When you print something out, it’s anonymous, right? Sure, someone might be able to figure out what kind of printer or paper was used, but they can’t identify the exact printer, right? Wrong!
Many printers include a secret marking on whatever is printed in the form of coded small yellow dots. The information normally includes the date and time of printing and the printer’s serial number. Some of the manufactures that include this “feature” are Dell, Canon, Xerox, HP, Epson and Lexmark.
This isn’t a huge problem in itself because authorities don’t have time to check everyone’s printer to see if the serial numbers match, only people who are suspects. For the information to be truly dangerous, they would need a database of these numbers to search, which is exactly what every manufacturer has.
When you register your printer, you tie your personal information to your printer’s serial number. This is information that manufacturers will share with the authorities. It’s also likely that some distributors retain order information that includes serial numbers. Government and industry representatives claim that the information is used only to track down currency counterfeiters.
How could this be a problem? Let’s say you send an anonymous letter to the authorities blowing the whistle on some government corruption. Unfortunately for you, the police chief just happens to be friends with some of the people you implicate. Through the hidden dots in the document, the police chief figures out the make, model and serial number of the printer that was used, then calls the manufacturer citing a phoney charge and gets your name.
This is part of the growing trend towards cooperation between government and private industry. This relationship began in the early ’90s after several governments raised concerns that counterfeiters might begin using high-quality computer printers to make fake money. This led to popular photo editing programs refusing to open images of banknotes and printers refusing to process similar images.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently cracked the code for Xerox’s DocuColor series of printers. Xerox’s response amounted to “you don’t have any privacy anyways, so what’s one more violation.”
The EFF has confirmed the presence of similar systems on about 100 models from various manufactures. So far the systems have only been discovered on colour laser printers, but a group of researchers at Purdue University is working to bring the technology to inkjets, which are much more popular with home users.
Expect to see this technology in your home in the near future.
Recently, the third largest music label in the world, EMI Group, announced that iTunes will be introducing variable pricing within the next year. Since its inception in 2003, the service has sold 600 million songs at its flat $0.99 rate.
The justification behind the tiered pricing system is that labels want the ability to increase prices on popular music and lower the prices on older, less popular music. The change would mark a major turnaround for Apple CEO Steve Jobs who was quoted as saying “If [the labels] want to raise the prices, it means that they are getting greedy.If the price goes up, [the consumers] will go back to piracy and everybody loses.”
The appeal of online versus conventional music distribution, for me, is that it puts lesser-known artists on the same footing as big-name ones. The problem with variable pricing is that labels are likely to set prices to create trends, rather than to reflect them. Instead of increasing the price of a song because it’s popular, a label may choose to increase the price of a song to create the perception that it is popular so more people buy it.
Link O’ the Week:
List of Printers Which Do or Don’t Print Tracking Dots
eff.org/Privacy/printers/list.php
Find out if your printer is spying on you.
So I was wrong.
Webcomic O’ the Week: Make with the Funny by Paul D. Spencer, Ryan Abrahams & Aaron Harrison-Brown
mwtfunny.com
Nerd humour, pantsless debauchery and toasters that must die.
.at least 2 people..
Free Application O’ the Week: 1-4a Rename
1-4a.com/rename/
A pretty advanced file-renaming program. The quick way to rename a few hundred MP3s or digital photos.
.read these descriptions.
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