12 Responses for "Big Brother on Your Printer"

1. Jonathan M. Hollin (DarkBlue)

   November 23rd, 2004 at 9:40 pm

   1

   I don’t think this is anything to worry about… Unless you are printing dollar bills!

2. Lea

   November 23rd, 2004 at 10:38 pm

   2

   I’m not so much worried about this particular technology as much as customers didn’t know anything about it. It holds information that is specific to the printer’s origins. Potentially, there may be more technology currently or in the future that will be in use with information that is being processed about us that we are unaware of. I think it’s a clever and good thing that such a technology exists to prevent criminal activity, but what if one day more sensitive information is passed along without our knowledge?

3. Jonathan M. Hollin (DarkBlue)

   November 23rd, 2004 at 11:48 pm

   3

   Ignore me Lea: I’m just jealous because I can’t afford a colour laser! :-)

4. JC

   November 23rd, 2004 at 11:55 pm

   4

   this stuff has been around since like… ‘93. I really don’t understand why it’s suddenly news all over the place. The information’s been out there since pretty much the day it was first included. It’s a bit more sophisticated now, but not much.

   As for personal information… what? the serial number on the printer? that’ll help the police establish which printer it was printed on… it’s not like it’s transmitting your credit card numbers and favorite sexual position over the internet. It’s a serial number attached to a piece of hardware… and unless maybe you registered the printer (how many people actually do that?), there’s not a shred of information about you tied to that serial number, anywhere. And if you’re worried about it… just buy a used one somewhere and pay cash. Or don’t register it. whichever.

   I don’t see this as being significantly different than the stuff they put inside guns to mark the bullets. If you’re hunting or target shooting or whatever… no one’s going to care, and any bullets anyone picks up, at most they can read a pattern on it that shows what kind of gun it came from… and nothing else. If they find one of the bullets inside a body, and find a gun at your house, they can fire a bullet from the gun and see if the patterns match. Ditto with the printer. They’re going to have to look at the printer to get the serial number off of it to compare, and no one’s going to have access to do that unless there’s probable cause.

   If you want to worry about sensitive information being passed without your knowledge, there are plenty of things out there that do that already (and your non-tech friends probably have dozens of them on their own computers).

5. Lea

   November 24th, 2004 at 12:02 am

   5

   Conspiracy theories aside, the bottom line is that this isn’t common knowledge. JC, you’re tech savvy so you would KNOW about its inception early on, but not everyone does.

   Whether or not there is any real threat anywhere, in even more public non-technical places, for identity theft, stalking, spying, etc.–the fact of the matter is that there isn’t much information spread about it.

   Again, not dissing the technology–just the lack of communication of it being put into use in the first place. And of course there isn’t much personal information from the serial numbers themselves, but the technology can be used to embed OTHER information besides the serial numbers if properly implemented, right? Anyway, I’m conspiracy theorising now, so I’ll bow out.

   I really don’t see an iminent threat, but it’s good to be aware.

6. JC

   November 24th, 2004 at 12:06 am

   6

   BTW, http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/eurion.pdf” rel=”nofollow”>this PDF (sorry, PDF’s all I could find) outlines one of the things copiers and scanners and graphics software check for to prevent counterfeiting… the PDF shows euros, pounds, and marks, compare that to the back of a new 20 or 50 and you’ll see a pretty immediate resemblance

7. Nicole

   November 24th, 2004 at 12:10 am

   7

   Hmmm, I really thought this was common knowledge. I remember hearing a long time ago that color laser printers had to be registered and were checked every once in a while as a precaution against counterfeiting.

   It seems odd that it’s just now getting attention.

8. JC

   November 24th, 2004 at 12:14 am

   8

   sure. And you can embed loads of text inside a jpg file without it changing the look visibly. And without the decryption key and the proper software to extract it, you’d never know

   And as for being tech savvy… I’m pretty sure I picked that up from reading the manual that came with the printer. It’s not just color printers that do it, either, I’m pretty sure all laser printers do.

9. JC

   November 24th, 2004 at 12:17 am

   9

   yeah, Nicole… I remember when color photocopiers first were getting inexpensive someone was telling me that if you photocopy money on it at 100% size, it’d flip a switch internally which would essentially break the copier and require you to call for support, and the support people would know the moment they got into the system what you’d done. Dunno if that was true or not, but I remember being ordered never to test it.

10. Jonathan M. Hollin (DarkBlue)

    November 24th, 2004 at 12:29 am

    10

    Thinking about it, this technology has an analogue equivalent too.

    For many years, forensic investigators have been able to match typewritten documents to typewriter they were produced on. They can do this because every typewriter has a unique signature – the “a” might print slightly above the other characters for example.

    (For those readers who are under 20 years old, typewriters can be found in the Google Museum: http://images.google.com/images?q=typewriter)

11. Lea

    November 24th, 2004 at 9:59 am

    11

    *hugs the FG crew* I learn something new every day. :-)

12. emptysea

    January 23rd, 2005 at 11:32 pm

    12

    take a print from a color laser copier/printer, get a 10x loupe (or good magnefying glass), and in some fairly bright light look in a field of the page that has no image in it (a white field). You may see many yellow dots in that area, arranged in a bit of a non-regular “moire” pattern. If you look at the entire page, you may see that pattern repeating. You are looking at a graphical representation that correspnds to the printers’ serial number. No idea how to “decode” the pattern, or how to circumvent it.