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Umm, S y you mispelled Onstar*.
:p
washingtonpost.com
Sleuths Crack Tracking Code Discovered in Color Printers
By Mike Musgrove
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 19, 2005; D01
It sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it isn't. The pages coming out of your color printer may contain hidden information that could be used to track you down if you ever cross the U.S. government.
Last year, an article in PC World magazine pointed out that printouts from many color laser printers contained yellow dots scattered across the page, viewable only with a special kind of flashlight. The article quoted a senior researcher at Xerox Corp. as saying the dots contain information useful to law-enforcement authorities, a secret digital "license tag" for tracking down criminals.
The content of the coded information was supposed to be a secret, available only to agencies looking for counterfeiters who use color printers.
Now, the secret is out.
Yesterday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco consumer privacy group, said it had cracked the code used in a widely used line of Xerox printers, an invisible bar code of sorts that contains the serial number of the printer as well as the date and time a do ent was printed.
With the Xerox printers, the information appears as a pattern of yellow dots, each only a millimeter wide and visible only with a magnifying glass and a blue light.
The EFF said it has identified similar coding on pages printed from nearly every major printer manufacturer, including Hewlett-Packard Co., though its team has so far cracked the codes for only one type of Xerox printer.
The U.S. Secret Service acknowledged yesterday that the markings, which are not visible to the human eye, are there, but it played down the use for invading privacy.
"It's strictly a countermeasure to prevent illegal activity specific to counterfeiting," agency spokesman Eric Zahren said. "It's to protect our currency and to protect people's hard-earned money."
It's unclear whether the yellow-dot codes have ever been used to make an arrest. And no one would say how long the codes have been in use. But Seth Schoen, the EFF technologist who led the organization's research, said he had seen the coding on do ents produced by printers that were at least 10 years old.
"It seems like someone in the government has managed to have a lot of influence in printing technology," he said.
Xerox spokesman Bill McKee confirmed the existence of the hidden codes, but he said the company was simply assisting an agency that asked for help. McKee said the program was part of a cooperation with government agencies, competing manufacturers and a "consortium of banks," but would not provide further details. HP said in a statement that it is involved in anti-counterfeiting measures and supports the cooperation between the printer industry and those who are working to reduce counterfeiting.
Schoen said that the existence of the encoded information could be a threat to people who live in repressive governments or those who have a legitimate need for privacy. It reminds him, he said, of a program the Soviet Union once had in place to record sample typewriter printouts in hopes of tracking the origins of underground, self-published literature.
"It's disturbing that something on this scale, with so many privacy implications, happened with such a tiny amount of publicity," Schoen said.
And it's not as if the information is encrypted in a highly secure fashion, Schoen said. The EFF spent months collecting samples from printers around the world and then handed them off to an intern, who came back with the results in about a week.
"We were able to break this code very rapidly," Schoen said.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
Last edited by Shelly; 10-19-2005 at 04:31 PM.
Umm, S y you mispelled Onstar*.
:p
fixed just for you
What's your stance on this S y?
So what's the deal with Onstar*?
My stance is I'm sure there's a lot more of this going on than we know about anyway.
I actually posted this for you and mookie!
Yeah I know.
I bet mookie has a seizure when he reads about this crap.
My question is: how do they come up with technology for this sort of thing? And who thought it up to begin with? I can see why they would like it, you know like making your own money. You read a lot about people who do that with computers and color printers. And I can believe it because some the lasers are really good.
naturally
you probably don't know a lot of
Yea at Brooks AFB we had a printer so advanced it was monitored by the secret service. You had to be at least a Col or above to even direct print to it (or by asking permission in advance). It had a pattern recognition for cash. The printer would go into a security lock mode if somone tried to print money.
And you don't either.
I only know about kids
and family
S y should adopt Mookie and make a sitcom about it.
my mom was never wunderkind to me
Poor, poor Mookie
But was she Wunderlich? (Don't know if anyone but S y will get my joke).
Yet another thread that has become a 'poor mookie' thread
That would be a good show actually.S y should adopt Mookie and make a sitcom about it.
Mookie would turn the S y household upside down, it would be like wife-swap, but different.
yet another of the dozens of poor mookie threads
Very, very doubtful.
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