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."

Comments

Tinfoil printouts

[banglogic]

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.

Re:Tinfoil printouts

[orthogonal]

According the EFF, for Xerox( but not Canon) printers, it looks like this:

For Xerox documents, within the 0.5" by 1" rectangular space, 8 x 15 = 120 locations exist for printers to print yellow tracking dots. Consider the following pattern found on test00-template, printed on a Xerox DocuColor 12 located at FedEx Kinko's, 201 Sacramento Street, San Francisco, CA.

(The Slashdot "lameness" filter prevents me from posting the entire diagram.)

Now it seems to me that Open Source has an answer for this. Can we patch Xerox printer drivers so that they automatically print the yellow dot at all 120 locations, making each page bear a fake serial number of "FF FF FF ..."?

Or if the drivers aren't open source, can we write proxy printer drivers that add the dots and then forward to the real Xerox print driver?

Who'll take on this challenge? (Preferably a good linux coder who isn't a US citizen or resident.)

Re:Tinfoil printouts

[nick13245]

What if you run out of yellow ink?

Getting the word out

[rocketman768]

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.

I Wonder

[Nom du Keyboard]

You might be able to see the small, scattered yellow dots printed there that could be used to trace the document back to you...put the "serial number of each machine coded in little yellow dots" in every printout. The millimeter-sized dots appear about every inch on a page, nestled within the printed words and margins.

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.

Re:Do as I say, not as I do

[ObjetDart]

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.

There was an interview on NPR a few weeks ago with Michael Smith, the British journalist who uncovered the "Downing Street Memo." He said that governments already do this: when a classified document is distributed, they often introduce subtle changes in wording from one copy to the next, so that each person receives a very slightly different copy. That way, in theory if the document is leaked, they can figure out who leaked it.

For once that "Soviet Russia" thing applies

[doublem]

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.

Yes, Evil.

[Tackhead]

> Im sorry, but the word 'evil' is really being used far too much on slashdot to talk about stuff that isnt evil in anyway, shape or form. It reminds me of the RIAAs usage of the word 'steal', and both parties are using the words wrongly to provide a very specific view in other peoples minds of things that they personally do not like IMHO.

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 Romania every typewriter had to be registered with a local magistrate. Samples of letters typed on these machines had to be produced under the observation of the secret police so they could trace underground publishing activity.

- G. Davey, Christian Publishing: Before and After the Communist Collapse

In Soviet Russia [geocities.com], all photocopiers were registered with the KGB and kept in secure rooms, to which physical access was restricted.

Some samizdat works, mostly magazines, were typed on typewriter. The copies were indistinct and hard to read. I realized that the movement against violating human rights was doomed to be an eternal amusement of the few intellectuals without proper copyprinters. But where could one find a copyprinting machine in the country, where all the copiers were affixed with seals at night and placed in the special rooms where only proved KGB members could work on it. There was the only decision - to make the machine ourselves. It had to be easy to make and quite efficient.

- A. A. Bolonkin, Memoirs of Soviet Political Prisoner

The West is probably still playing catch-up.

Re:I work for a manufacturer

[Digital Vomit]

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

So...what's the point of having the microdots?

Something's wrong with those PDFs...

[CrystalFalcon]

...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...)

only color laser printers?

[E8086]

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.

Irony

[eagl]

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!

Re:I work for a manufacturer

[Anonymous Coward]

(HP)

Turn off printer.
Remove Network Card.
Turn on printer while holding (checkmark), and continue holding button.
When printer says ready (orwhatever), turn it off.
Put the network card back in.

In Soviet Russia (not a joke)

[phr1]

typewriters and copying machines all had to be registered with the government, so they could trace the origin of any printed material. There were many incidents of underground publishing called "samizdat" that got around the registration system at great risk. Mikhail Bulgakov's novel "The Master and Margherita" was initially circulated as samizdat and Bulgakov later won the Nobel Prize in Literature. That could only happen because it was very hard to tell where any particular copy came from.

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?

Scary stuff

[einhverfr]

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?

Re:Conspiracy theory for the day

[papaskunk]

First of all, the effect is purported only to be incorporated in certain high-quality laser devices. The typical ink-jet printer and even your standard SOHO/business-class color printer/copier can't get even close to the quality of reproducing currency, not to mention the ridiculously difficult process of implementing color management. So why would they bother? We are talking about high-quality, high-speed professional output devices. Secondly, you attack the grandparent, yet ignore evidence (the Doc12) presented in the article. And third, much of what you write is simply innacurate. There's been some discussion here about rewriting the drivers. Believe me, this has nothing to do with drivers or even printer firmware. This is all happening in-RIP. What is a RIP? It's a Raster Image Processor, and it's a dedicated box that specifically translates printer files, be it PCL 5, 6, or PostScript, into the raster image that will be printed on the page. Guess what? Nobody buys a $6,000-$40,000 RIP or a $20,000 high-speed printer without getting a service contract to go with it. And what do you need when you have a service contract? A serial number, of course. Also, your statement that 1200 dpi output produces visible jaggies, is patently false. Pick up a book and look at it. The paper in that book was inked by an impression cylinder, which was inked by a plate, which was probably made from film, which was produced by an imagesetter, which received a file from a RIP that was -- wait, let's take a guess, how much? -- about 1200 dpi! 1200 dpi was specifically chosen because the human eye cannot see the corners of the dots. Every printed piece you look at was RIPped at about 1200dpi. And yes, microdots are real. Microdots, sometimes called spots, are what make up dots. The 600/300 lpi (lines per inch, not dots per inch) quality limit has everything to do with a) the ability of the RIP software to rasterize an image into line screens, and b) the reality that dot gain ('bleed', as you call it) makes printing 4-color process impossible at much higher of a line screen. But is it possible to lay down one microdot/spot, all by itself, and for it to stay just fine without interference from any other nearby dots? Of course! Even your ink jet can do this, by simply spraying out a bit of ink as the nozzle closes. Believe me, they do this at HP. Give the poster a break. Obviously, he works for a small company. Xerox, on the other hand, happens to have an exclusive contract with Kinko's, so there's about 5,000 Doc12's out there with bored college kids messing around with them on the night shift. Are you telling me you think nobody's ever even tried to counterfeit currency? Your stubbornness amazes me viewed in context with your absolute ignorance to the subject. Sincerely, Ryan Kirk