powers before...gathering information to blackmail Martin Luther King, for instance. We *know* that given enough slack, they will abuse their powers -- this has been demonstrated. The question is just how many powers they can be allowed before they start abusing them.
Secretly embedding signatures in things is not the sort of thing that I see as necessary or useful to any society other than a police state, where the only "trusted" people are the police.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
I wrote the parent post and after reading two reasoned responses and some guy who can't seem to accurately quote Benjamin Franklin, I've changed my position and although I don't think this is the biggest issue on the block, it isn't something I support. So mod my original post down.
To the guy who can't quote Benjamin Franklin, a word of advice.
"A penny saved in a 401k will catch the early bird's worm" - Benjamin Franklin
Assume I had the common sense to only use the printer for counterfeiting. What exactly do they do now? Get a warrant for every house within 50 miles of said Office Max, and check the serial number on all the printers?
Or maybe, *just maybe*, this isn't about counterfeiting at all. Maybe Bush was just really peeved about that guy that forged those (extremely poor quality) documents that said that he was a slacker in the military.
Nah, what am I saying? The FBI is out to help us. They wouldn't abuse their powers. That's tin foil hat talk.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Funny how all this stuff thats supposed to protect us from the bad guys only works on the average user. This mechanisms can be quickly defeated by anyone how really wants to (both the tracking and anti-counterfeit parts) so who are they really targeting?
... thousands of geeks lined up to buy every shred of yellow paper :-)
Seriously, it would be interesting to check if using different paper colors made it more difficult to discern the numbers.
It's not like the color laser in my office can manage to print correctly anyway, so I'm not concerned at all that it can manage to print microscopic dots in the right places with the right colors and be used to trace back writings of any sort. And of course it wouldn't have a hope in the world of counterfeiting with the color screwups it has now. Not to mention it's on its fourth service call in recent weeks for not being able to print correct colors anyway. Still, it would be interesting to know if it's ever been used in a criminal case (or a civil lawsuit) and I've never seen anything suggesting that it has been.
1972, actually. Last time I checked, Greenpeace was non-violent and always has been.
Yeah, you're right. Raming one boat into another isn't violent, even when said boat is competing in the America's cup race. Breaking and entering into the control room at a Nuclear plant isn't either. Paying millions to the ELF (definately not a non-violent organization) is OK. So is trespass, destruction of property, forcibly boarding a cargo ship in flordia, etc.
I could go on... really I could
BBH
I thought I read somewhere that DVD burners do this same trick - every burned DVD includes the unique ID of the drive that created it; this feature too, is part of the firmware and cannot be bypassed.
Boat boarding and "ramming" are not made up. You didn't watch the America's cup" race a while back when they rammed a competing french boat? How about the boarding of the cargo vessel in Flordia?
BBH
for light yellow paper..
n/t
Let's see:
* Bush Administration takes a page from Hitler's rise to power, uses terrorist act against goverment building to proclaim immediate need for reduction in civil rights, increase of police powers.
* Bush Administration takes a page from Stalinist USSR, demanding that document production be government-trackable (actually, Stalin didn't do it *secretly*, so he's actually still on the moral high ground on this one).
Meanwhile, more people will die in the United States each week, *every week* from tobacco than died in all of 9/11, and more people in the US will die from car accidents *every two months* than from 9/11. Hell, something like four times the number of people killed in 9/11 are killed every year in the US by the *common flu*.
However, we can afford to invade entire nations (including one that wasn't actually relevant to, y'know, 9/11) to stop *those terrorists*, but we can't put that funding to, y'know, save lives in car crashes. And despite all that money we spent, the reason 9/11 can't happen again has nothing to do with our expensive purchases, but with the fact that nobody's going to be able to stand up in a plane any more and say "Okay, everyone just stay in your seats!" without being mobbed. Kinda sad, that. Almost makes one think that one's government doesn't have one's best interests at heart.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Imagine being the poor bastard that had the misfortune to have registered his printer for warranty coverage but threw it out or sold it to someone who 'misused' it later on.
What now, we need to put all our electronic devices through a chipper/shredder too?
Sure maybe you wouldn't be charged per se, but I don't find much difference from being 'arrested' and serving a day in jail and being questioned or harrassed (more accurately) for an equivalent amount of time.
