October 19, 2005

EFF have cracked the code in printers which tracks you. The Secret Service has admitted they encode data into pages produced by some colour laser printers in order to track counterfeiters and others, however the data stored in the code was not known prior to EFF's discovery.
posted by Chyren 19 years ago
  • And I was worried about tiny tracking chips in my Cheerios. Seriously, though, I'm glad somebody's working on cracking this. If nothing else, it'll bring some publicity. And we'll all have to go back to making crackpot political pamphlets and ransom notes the old-fashioned way by cutting letters out of a magazine.
  • I first noticed just how cool the EFF was when they came out with Deep Crack DES cracker. It seems that nearly every year they do something way cool be it research or legal defense. They're such a great organization. I ♥ EFF
  • I just draw all my bogus bills with some green crayons.
  • easier
  • Yeah, but you gotta print it out...
  • We have an HP Color Laserjet that's on the list, and I have a test print page in my hot little hands. I can't make out any yellow dots with my nekked eye, and I don't have a blue light handy. Spilling coffee on the page doesn't help, but I wonder if brushing with lemon juice and/or heating the page over an open flame would reveal the hidden dots..?
  • I wonder if brushing with lemon juice and/or heating the page over an open flame would reveal the hidden dots..? If it doesn't, it should at least give the Secret Service a reason to think twice about whether or not they really want to arrest the coffee-stained, lemon-scented klutz with the 3rd-degree burns.
  • This hidden 'features' have been added to software for some time now; who knows what other backdoors are there, inside our toys and tools, ready to snitch on us to those in the known.