Electronic Frontier Foundation decodes printer tracking dots

[Steve]

The tin-foil hat wearers among you may recall an article I wrote in July about printers printing encoded data into your documents. The EFF, with a little patience and help, has disciphered what the encoding dots mean.

The team discovered that the dot pattern contains the serial number of the printer along with the date and time that the paper was printed. The dots are either on or off and represent a binary 1 or 0. Each column of dots adds up into a decimal equivalent and there are even parity dots on each row and column for error correction. Schoen says, "If you brought me two pages, I can tell you if they came from the same printer and which one was printed earlier than the other."

TG Daily has more.

[TheAnimus]

http://www.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/

was talking about this with one of mi lecturers, can't see why people are scared, its not as if it couldn't be sugested to a court by an expert whitness that it was very likely a printout came from this printer because of the 'imperfections'. Theres plenty of legal precidence with typewriters too. Juries are always swayed by expert whitnesses too aparently.

But best of all, you going to be printing something ilegal/imoral... why?