If you don't think investigators are brutally relentless...good for you to be so blissfully ignorant and may you never find out the truth. Your life can be trashed without any charges, merely because you were a suspect.
Just another reason why the EFF is right on this one.
So, instead of costly and complicated yellow-dot checking, all the Men In Black need to do to find you is to check out the only guy in a 200 mile radius to use a 1983 dot-matrix printer... brilliant.
If the gov't really had an evil purpose for this wouldn't they just intercept all the mail to EFF and get records from all of us?
;)
;)
Oh, and where is the privacy policy for these test sheets with my printer code on em and the ID code from my mailing machine i am sending to EFF
If these dots are only used for currency forgeries and current printers dont print currency anyway then what are they used for. goto If...
hehe, just a few random thoughts
Just have printers/copiers not print currency in realistic sizes and be done with it. Could even have an override that prints a visible id.
The comments would have been a lot less inane if everyone realized it refers to COLOR prints. To the ones that said fax: Anyone with access to 2 color faxes is probably easier to find than a specific printer id
BTW, it appears our HP 4550 doesn't add these dots to black and white images only actual color prints. (it doesn't even cycle to the color cartidges if only b&w)
You pro-Greenpeace people are seriously deluded. "Non-violent direct action"? What an oxymoron! And not even true, unless you consider ramming whaling boats, vandalizing property when people are around, and making deafening sounds to disrupt stock exchanges are all non-violent. Could this violence be *justified*? Maybe, but don't think it's "not violence" just because you happen to like the violence.
And even if all they did was destroy property, that would be just as bad as violence. When you kill someone, you might object, you take their LIFE! True, you take a *part* of it - the part that would happen in the future. However, when you destroy the product of someone's labor (their property), you're also destroying a part of their life - the fraction used to produce it. Do you really want to hinge your moral defense of Greenpeace on the difference between destroying someone's past and destroying someone's future? Okay, whatever, just keep in mind that in doing so you would "justify" the actions of scam artists who target the elderly - after all, they're not violent, are they? But who cares about the elderly anyway, right? They don't labor. They can't go on strike, so why should you socialists care about them?
I routinely conduct asset audits on printers as part of my job, even with access to the physical device, the corporate purchase records and the vendor sales records we have dificulty uniquely identifying when most devices were sold and to whom.
As stated elsewhere on this thread, this techology will be used like DNA is currently used - to confirm/deny the validity of a suspect, not to generate a suspect list in the first place.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
The thought that immediately comes to mind is that the USSR used to catalog the typefaces of every typewriter sold so that they could trace any document back to the original author.
Of course, I suspect that any sufficiently advanced forensic analysis of a document could probably tie it to a printer. However, the fact that these are documented is what bothers me. I.e. the FBI need only ask Xerox which printer produced a specific document and they can tell them.
The USSR used this sort of scheme to censor writers and ensure that if someone spoke out they could be easily traced. What is to prevent any government from making the same requirements of any company?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Have you seen what color ink is going for lately? Be lucky to break even if you printed anything smaller than 20s.
Yahoo! Pipes are awesome. How awesome? http://pipes.yahoo.com/jesdynf/slashdot
I mistakenly selected goatse.cx when printing a document and it thankfully warned me before I caused a loss-of-vision incident at the office. They need to keep a list of these too!
Epson is a japanese word meaning "Paper Jam".
alas for the government, or whoever might wish to apply such limitations, thanks to the lunatic state of the printer market, printers (with catridges) are cheaper than full cartridges..
Buy, print, incinerate.. kind of hard to pin that down.
Of course, one would presume that printers capable of rendering passports/cash/etc would be expensive, but then again, so are passports/cash/etc.. Given the profit involved, destroying a high-end printer once a month is not that big a setback..
Agreed.
I am surprised that no one has pointed out that this is a two-way street. If each printer has a unique dot pattern on its pages then each person can make authentic, original documents. I can't counterfeit money, but you can't counterfeit me either, unless you steal my printer.
