WHO'S IN CHARGE HERE?
Magpie is a former journalist, attempted historian [No, you can't ask how her thesis is going], and full-time corvid of the lesbian persuasion. She keeps herself in birdseed by writing those bad computer manuals that you toss out without bothering to read them. She also blogs too much when she's not on deadline, both here and at Pacific Views.
Magpie roosts in Portland, Oregon, where she annoys her housemates (as well as her cats Medea, Whiskers, and Jane Doe) by attempting to play Irish music on the fiddle and concertina.
If you use a laser printer, the documents you print out may contain more information than you know. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, many printers add a series of tiny yellow dots containing encoded data to each document. That data, says EFF, identifies your particular printer and the day and time when you printed the document. [The image shows the dot code from a Xerox DocuColor color laser printout. The small dots have been overlaid with larger yellow dots to make the code easier to see.]
The dots had been noticed by others before now, but no one had figured out what they meant. Cracking the code took only a few days once sufficient samples had been collected.
The US Secret Service has confirmed that the dots added to printouts are used for law enforcement purposes. Xerox has confirmed that its printers do indeed add such dots, but refuses to say what they mean or how long Xerox printers have been adding the information.
EFF says that printers made by other companies, including Dell and Canon, also add dot codes to their printouts. The group is asking people to submit test sheets from their printers so that the public can know which printers are adding the dot codes and which don't. The current list of 'good' and 'bad' printers is here.
You can read a more detailed analysis of what EFF found out about the coding on Xerox DocuColor printers if you go here.
Via news@nature.com.
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Posted by Magpie at 11:29 AM |
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