Ho John Lee’s Weblog

via BoingBoing:

Many color laser printers hide information about your printer’s serial number and the date and time of your print job in every job you print. It’s believed that this is done to get your equipment to incriminate you without your knowledge. Now EFF has decoded the information-hiding scheme on the Xerox Docucolor series, by getting EFF supporters to print out pages from their printers and mail them to our researchers, who examined them under magnification and special light and cracked the code.

EFF: Is Your Printer Spying On You?:

Imagine that every time you printed a document, it automatically included a secret code that could be used to identify the printer - and potentially, the person who used it. Sounds like something from an episode of “Alias,” right?

Unfortunately, the scenario isn’t fictional. In a purported effort to identify counterfeiters, the US government has succeeded in persuading some color laser printer manufacturers to encode each page with identifying information.

They have a longer discussion and an online pattern decoder for reading the tracking output from a Xerox Docucolor 12 on the EFF site.

Update 10-29-2005 21:10 PDT - EFF has a list of printers which include visible tracking.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 17th, 2005 at 9:05 am and is filed under Personal Technology, Security, Front Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.