Archived from groups: comp.periphs.printers (More info?)
Colour printers add hidden government codes to all documents
Next time you make a printout from your color laser printer, shine an
LED flashlight beam on it and examine it closely with a magnifying
glass. You might be able to see the small, scattered yellow dots
printer there that could be used to trace the document back to you.
According to experts, several printer companies quietly encode the
serial number and the manufacturing code of their color laser printers
and color copiers on every document those machines produce.
Governments, including the United States, already use the hidden
markings to track counterfeiters.
Peter Crean, a senior research fellow at Xerox, says his company's
laser printers, copiers and multifunction workstations, such as its
WorkCentre Pro series, put the "serial number of each machine coded in
little yellow dots" in every printout. The millimeter-sized dots
appear about every inch on a page, nestled within the printed words
and margins.
"It's a trail back to you, like a license plate," Crean says.
The dots' minuscule size, covering less than one-thousandth of the
page, along with their color combination of yellow on white, makes
them invisible to the naked eye, Crean says. One way to determine if
your color laser is applying this tracking process is to shine a blue
LED light--say, from a keychain laser flashlight--on your page and use
a magnifier.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1093&e=4&u=/pcworld/20041122/tc_pcworld/118664
--
The Insider
http://www.theinsider.org
Colour printers add hidden government codes to all documents
Next time you make a printout from your color laser printer, shine an
LED flashlight beam on it and examine it closely with a magnifying
glass. You might be able to see the small, scattered yellow dots
printer there that could be used to trace the document back to you.
According to experts, several printer companies quietly encode the
serial number and the manufacturing code of their color laser printers
and color copiers on every document those machines produce.
Governments, including the United States, already use the hidden
markings to track counterfeiters.
Peter Crean, a senior research fellow at Xerox, says his company's
laser printers, copiers and multifunction workstations, such as its
WorkCentre Pro series, put the "serial number of each machine coded in
little yellow dots" in every printout. The millimeter-sized dots
appear about every inch on a page, nestled within the printed words
and margins.
"It's a trail back to you, like a license plate," Crean says.
The dots' minuscule size, covering less than one-thousandth of the
page, along with their color combination of yellow on white, makes
them invisible to the naked eye, Crean says. One way to determine if
your color laser is applying this tracking process is to shine a blue
LED light--say, from a keychain laser flashlight--on your page and use
a magnifier.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1093&e=4&u=/pcworld/20041122/tc_pcworld/118664
--
The Insider
http://www.theinsider.org
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