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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."
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.
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)
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
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?
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.
I read Usenet for the articles.
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.
The dots' minuscule size, covering less than one-thousandth of the page, along with their color combination of yellow on white, makes them invisible to the naked eye, Crean says. One way to determine if your color laser is applying this tracking process is to shine a blue LED light--say, from a keychain laser flashlight--on your page and use a magnifier.
I am billdar, and I approve this message.
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?
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
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It's prints "Page 1" at the bottom, dumb ass.
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.
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?
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.
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"
(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.)
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
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
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?
well, it works and it doesn't. The copier you use will not notice the dots (too small), but it will tag it's own set of dots on there (and yes i know. I'm a colour tech for a very large copier company)
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