I don't know squat about inkjet printers but I work on laser printers every day. On any somewhat modern laser printer (I speak mostly of HP and Lexmark) you can enter a service mode and change the serial number. Or you can swap out the formatter board with another printer. Now if this encoding is achieved by the engine and not the logic then you change the engine board. I really don't think it's done with the laser assy. but even if it is...why not change that part out too?
I'm quite surprised noone else (that I've seen) has brought this up. There are many different ways to get around it, but the gov't is, and rightly so, counting on pure idiots to counterfeit money.
for writing death letters, with one's own blood, can also be traced by using DNA tests, so what's the news?
ALF, not ELF. Animals, not Elves ;)
I haven't heard of links / donations between Greenpeace and ALF before - any sources?
As for ramming boats into each other, from what I remember Greenpeace tends to be in a rubber dingy against a tanker / whaler / toxic waste dumper, which seems about as violent as tickling a tank with a feather. I'd agree they're sometimes over the top, but "violent" is a stretch.
The fringe of the animal movement, though, definitely has terrorists. http://www.shac.net/ seem keen to firebomb people to save rats, among other things.
no taxation without representation!
Not a hunter myself, although I don't object to hunting. Seeing as there are no wolves or bears in Europe anymore (with few exceptions), and deer aren't stupid enough to all killed on the road in sufficient numbers, we have to shoot some deer. And venison can be nice.
But pray do explain your reasoning: Greenpeace - unarguably non-violently in this case, unless you construe mere presence in open ocean as violence - protest against nuclear tests. That gives the French secret servie the right to a) blow up their ship b) kill people c) do this in NZ territory?
no taxation without representation!
Ramming a french boat seems like very peaceful retaliation, considering that the french blew up their flagship in harbour, killing a crewman.
Methinks a bit of perspective is called for.
As for the "boarding" incident, I seem to recall that they clambered on board the ship - it's not like they took over control of the ship at gunpoint. Illegal? Probably. Stupid? Probably. Tresspassing? Yup. Violent? err, no. Sorry.
no taxation without representation!
If gunmakers deliberately screwed around with the guns to make them work for interests other than the user, you're damned right the NRA (and plenty of others) would be up-in-arms (figuratively?).
Printers supported by BSD??
why not buy several such printers, print empty pages on each of them in a random order and sell such paper to other paranoid people? Or, permute inks/toners in the printer and use the same color permutation at the software layer?
This is totally offtopic, but I can't sit and be quiet.
Do you consider it terrorism to be responsible for the deaths of thousands of people? Because Greenpeace convinced the leader of Zimbabwe that genetically modified foods cause horrible diseases in their efforts to make all genetically modified food labeled.
Yeah, they're conservative sources, it's all I could find at short notice.
I don't care either way on the issue, and they might have a point about labeling GM foods - I haven't done the research. But it doesn't mean dick to starving Africans if the food is genetically modified or not. And that can certainly be considered terrorism.
Not as much as PETA, of course...
The next time I send a threatening letter to some government official, I'll be sure to use the printer I bought at CompUSA, which I paid for with a check bearing my name, address and phone number.
And also the printer paper I use will be purchased at Staples, and I'll be sure to request their spam by leaving my name, address and phone number attached to the order.
And, all my ink cartridges used will be purchased online from PrintPal.com, using my ATM/Visa card.
Oh, and I'll make sure my photo gets taken by the security cameras at the exact instant I buy the stuff.
When are cops going to realize that they are only capable of catching morons? Because they are morons.
Of course, they caught me after robbing a bank - but that was because I was a moron at the time...:-) To paraphrase the Hitler Youth member in "Our Man Flint": "I'm a much smarter person NOW!"
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I applaud the EFF for looking into this, but ... they say:
Yet there are no laws to stop the Secret Service -- or for that matter, any other governmental agency or private company -- from using printer codes to secretly trace the origin of non-currency documents.
Why should there be such laws? You're printing an ID in all your documents. If you give such a document out, you are publicizing your printer ID. Using this to find you just makes sense. What if the printer printed your name, instead of an ID code? Would you have a problem with someone tracing you then? What's the difference?
Now, what is a problem is that printer manufacturers are doing this hard-to-detect printing without telling anyone.
