You think maybe the feds have the wrong priorities when they hunt for the bad guys??
Posted on 07/31/2005 4:35:32 PM PDT by ChildOfThe60s
EFF probes printer watermarks
Color laser printers print hidden data that lets law enforcement agencies tell which printer was used and when, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The EFF on Thursday sent a freedom of information act request to the U.S. Secret Service in an attempt to get details on the tracing feature, which the group says impacts the privacy of users.
"This undermines people's ability to speak and publsih anonymously," Seth Schoen, a staff technologist at EFF said Friday at the 13th annual Defcon hacker event in Las Vegas.
In the traditional EFF presentation at DefCon, Schoen placed a sheet of paper printed on a Xerox DocuColor printer under a microscope with a blue light. Yellow dots appeared. These identify the printer and when the print was made, Schoen said.
"If you actually print out a white page you would get a whole page with yellow tracking dots that you can't see with the naked eye," Schoen said.
The marking technology in printers was developed at the request of governments to deter counterfeiting activities using the machines, PC World reported in December. The Dutch government, for example, has used it to track counterfeiters of railway tickets, WebWereld, a Dutch technology news site, reported in late 2004.
Schoen isn't hopeful that the Secret Service will share details on the laser printer watermarks. EFF's lawyers probably have to go to court, he said.
Posted by Joris Evers
So after you print your money on a second-hand printer that you got at the pawn shop (garage sale, etc.) under an assumed name, you get rid of your printer. What is so hard about that? (sarcasm off)
Proof positive that the pen is mightier than the sword.
Else, why are the Chicoms so eager to censor the internet?
Perhaps they are afraid of their own Rathergates?
Cheers!
Didn't anyone see this in a CSI episode?
"Color laser printers print hidden data that lets law enforcement agencies"
This rumor was floating a couple of years ago and was proved to be false. Time to do some research.
Interesting read on the subject here http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1286138/posts
"Charles Wiles, former police field commander and president of the Wichita Retired Police Officers' Association, told CNN his current sources on the force point to a computer disk in a package sent to local station KSAS. "They electronically peeled it back and found information that had not been erased," he said."
"A hidden electronic code on a computer diskette helped lead police to Dennis Rader, the suspect in the BTK serial killings, according to the pastor of Rader's church and a retired Wichita police supervisor.'
"The Rev. Michael Clark, pastor of Christ Lutheran Church, said Tuesday that police searched the church and found that a 3.5-inch diskette containing what is alleged to be communication from BTK had once been used in the computer in the church office."
Of course, that was because they were aware that the ruling would only be enforced against Free Republic, and nobody else...
I guess they didn't expect Gore and Kerry to be defeated by the bumpkin from Texas. ;-)
So laser printer sales are tracked better than handguns?
Accorging to the info at http://www.eff.org/Privacy/printers/list.php your printer does indeed have tracking dots. get a good magnifying glass like a lupe lens. A Swiss army knife lens works OK too. View in bright light with the lens right up against your eye. It might take a minute of looking before your brain "locks on" to the dots. Don't waste time panning around; the dots are everywhere. Any given field of view will have at least a hundred.
If you have a good table scanner, scan a small area at high resolution and play with costrast, intensity, and yellow color enhancement in the scanner's preview pane.You can do this agaim after scanning to get better contrast, but do befoe scanning to optimize the scan itself.
Interesting - thanks for letting me know.
Of course real miscreants buy used and/or pay cash and don't register their product, rendering this issue completely moot.
D
Oh, yes, one more thing. Your suggestion to just print in monochrome won't work. I tried it only a HP 5550dn at work (that's what my first post was based on). Telling the printer driver to send in b/w is no good. the dots come anyway. On the other hand, If you're really disgusted with the whole deception and can't resell the printer because it's "tainted" (I've already seem a usenet poster trying to sell a printer with this spyware have follower-up warn everyone off), try draining the yellow ink and use it in b/w mode exclusively.
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