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Your Printer Is Spying On You!
Posted by Pile
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It sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it isn't. The pages coming out of your color printer may contain hidden information that could be used to track you down if you ever cross the U.S. government.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco consumer-privacy group, said it had cracked the code used in a widely used line of Xerox printers, an invisible barcode of sorts that contains the serial number of the printer as well as the date and time a document was printed. The EFF said it has identified similar coding on pages printed from nearly every major printer manufacturer, including Hewlett-Packard, Canon and others, though its team has so far cracked the codes for only one type of Xerox printer. |
| With the Xerox printers, the information appears as a pattern of yellow dots, each only a millimeter wide and visible only with a magnifying glass and a blue light.
The U.S. Secret Service acknowledged yesterday that the markings, which are not visible to the human eye, are there, but it played down the use for invading privacy. | Details
EFF Cracks the code | |
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LIFE LIBERTY AND THE PURSUIT OF CASH Posted by turk_182 on 2005-10-26 15:48:23 | I'll bet the gun lobby won't let them put bar code on the rifling in gun barrels. Maybe the pen isn't as mighty as the sword after all. |
labels on guns Posted by Stan A on 2005-10-26 22:13:44 | That's a cool idea. I agree with you. It would probably never happen. |
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