Printing with a color laser printer? It might be wise to think of this the next time you run off a sheet of $20's. From TechNewsWorld:
Codes Make Printers Stool Pigeons
Clandestine codes used to track the output of some color laser printers have been cracked by a research team led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
According to the organization, the codes are part of a deal cut by the U.S. Secret Service with some printer makers to help curb the counterfeiting of currency.
In a statement released yesterday, the EFF said the codes, which are invisible to the human eye but can be seen with a microscope or under blue light, reveal the date and time a page was printed as well as the printer's serial number.
Widespread Adoption
The EFF has published a list of printers that deploy the coding scheme at its Web site.
"The whole industry has agreed to do this tracking without regard to how expensive the printers are," EFF staff technologist Seth David Schoen told TechNewsWorld.
The EFF has broken codes on pages printed on Xerox DocuColor printers, which cost tens of thousands of dollars, Schoen said. But code crackers saw similar dots on pages printed with Dell color lasers, which sell for US$299 to $399.
While the codes may aid the Secret Service's fight against counterfeiting, the practice raises some larger issues for society, according to EFF Staff Attorney Lee Tien. "People who want to protect their anonymity -- whether they're whistleblowers or dissidents or journalists or whatever -- when they print something out, should know that there's an issue here," he said.
This rankles... I have been thinking that a Color Laser might be a nice addition here (Ink-Jet printer output is not waterproof) -- they are getting very very cheap. I'll have to shop more carefully. I am not doing anything illicit but this is not cool.
