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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."
Only a Sith deals in absolutes.
(I got it first!!!)
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
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."
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
Let me go ahead and print those model names out for you. Oh no! They know now!
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.
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."
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?
Turning AOL'ers into thinking beings would require one mother of a donation!
It reminds me of the old joke (or was it true?):
Some amateur counterfeiter was driving around the Appalachians to find some hillbillies to swindle. He found a couple of dumb-looking guys sitting on their front porch, stopped the car and said, waving a freshly printed note: "any of you guys have change for a $18 bill?". One of the guys reach in his pocket and says: "sure, d'ya want 2 nines or 3 sixes?"
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
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
If it's behind the laser window, you're screwed. Optics are touchy to a level that can only be described as premenstrual.
I always set the evil bit on my TCP/IP stack outgoing, just to check for RFC compliance: ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc3514.txt
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
It's prints "Page 1" at the bottom, dumb ass.
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!'
A time for Yes Minister quotage i think:
Sir Humphrey: "Bernard, the Official Secrets Act was not put in place to protect the secrets, it's there to protect the officials."
And
Sir Humphrey: "In the spirit of "Open Government", one should always make public anything that can easily be discovered by some other way."
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"
Guy With Scream Mask: "Um... How about I pay in cash. Got change for a Canadian thousand dollar bill?"
Yeah, Epsons can be cheap, but that's not nearly going to cover ink.
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
Posting anonymously NOW, isn't it still kind of obvious who I am?
"Do NSA printers exhibit the same behaviour?"
I dunno about NSA printers, but I hear that White House printers add a footer:
"Psst: Valerie Plame, er, that is, Ambassador Wilson's wife is a CIA agent -- but you didn't hear it from us!
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Hmmm, you'll probably find one of your workmates had an affinity for printing documents with large areas of skin tone ;)
Oh! Oh! Oh!
... instead!!!
Wait!
Print EF FE FF EF FE FF
Thank you for telling us...
"Honey? Im going to Walmart, you want anything?"
No sig for the moment.
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!
walmart employees probably have never seen large, exotic bills like the $30 in their paychecks.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
You're saying that instead of using the yellow toner from the yellow toner cartridge, they're using color-changing fairy dust pulled from thin air?
Somehow, I doubt that.
My other car is first.
Your theory doesn't work.
I checked out the dots on my work printer with a magnifying glass and sure enough, they were there.
I then found the serial number written on the side of the machine and wrote over the label with a new serial number (using your example of 32767).
Unfortunately, printing out more pages still produces the same dots.
Make electronics your hobby and buy a solder gun. And be really careless...
What if you run out of yellow ink?
Warning citizen, your Lexmark printer will soon become unpatriotic - please replace the *yellow* cartridge before further printing.