So let's shine the light of openness on this practice, and let the market decide. When I buy my next printer, I hope there is a list of all models that print ID codes. There are a number of issues to consider when buying a printer; make this one of them. I'll try to avoid those on the list. Perhaps other people will, too. Market pressure might solve this problem very quickly.
All my laser printers are Postscript printers, not PDF printers. I am not talking about the so called "printer drivers" on PC's. I have the firmware of the printers in mind. How about yours? 99% Postscript? So why do the EFF experts distribute PDF files instead of Postscript files? Is the conversion from something to PDF to Postscript helpful? Or do the experts think that we all need PDF files just because the fine software called Microsoft Windows still cannot send a Postscript file directly to a Postscript printer, after a decade+? Strange things happen in the IT world.
Buy a Dell printer. They always break. You won't print shit. So nothing to track...
Why not run the same piece of paper through several printers, then print the document on another printer? That way all of the tiny yellow dots from the different printers will overlap?
Each piece of Anoto paper is printed with a pattern that is a unique region of Anoto Pattern Space which is about the size of Europe and Asia together, and there's a lot of useful things you can do with that.
Now I'd be very interested to hear about an open source project that would add this kind of functionality and work with lots of printers and scanners so long as they are high enough quality. Kind of like steganography in the real world. Of course this might interfere with what the EFF's worried about too but not guaranteed. And you would want to have a server that keeps track of who used what paper anyway for it to be useful for business anyway. Gee what other things can be microprinted besides paper?
"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security." - Benjamin Franklin
There! Feel better now?
Do you think your faux witticism falls in the 60% total rubbish category, the 39% mostly rubbish category or the 1% chest puffing category?
IDEAS:
1) Suck the yellow ink out of the cartridge and replace it with clear.
2) Every doc gets a yellow background.
3) Remove the color cartridge, Print everything using the black cartridge, refill the black cartridge with cyan, then blue, then yellow, then magenta, printing your layers one at a time.
I usually don't post anonymously.
Not to thwart the CYA mentality in the Whitehouse, I heard that all printed paged automatically have the word "CLASSIFIED" printed on them. That saves them from having to dig up their rubber stamps each time they're about to do something stupid^W in the interest of national security.
is not enough.
You have to assume that one or more of those cash register, ceiling-mounted ball cameras is tied to the barcode scanner. Scan a specific class/capability printer and one or more balls snap and video your mug, your height, and maybe more (maybe one day they'll do IR/thermal and even microwave to get your bone structure in case you dress up as a woman in pumps and a wig).
Now, so much for buying certain merchandise/goods with cash. They could even motion-track you all the way to the car or bus you depart in.
Also, when you sign even a fake name at the register, your palm's side might be on the paper, or your prints on the pen, or your skin oil on one or both. Not that they are taking this from these transactions, but years ago I wondered just how many Capital Hill "restaurants" were really just spy fronts used to micro-record and oil/fingerprint sample all the diplomats, spies, politicians, and reporters dining. Can you IMAGINE the huge database there must be.
It brings to mind "Get Smart", but I don't recall any Control or Kaos (sp?) dining halls set up in DC. I imagine if the scriptwriters DID think of it, someone on the inside or outside probably warned them not to mention in, or to remove it from/sanitize the script. Heck, even in DS9 and B5 and other shows, we almost never, if at all, see body oils, DNA, prints, hair, etc being taken. For example, serve a glass, take the glass to the kitchen, then mail it off to Mother Russia, or some quick-analysis & recording lab. This way even if a "spy" or operative alters his/her physical characteristics, it's highly unlikely the saliva, sweat, or oils will be changed.
Just an over-active imagination here...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Assuming you use normal paper, couldn't you like destroy the set of dots by using a little bit of sandpaper or a bit of acid?
Also, if you print reprint a few unnoticable stuff on the page by flipping the page over and reprinting, wouldn't you effectively destroy the sequence?
Speaking of evil genius, how about putting chemically tagged product in the ink cartridge refills at your local grocery store? You could tag day of the week, month and year, plus customer's VISA number, with 50 additives or maybe even less. If this qualifies as a 3M suggestion box idea, I want my 25 large. They stiffed me on the reflective tape on shoe heels idea I had back in 1986.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
No, ELF, the Earth Liberation Front, a group formed in conscious imitation of ALF--they're the ones who firebomb condo developments and such.
