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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."
That's absurd enough when applied to simple copyright infringement, but there's absolutely nothing illegal about after market ink. In fact, these sort of shenanigans should be illegal themselves. Let the printer manufacturers compete fairly.
Decided to buy a different printer.
It is Defective by Design. Don't buy this stuff
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:
He hit the damned nail on the head, you idiot anonymous mod. How is this NOT "digital rights management"?
This firm has designed hardware/firmware that would let printer manufacturers digitally restrict your use of their product, i.e. the printer, by preventing OEMs from making alternative cartridges and you from having choices. Isn't that rights management? If a competitor actually succeeded in creating a knockoff, you'd see a repeat of the stunt Lexmark pulled with toner cartridges: they'd sue in court under the provisions of the DMCA. In this case, this sleazebag Cryptography Research would no doubt jump in with a patent infringement suit, as well.
It's bad enough that average people are such a complete disappointment; when I see people here mod like that, even Slashdot disappoints me.