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FOIA Request Shows Which Printer Companies Cooperated With US Government
New submitter Dave_Minsky writes "The U.S. Secret Service responded to a FOIA request on Monday that reveals the names of the printer companies that cooperate with the government to identify and track potential counterfeiters. The Electronic Frontier Foundation revealed in 2005 that the U.S. Secret Service was in cahoots with selected laser printer companies to identify and track printer paper using tiny microscopic dots encoded into the paper. The tiny, yellow dots — less than a millimeter each — are printed in a pattern over each page and are only viewable with a blue light, a magnifying glass or a microscope. The pattern of dots is encodes identifiable information including printer model, and time and location where the document was printed." Easy enough to avoid government dots; just don't buy printers from Canon, Brother, Casio, HP, Konica, Minolta, Mita, Ricoh, Sharp, or Xerox.
Firstly, what's the big deal with the document having these microdots? They identify the machine by serial number, and the time (assuming the machine's clock is set correctly - in my experience, many aren't). The "location" isn't really identified since these devices have no way of knowing their location, so what's being described here isn't actually possible.
If you're going to be printing stuff you don't want identified, don't use one of these machines, sure. But for day to day normal printing, it's not exactly going to affect you.
I'm aware this argument sounds a lot like "if you've got nothing to hide, you don't need security" or whatever, but really it's not. If you DO want to hide that the job was printed on your device, change the serial number (on most devices, this just requires knowing how to get to the "Service Mode" of the machine - which, while no company will tell you how, is trivially easy to find on Google).
It's not like we actively keep it a secret that our machines do this.
And just as a minor nitpick: "Konica" and "Minolta" haven't been two separate companies in a long time. (Full disclosure: I work for Konica Minolta)
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Great to know my printer maker isn't on the list.
I've worked rather extensively with a Xerox DocuColor 252 over the last four years. Those yellow dots are anything but microscopic. I could plainly see the dots on most printouts under standard office-style fluorescent lighting. They always bugged the crap out of me.
* chirp * chirp *
Here's a partial list:
lexmark
Kodak
TVS Electronics
WeP
PENTAX
Planon
prolink
Olivetti
Epson
Lenovo
OKI
Panasonic
Dell
Samsung
Kyocera
Someone already made the bad printing quality joke so I won't bore you with it again.
There's a US law that forbids melting down pennies and nickels, or exporting them in large quantities.
(The penny was changed to copper-plated zinc in mid-1982; 95% copper pennies from before then are also worth above their face value in metal.)
USC Title 31 Section 5111 subsection D (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/31/5111) gives the Secretary of the Treasury the option, http://www.usmint.gov/pressroom/?action=press_release&ID=724 is about that option being used.
PS
Many silver coins are just worth their metal value, and those are often melted down.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
It's not entirely worthless - it makes good kindling, and bad toilet paper. (or very bad kindling if you use it as toilet paper first)
You have to let it dry first, obviously.
Case in point: many rural populations use dried animal dung as fuel
.. it was the right house
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aiyana_Stanley_Jones
not saying there weren't multiple fuckups on the parts of law enforcement,
(there most assuredly were from what I read)
but there is a small sliver of 'reap what ya sow' in all that went on there, father included.......
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
That "dirt cheap" food is much shittier than it was 20+ years ago. On top of that, portion sizes have shrunk: take a look at various canned foods, and compare them with cans from 20 years ago; the volumes have shrunk slightly to offset the inflation.
Clothing is only cheaper because they've moved all the production to southeast Asia, and of course tech products are cheaper for two reasons: 1) they're all made in China now, and 2) newer technological processes are cheaper and more efficient than the old ones. Also 3) volumes are likely higher for many tech items, and greater volumes means greater economies of scale; not as many people had PCs or laptop 20 years ago.
With furniture, you have to be careful because there's a lot of shitty cardboard furniture out there (no shit, it's just paper fibers pressed together with a fake wood-grain laminate glued on top); for a valid comparison, you need to look at the prices of solid wood high-quality furniture (something like Thomasville), from both then and now. Even that's a little suspect because on a lot of the factory furniture, they're using more veneers on even the hardwood furniture: instead of solid cherry, they make it out of a cheap hardwood like birch and use cherry veneers. Still far better than cardboard shit, but it's not the same as non-veneered furniture as veneers can come off, plus if you ever want to refinish the piece, there's only so much you can do with a veneer, whereas with solid wood you can sand through even deep scratches and refinish without damaging it.
Bottom line: be very careful in how you make comparisons in the prices of items.