Small Business Reading Room

Tuesday, October 18, 2005

More privacy issues raised

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports they have cracked the Secret code that allows the government to track the origin of any document printed on some Xerox color printers.

The code is embedded in a series of very small yellow dots that print at the top of every page. The information contained includes the date and time of printing and the serial number of the printer.

The EFF believes a similar code may be found in documents printed by printers supplied by Canon, Epson, HP, IBM and Dell.

The blogosphere is alight with talk of this issue. Some are worried that DVD's, CD's and other electronic media may have similar codes embedded in them. And of course, this is old news in some sense. Copiers have done this kind of thing for quite some time. Color copiers were capable of fooling automated dollar bill machines as early as the eighties.

Since news of this went out on BNA's newsletter the EFF servers have been jammed. Expect the links above to be slow for some time.

posted by Larry at 10:50 AM - permalink 0 comments

Small Business Reading Room

More privacy issues raised

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