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Cryptography To Frustrate Printer-Ink Piracy
Zack Melich writes with news of a new front about to open in the war printer manufacturers wage with cartridge counterfeiters, refillers, and hardware hackers. A San Francisco company, Cryptography Research Inc., is designing a crypto chip to marry cartridges to printers. There's no word so far that any printer manufacturer has committed to using it. Quoting: "The company's chips use cryptography designed to make it harder for printers to use off-brand and counterfeit cartridges. CRI plans to create a secure chip that will allow only certain ink cartridges to communicate with certain printers. CRI also said that the chip will be designed that so large portions of it will have no decipherable structure, a feature that would thwart someone attempting to reverse-engineer the chip by examining it under a microscope to determine how it works. 'You can see 95 percent of the [chip's] grid and you still don't know how it works,' said Kit Rodgers, CRI's vice president of business development. Its chip generates a separate, random code for each ink cartridge, thus requiring a would-be hacker to break every successive cartridge's code to make use of the cartridge."
Vintage champaign? stop dreaming
Currently, the ink of some printers is going above 10% of the price of gold per gram.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
* AFAIK, making wasteful products is not illegal.
o ntrol/20041026_Ruling.pdf
* The antitrust argument might have some merit, but I'm not sure if it is good enough to take to court.
* Finally, I've found a case about DMCA and printer cartridges that has already be decided in court:
http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/Lexmark_v_Static_C
Here, Lexmark failed with a lawsuit against a company that reverse engineered its cartridges.
C - the footgun of programming languages
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070628-cryp tography-company-develops-chip-to-lock-out-third-p arty-ink-jet-cartridges.html
m ay2006/tc20060526_680075.htm - ray-content-protection-agency-certifies-bd.html
Cryptography Research Inc are also working on blu-ray BD+, the security on new blu-ray discs that will have features like:
1: expiring discs. so the media you own will need continued licence renewals to enable you to use it.
2: the ability for studios to remote disable drives permanently if yours or a line is found to be hacked/venerable.
3. usage reports to the studios of your hardware, including your location and serial number used in the fight against piracy.
http://yahoo.businessweek.com/technology/content/
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070620-blu
The Truth Is Out There:
Printer Companies are getting worse at this. My Canon Laser Printer locked up because the 'toner had exceeded it's lifetime'. Note the weasel words. Quite different from being out of toner! I had been using Toner Saver mode so expected a higher page couut, but nope, after I printed the predetermined number of pages it went into lockdown and refused to print anything more. The cartridge still has toner in it, a fair bit by the sounds of it, but a smartchip detects it being reinserted. Buy a new one. Others report on the web that Canon cartridges typically have 10-20% toner in them when they "reach their lifetime."
The message claims that continuing to use the printer would damage it. Rubbish. Remember laser printers and photo copies before the DMCA allowed this smart chip chikanery? They'd get faint, and you'd replace the toner, and all would be ok.
Will your printer do this? It's hard to tell, because reviewers don't print enough pages to find out. This isn't declared anywhere on the advertising material. It's unethical on Canon's part, and should be illegal. But as we saw with the Sony Rootkit, big companies can break the law on a whim and not get prosecuted.
Lexmark tried it
o ses_round/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/10/30/lexmark_l
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
On some of the HP Lasers we have @ the office, they have a little chip affixed to the toner cartridge. If the chip isn't there, the printer won't function. Even though the cartridge is identical to one of the lesser models, you have to have the chip or the printer will NOT function.
Our re-filler got a bunch of chips from somewhere, but none of them worked. We found that if we pulled the chip off the old toner cartridge and put it on the new one, it worked just dandy..
= Grow a brain...