Get out your tinfoil hats everyone!
Has the whole world gone mad? I don't know why I even think that anything I do is private anymore. The only stuff that everyone else doesn't know about is stuff so boring that they wouldn't be interested anyway.
EFF: Breaking News: "Secret Code in Color Printers Lets Government Track You
Tiny Dots Show Where and When You Made Your Print
San Francisco - A research team led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently broke the code behind tiny tracking dots that some color laser printers secretly hide in every document.
The U.S. Secret Service admitted that the tracking information is part of a deal struck with selected color laser printer manufacturers, ostensibly to identify counterfeiters. However, the nature of the private information encoded in each document was not previously known.
'We've found that the dots from at least one line of printers encode the date and time your document was printed, as well as the serial number of the printer,' said EFF Staff Technologist Seth David Schoen.
You can see the dots on color prints from machines made by Xerox, Canon, and other manufacturers (for a list of the printers we investigated so far, see: http://www.eff.org/Privacy/printers/list.php). The dots are yellow, less than one millimeter in diameter, and are typically repeated over each page of a document. In order to see the pattern, you need a blue light, a magnifying glass, or a microscope (for instructions on how to see the dots, see: http://www.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/).
EFF and its partners began its project to break the printer code with the Xerox DocuColor line. Researchers Schoen, EFF intern Robert Lee, and volunteers Patrick Murphy and Joel Alwen compared dots from test pages sent in by EFF supporters, noting similarities and differences in their arrangement, and then found a simple way to read the pattern.
'So far, we've only broken the code for Xerox DocuColor printers,' said Schoen. 'But we believe that other models from other manufacturers include the same personally identifiable information in their tracking dots.'"
EFF: Breaking News: "Secret Code in Color Printers Lets Government Track You
Tiny Dots Show Where and When You Made Your Print
San Francisco - A research team led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently broke the code behind tiny tracking dots that some color laser printers secretly hide in every document.
The U.S. Secret Service admitted that the tracking information is part of a deal struck with selected color laser printer manufacturers, ostensibly to identify counterfeiters. However, the nature of the private information encoded in each document was not previously known.
'We've found that the dots from at least one line of printers encode the date and time your document was printed, as well as the serial number of the printer,' said EFF Staff Technologist Seth David Schoen.
You can see the dots on color prints from machines made by Xerox, Canon, and other manufacturers (for a list of the printers we investigated so far, see: http://www.eff.org/Privacy/printers/list.php). The dots are yellow, less than one millimeter in diameter, and are typically repeated over each page of a document. In order to see the pattern, you need a blue light, a magnifying glass, or a microscope (for instructions on how to see the dots, see: http://www.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/).
EFF and its partners began its project to break the printer code with the Xerox DocuColor line. Researchers Schoen, EFF intern Robert Lee, and volunteers Patrick Murphy and Joel Alwen compared dots from test pages sent in by EFF supporters, noting similarities and differences in their arrangement, and then found a simple way to read the pattern.
'So far, we've only broken the code for Xerox DocuColor printers,' said Schoen. 'But we believe that other models from other manufacturers include the same personally identifiable information in their tracking dots.'"
posted by Your_Host at 12:40 PM
1 Comments:
Yep, its scarry. I just watched the ACLU Freedom Files and they had stories about people deported, and those arrested for saying negetive things about the pres and what not, and all the crap they can do to you without letting you know. It is scarry.
Post a Comment
<< Home