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
Yeah, they're conservative sources, it's all I could find at short notice.
No shit? Try posting some BBC or CNN sources instead of political rants from the indefensible.
You can google for "the sky is green" and get a hit but it doesn't make it so.
ZIMBABWEAN government of President Robert Mugabe which is said to be struggling to provide food to almost half of its over 12 million population
Riiight. You may want to learn a little about Mugabe and the "Army Veterans". More than 3,000 white Zimbabwean farmers have been forced off their land in recent years as Mugabe tries to "Africanise" agriculture.
As laudable and all as government efforts to protect their currency are, maybe its about time someone mentioned "digital cameras" to them. As for the exact shade of green being printed, do you think the average shop clerk is qualified to notice the note in his hand isn't the exact hex-reference green as government issue? Never mind the paperless office, I'd say the paperless economy isn't far away. Still, I bet that will make the fundies and their "sign of the beast" contingent happy.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Has been doing this for years. If you think your JPEGs do not contain your name and serial number - think again. If they wanted they could sue any website using Pirated software.
The authors say it would be very difficult to detect the presence of the marks if they are encrypted. The authors also assume that it is the serial number of the printers. What if this is not the case? The most simply way to avoid anybody find out about the marks is to write a secret serial number unencrypted to the paper. Nobody would be able to find out, because the mapping of secret serial number to public serial number would be kept secret. Add to this some randomness by printing additional but meaningless data as well, and it will make it necessary to print a very large number of pages until you find the pattern repeating. And of course, change the method details every couple of years.
Perhaps it's time to unfold my tinfoil hat and use it to cover my printouts instead.
Since I once jammed the printer with tinfoil I switched to yellow letters on yellow background when blackmailing my boss.
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Watch this Heartland Institute video
thanks, that post was just the funniest thing I've read in years.
saying the difference between petty theft and murder is "the difference between destroying someone's past and destroying someone's future" --- that's just flat-out brilliant.
use a b&w printer.
By the way, I wish you could all see the captcha for this post. It reads "paranoia" (honestly). I think someone is trying to mess with my mind.
Why should WM care about training tens of thousands (I guess) of workers in counterfeit detection, when the value thereby gained (putative loss prevention) would be far outweighed by the cost of education? Further, what about the time spent by each clerk at every transaction for the LARGEST RETAILER IN THE WORLD? Sure, at first you're talking about mere seconds, but at the scale we're talking, it's a huge amount. And if you figure that A) other institutions will cover you through fraud detection, and B) anybody truly successful at counterfeiting (the only real threat, after all), probably won't shop at WM very long :-)
Besides which, courtesy to the customer weighed against the possibility of a small profit (as when the cashier at a gas station lets you replace your spilled SugarBombSodaGallon for free), has always gone a long way in my book. You assume the customer is decent, and they remember it.
I was raised poor, and remember where I was treated well. I remember the first barber who called me "Sir". I was seven at the time, and thereafter I went to his shop until he *died*. SO you get the odd counterfeit $20. Truly small change, even when multiplied against the scale of WM's activity, if you consider the damage that two or three incidents made public (which does NOT scale) could do to a company that size.
And I have another airport code (IATA, not ICAO): DOS = Dios Field, Bougainville Island, Papua New Guinea
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
Don't buy xerox anymore! Or even better: Why print at all? This would even be a good thing to nature and lower risk of cancer. (you know, laser printers emit cancer producing dust)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I always print my documents will a full-covering yellow background...
I dunno about funniest ever, but it certainly made me laugh. :-)
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Mugabe is a monster.
But lots of people have food taboos. So WTF couldn't the US government just send money and let the starving Zimbawean's buy whatever food they damn well do like? Or do you think Africans have no rights just because they're poor?
Wonder if anyone still makes type writers, and if not, how much they are on eBay ...
Can't I just remove the color cartridge and avoid detection altogether? Or will someone cry it's a DMCA violation?
I print most of my documents in black & white draft mode anyway. The only stuff I print in color are bootleg CD covers. (I keed! I keed!)
You never expect irony, do you?
Want to be a professional wrestler? Visit www.iyfwrestling.com
@iyfwrestling
Well... if it is me or them, I know what option to pick.
Not if I don't go around telling everyone else not to buy their product.
You won't give an advice to your friends? You won't share what you know?
The next day, we'll be sitting in a federal penitentiary for having crazy ideas about "anonymity" and "not submitting to strip searches on the way to work.'
Or not, with a good combination of knowledge and luck. Or the Adversary kills itself by jailing enough smart people to cripple its own R&D and manufacturing. You also should always have a plan B, eg. using the jail time to learn some higher math, and practice playing chess.
Fortunately, I've turned this all into a game "How quickly can we Plunge into a New Dark Age."
We can always try to fight and slow things down.
This technology doesn't prevent counterfeiting; it makes it easier to track who made a particular document.
Precisely. You can still counterfeit, say, a $20 bill on one of these high-end printers - but along with the counterfeited bill you get a bunch of dots that comprise a data pattern unique to the printer you printed them on. If they're picked up and traced back to you, you're busted.
Every document printed is watermarked, with no notice to the user. The possibilities of abuse are huge.
Very true. For example, I do flyering work for RantMedia in my area. Right now, I use a Lexmark Z700-series inkjet printer, as I don't really need high image quality (most of the flyers I make are pretty much text-only, with the occasional RantMedia logo).
However, if I were to upgrade to a high-quality color laser printer and the Feds snagged some of my flyers for a "terrorism" investigation, I'd be royally f00ked, even if I made photocopies of the high-quality originals.
At least knowing this exists if one does need anonymity one can avoid this technology.
Again, very true. After all, that's one reason why the Miranda Rights were established - so that citizens wouldn't be forced or tricked into incriminating themselves without warning. They ought to warn people that "this printer model encodes an identifying data pattern on all documents printed".
Patrolling ftw
Digimarc patent # 6,771,796
From TFP:
Line art on a banknote or other security document is slightly changed to effect the encoding of plural-bit digital data (i.e. the banknote is digitally watermarked). When such a banknote is thereafter scanned, the resulting image data can be recognized as corresponding to a banknote by detection of the encoded data. (Alternatively, the image data can be recognized as corresponding to a banknote by machine detection of other forms of watermarking, or by reference to visible structures characteristic of banknotes.) In response to detection of a banknote, the detecting apparatus (e.g., a scanner, photocopier, or printer) can intervene by inserting forensic tracer data (e.g. steganographically encoded binary data) in the image data. The tracer data can memorialize the serial number of the machine that processed the banknote data and/or the date and time such processing occurred. To address privacy concerns, such tracer data is not normally inserted, but is so inserted only when the image data being processed is recognized as corresponding to a banknote. Any printed output from such image data will include the tracer data, permitting identification of equipment used in its reproduction.
If it's so stupid, refute it. You didn't, and you won't, because you can't. You can't refute the fundamental similarity I've shown between violence and property damage. So go ahead, live in your own little world where it's okay to scam the non-union, non-working elderly since they don't meet your standards for a "true worker".
You're right, it is a slippery slope. We've been sliding down this slope long before most of us were even born. It's a little late to do anything about it since our velocity on this metaphorical slope is 100mph and it's so slippery there aren't any brakes that would do anything.
With cameras everywhere, vending machines handing out tickets at traffic lights, airports, "discount cards" and credit cards, printers with tracking devices is really minor compared to everything else.
We lost this country because most of us simply do not care. We are like stupid cows, next election, we won't consider this at all. Someone will tell us about morals or fabricate an emotional issue.
We'll fall for it, we always do.
Yes...
NOW you understand what it means to be an evil printer.
Down, boy.
:-D
The scenario we're discussing is not that sort of scenario.
You won't give an advice to your friends? You won't share what you know?
Advising someone not to purchase something, and boycotting something, are two different things. I don't recommend sleeping pills for long study sessions either.
Or not, with a good combination of knowledge and luck. Or the Adversary kills itself by jailing enough smart people to cripple its own R&D and manufacturing. You also should always have a plan B, eg. using the jail time to learn some higher math, and practice playing chess.
They could plunge us into a dark age and continue operating with no problems.
We can always try to fight and slow things down.
Who says I'm not
Hey, long time no see. Email or something :)